The Question Of Ownership
Posted: 7/16/2008
Written By: Matt
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Recently, a new StoryImprov visitor sent me this comment:
“So in theory, you folks could use my submissions as your own, since it's your property (as stated on the ‘how to play’ page.) That's sort of a turn-off.”
Since we don’t have a FAQ yet, and the blog is as good a place to start one as any, let’s begin with the question of ownership. So the FAQ question will be something like this: Why does StoryImprov claim ownership of the user-submitted content?
For starters, I sent this email reply:
“You are right that our terms of use statement must be revisited. I plan to meet with a lawyer to get it done right, but rest assured that we have no desire to publish anything without crediting the authors as much as possible.
That's a bit tricky, however, because we aren't collecting much information about our contributors - just a screen name and an email. If, down the road, we want to put together a collection of StoryImprov stories, it is likely that we won't be able to track down every contributor to get a release from them. We don't want that to stop us from moving forward, hence our claim to ownership.”
There is, however, more to it than that. There is also the question of the value of ownership. What good is it to the writers to own the content they submit? Outside of the context of StoryImprov, there is very little that they can do with it.
Take, for example, Motor City Republic. Dan started that story, melissa continued it with chapter 2, and I put together chapter 3. If melissa owned chapter 2, of what value is it to her? While it is a very solid chapter and moves the story nicely and I am exceptionally pleased with how it fits in context, without being sandwiched between chapters 1 and 3, it is just middle ground with neither a start nor an end.
If we were receiving submissions of complete works from each author, then the question of ownership would be much stickier because the submission carries its own value. As it is, however, we aren’t good at writing full works, remember? We’re building prose one block at a time, and if it carries any value, it only does so when the final block falls into place.
That being said, let me just point out that while anything is possible, I certainly have not received any phone calls from Tor looking for any publishing rights. I’ll let you know when that happens.
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