Unfriendly Clauses for Academic Authors

To the extent permitted by applicable law, you grant all of the foregoing rights irrevocably, and free of royalty or other participatory claim. The [publisher] may transfer, assign, or sublicense these rights without further permission from you.

This is a contract for an academic journal. It means that whatever rights the author gave up are granted forever, and the publisher doesn't have to pay anything for the rights. The contract also allows the publisher to transfer any or all of the rights it has under the contract to anyone else without asking or paying the author.

"SOCIETY'S" Copyright Transfer COPYRIGHT TRANSFER

The undersigned, with the consent of all authors, hereby transfers, to the extent that there is copyright to be transferred, the exclusive copyright interest in the above cited manuscript, including the published version in any format (subsequently called the "work"), to the Society subject to the following (If the manuscript is not accepted by the Society or withdrawn prior to acceptance by the Society, this transfer will be null and void.): A. The undersigned author and all coauthors retain the right to revise, adapt, prepare derivative works, present orally, or distribute or transmit to not more than 50 colleagues, their own paper, provided that copyright credit is given to the source and the Society, that recipients are informed that they may not further disseminate or copy the paper, and that all such use is for the personal noncommercial benefit of the author(s) and is consistent with any prior contractual agreement between the undersigned and/or coauthors and their employer(s). Authors/employers may post the title of the paper, abstract (no other text), tables, and figures of their own papers on their own Web sites, and include these items in their own scholarly, research papers. B. Where a work is prepared as a "work made for hire" for an employer, the employer(s) of the author(s) retain(s) the right to revise, adapt, prepare derivative works, publish, reprint, reproduce, and distribute the work in print format, and to transmit it on an internal, secure network for use by its employees only, and additional rights under A, provided that all such use is for the promotion of its business enterprise and does not imply endorsement by the Society. C. Whenever the Society is approached by third parties for individual permission to use, reprint, or republish specified articles (except for classroom use, library reserve, or to reprint in a collective work) the undersigned author's or employer's permission will also be required. D. No proprietary right other than copyright is claimed by the Society.

This clause, from an academic society's journal, requires the author to assign the journal her copyright in the work. While the author retains the right to create derivative works and present the paper to a limited number of colleagues, she may not make any profits from the work. The society may not, however, reprint the work without the author's permission.