One thing I love about being a writer is my complete justification to ego-surf. In fact, during my most recent monthly fix of self-googling and yahooing (in search of unauthorized use of my work), I self-amazoned as well. Having never written a book, I hardly expected to discover my name, and never four times: two articles in popular magazines, one letter to the editor of a trade magazine, and my graduate school thesis!

Were I a prolific article generator or had my publications all been posted by the same source, I might have concluded them to be a fluke. But I soon discovered that many writers may have their work posted for sale without their knowledge or compensation.

For the first step in reaching this conclusion, I double-checked my correspondence with the magazines to ensure that I had sold nothing but one-time rights. In the case of my thesis, the university library does reserve the right to distribute photocopies for academic purposes.

Second, to discover who posted my work and who could make money off of it, I wrote the publishers. The publisher of E/The Environmental Magazine and the program coordinator in charge of theses immediately responded. The publisher wrote, “…like other magazines, we have arrangements with research firms like Lexus-Nexis, ProQuest, Ebsco and a bunch of others that put ALL E content on databases that are then accessed at libraries and other institutions for research purposes. We think that some of that content is now turning up on Amazon because these companies have expanded their client base. We would never be able to get permission from every writer of every article to include or not include their work in this arrangement, so like most magazines we just make it all available.” The university administrator declared more poignantly: “I have absolutely no idea how they got on Amazon.”

I then wrote Amazon’s copyright agent, Adrian Garver ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ). To my surprise, Garver responded the very next day and explained how aggregators (the name for research firms that build databases) post these articles. Three different aggregators posted my work: Thomson Gale, ProQuest, and Online Computer Library Center. Garver assured me that Amazon.com wanted nothing to do with copyright violations and would write the two aggregators who could earn money from my articles (the thesis could not be purchased online). He noted that Amazon.com could not police contractual relationships either between writers and publishers or publishers and aggregators.

Again to my surprise, the next day a Thomson Gale representative wrote, “As part of our 1993 agreements, the American Planning Association and the National Recreation and Parks Association [two of the four publishers] represented that they had all of the rights necessary to license and distribute the articles in their publication. Accordingly, we request that you contact the publishers directly to answer any questions that you may have regarding your rights. In addition, we will contact the publishers immediately to investigate your inquiries and will take further action to remove the material at issue from our services if warranted.”

The following day (by now my surprise had worn out), a ProQuest representative asserted that based on their license agreement with the publisher, they could reproduce articles, but he would ask Amazon.com to remove my article anyway.

Thus, the story quickly took shape. Three of four publishers (but not the university) had assumed the right to allow aggregators to reproduce copyrighted material. Moreover, aggregators now interpret “databasing” to include sale of individual articles on Amazon.com which is, after all, a database. For a license agreement signed in 1993, sale of individual articles as e-documents on Amazon.com was never part of the original intent. Whether the distinction between educational access to article databases and commercial sale of individual articles could stand up in court as a copyright violation is beyond this essay, but what remains certain is that freelance articles do appear on Amazon.com without knowledge of writers and without their consequent compensation.

This experience raises several interesting questions:

Do publishers even have the right to submit material for databasing when they only purchase one-time rights from writers? (Some do purchase explicit databasing rights.)

Would publishers honor a writer’s contractual request to prohibit that work be sold on Amazon.com without writers’ due compensation?

Can authors directly submit their own work for sale to Amazon? (Garver’s response: “At this time we don’t have any programs in place to accept edocs directly from authors.”)

If you find your work posted and would like it removed, write Amazon. But you may want to leave your material on the world’s largest bookshelf: I left up my non-purchasable thesis, after all, in order to satiate my writer’s ego.

© 2005 Jon Kohl

About the Author

Jon Kohl is a part-time freelancer specializing in outdoor recreation, the environment, and systems thinking. His writing ego can be stroked at www.jonkohl.com. At the time of this writing, two of the three articles have already been removed (thesis remains posted).