Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Copyright can be assigned to a third party, but publishing isn't (in my knowledge, at least) done that way; the copyright holder simply signs a contract with a publisher, giving that publisher exclusive or non-exclusive rights to the work for a specified period of time. The copyright, however, remains with the author.
If you're asking if a book has a copyright that is distinct from that of the original work, the answer is no. Not unless it's something like a translation, which has its own separate copyright, or unless there's some particular and non-trivial skill involved in the particular presentation of the material, in which case it can have what's called a "typographical copyright", which lasts for 25 years.
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This is correct. When authors contract with a publisher to print the author's work, the author is granting a
license of the print rights to the publishers. This is very, very different from assigning the copyright to the publisher.
For the record, I'm both a published author and a publisher, and I know a bit about IP law.