I know that by posting on the SDMB I allow the Chicago Reader free use of my posts, and that’s fine. But the Chicago Reader is now under new ownership. Does the sharing of copyright extend to the new owner? What about other subsidiary companies it may have?
From the footer:
Aside from that, yes, in most cases a company when it buys another also buys the intellectual property of that company.
It is not necessarily the case that the current owners of the Chicago Reader are its “successors.”
I presume that there will be an amendment to the agreement relatively shortly, clarifying the issue. However, I would tend to agree that the owner of the Chicago Reader owns what the Reader owns, including the right to use the posts we make here.
IANAL but yes, Creative Loafing owns the Chicago Reader and all its assets, including The Straight Dope. So what would have changed?
I don’t know anything about how the Creative Loafing/Chicago Reader purchase was structured, but I can give you some general ideas of some of the ways that corporate acquisitions may work.
When one corporation purchases another, it can do so in a variety of ways. Generally and oversimplifying, there are three basic ways to do so: merger, asset purchase or stock purchase.
In a merger, one corporation is merged into another so that they are legally joined together to form one legal entity. All assets and liabilities of both corporations that are merging pass automatically as a matter of law to the merged corporation, which just continues the business of both. In a legal merger, all copyrights and other assets of the predecessor corporations should pass to the merged corporation without any speific assignment document.
In an asset purchase, the selling corporation sells all (or most) of its assets to the buying corporation, with both corporations remaining as separate corporate entities. The buying corporation operates the business of the selling corporation with the sold assets, and the selling corporation pays off its debts and liquidates. To do such a transaction, there must be a document assigning each asset, including copyrights, to the buying company.
In a stock purchase, the buying corporation buys all the stock of the selling corporaiton. In that case, the buying corporation can do several things, including a merger as described above. However, the buying corporation can also just continue to operate the selling corporation as a separate subsidiary. In that case, there would be no transfer of assets, because there would be no change in owner as the selling corporation would remain the owner of the assets, just who owns the selling corporation would have changed.
I don’t know what happened here, but in either a merger or a stock purchase, it would be likely that there will be no need for a formal assignment or other transfer of copyrights.
Does anyone know it Reader (or it successors) have at any time used that right? Do they use anything posted on SD? I assume they’ve got a (on-line) magazine to fill, and this board provides at least a wellstream of ideas for articles, complete wit research. And in many cases, the board provides ready made copy.
Has any of this ever appeared in the Reader? I really want to know, as I don’t really buy the PTB’s lament that the only way they can get money out of this place is by advertising or by subscriber fees.
I seem to recall seeing snippets from the message board included as padding in at least one of the later SD books, but I don’t have my copy handy to verify I’m not misremembering.
IIRC, it was Triumph of the Straight Dope that included online material. But it was actually from the old AOL forum not this board. No new books have appeared since this website was started.
But if they so chose, they could.
There has not been a new Straight Dope book since we moved to our own site so this has not been a deal. Could be again, not sure when.