r/printSF • u/Mahler_n_Trane • 3d ago
A Statement from Must Read Magazines, publishers of Asimov's, Analog, and F&SF
The Analog/Asimov's publishers released this bonkers statement on 10/9/26 on Bluesky. Here's how it starts off:
"We previously commissioned illustrators to create covers as work-for-hire when they were asked to adapt authors’ original stories for elements such as cover art.
"This will be changing.
"The rights granted to MRM by authors are limited, and therefore we can’t protect the intellectual property and rights of the original author of the story, if we at the same time grant the authors’ rights to the illustrator so that the illustrator can then retain an adaptation copyright. We don’t acquire rights from authors that allow us to grant illustrators broad unencumbered use of the worlds, characters, and other elements created by the author."
The entire nonsensical statement can be read at https://file770.com/must-read-magazines-issues-statement-on-cover-illustration-contracts/
This seems to be MRM's reaction to having been publicly called out a day earlier for predatory contract stipulations by a couple of artists who ended up walking away from offers to create cover art for the magazines.
You don't have to read the whole thing to see how crazy this is. I just want to focus on these two parts of the statement:
"The rights granted to MRM by authors are limited, and therefore we can’t protect the intellectual property and rights of the original author of the story..."
Of course, it isn't their job to protect the IP rights of the author. I'm no lawyer, but I assume that's why copyright laws exist. But setting that aside for a moment, I can't even figure out their argument here. The best I can translate is, "We need authors to surrender all their rights to us so we can... protect the author's rights." That makes no sense.
The there's this:
"We don’t acquire rights from authors that allow us to grant illustrators broad unencumbered use of the worlds, characters, and other elements created by the author."
I've had many works published in a number of illustrated children's magazines. I can tell you there is absolutely no circumstance ever that an illustrator would need "broad unencumbered use" of an author's rights to his/her/their text in order to create an illustration. This is not a thing. When an artist illustrates my work, I keep the copyright to my text, the illustrator keeps the copyright to their art. What's mine is mine, what's theirs is theirs. That's how it works.
According to John Picacio, one of the artists who publicly called out MRM, even after negotiating a better contract with them (which, btw, is not normal in the magazine world, as there isn't time to negotiate individual contracts with individual contributors) he was expected to waive his moral rights to his own work and give up all copyright. He understandably walked away.
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u/EFPMusic 3d ago
That sounds like an extremely convoluted way of saying from now on, illustrators have to give up copyright for any work done.
Which is ridiculous. It’s like telling authors they have to give up the rights to their words to get published. MRM should be boycotted by artists, authors, and readers until this changes.
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u/GodOfDarkLaughter 2d ago
Is this just so they can continue to use the art without paying the artist any additional reimbursement? Like, is it that simple and obvious? I almost feel like I must be missing something because that actually sounds like an insanely blatant thing for a print magazine to do.
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u/nixtracer 2d ago
They tried to do it with the works being illustrated, so yes, that's exactly what they're after.
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u/EFPMusic 2d ago
So they’re being consistent reprehensible across the board, then?
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u/nixtracer 2d ago
Why else would anyone take on a stable of venerable old magazines that haven't made money or gained subscribers in decades?
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u/Standing__Menacingly 3d ago edited 3d ago
I absolutely agree. In addition, cover artwork for an SF magazine need not have anything to do with any of the stories. Just look at most magazines. But assuming they want it to be related, again I think you covered that point well.
I hope Asimov's migrates to a better publisher at some point. They have so much history, and they continue to print excellent stories. I really would like to keep reading them without this stuff going on in the background.
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u/TheOtherHobbes 3d ago
Why do these tedious corporate lunatics always seem to end up running things into the ground?
Writers and artists should both keep copyright but assign first publishing rights, maybe with a separate anthology rights clause.
A full all-rights in perpetuity buy-out is a land grab and anyone attempting it should be shunned.
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u/Aethelrede 2d ago
In general, they are incentivized to do so, especially at a publicly owned company (though privately held companies often follow suit.)
Everyone is focused on short term gains that keep shareholders happy (and in the US, companies have a legal duty to their shareholders). Nobody bothers planning for the future, especially since the individuals actually making the decisions will generally move on before the birds come home to roost.
It's a terrible system that leads companies to disregard their workers, their customers, and the health of the company itself in pursuit of short term profits.
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u/1805trafalgar 2d ago
"work for hire" in the context of illustration, people may not realize, is the term for when you are hired to make some art for an employer but then the employer owns all the rights to the work and YOU have no rights to the work at all.
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u/Amphibologist 2d ago
To be fair to MRM, this whole concept of literary and fiction periodicals is brand new, as nobody has ever done this before in the history of publishing. They’re just trying to feel their way through this groundbreaking, uncharted medium. Obviously they’re going to make some missteps.
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u/RanANucSub 2d ago
you forgot the /sarc tag...
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u/Amphibologist 2d ago
Truly, I didn’t think it was necessary. The downvote I got proves otherwise though! (Unless it was someone from MRM)
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u/MobileSuetGundam 3d ago
Yeah, this makes no sense at all. Like you, I've had publishers commission illustrations of my stories and essays. I've also had children's picture books published, full of illustrations. There's no ambiguity whatsoever: the words are mine, the artworks are the illustrator's. I don't understand what they're talking about.
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u/Mahler_n_Trane 3d ago
It seems to me a made-up problem that never existed before MRM took over. Or, at least, the legal issues were worked out a long time ago.
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u/GodOfDarkLaughter 2d ago
The magazine industry has been around for a few hundred years now. I imagine most legal aspects of the medium are pretty well hashed out at this point. Like, who's gonna come up with a new and novel copyright practice in 2026? There has to be a boilerplate form almost anyone can use where you just fill in the names, if you're a tiny outfit. Fucking Azamov's has no excuse.
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u/art-man_2018 2d ago
Illustrators can be the most exploited practitioners in the art field. It didn't surprise me either how the elite fine art critics literally mocked George Lucas' museum of narrative art. And this doesn't surprise me either.
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u/KingBretwald 2d ago
Jason Sanford has a Genre Grapevine column about this also.
https://www.patreon.com/jasonsanford/posts/genre-grapevine-172147163
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u/Mahler_n_Trane 2d ago
Thank you for that! From the link:
"These words – and the entire statement released by MRM – are such a word salad of BS that not even the world’s worst generative AI system could have crafted them. It’s as if MRM would have the entire SF/F genre believe their company is somehow facing an intractable problem that every other genre magazine strangely avoids by using industry-standard contacts.?"
And the thing with the NDA is just cuckoo. I think you should make a new post with this link.
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u/growltiger_nimbus 2d ago
I feel like this must be downwind of some language in film and TV rights contracts about character design. Because the owners of this company are also interested in selling film and tv rights. If there's an artist who can claim that they designed and own the visual look of a character, that would have an impact later on.
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u/maxCyrusSCIFI 2d ago
| The whole argument feels backwards. An illustrator should be able to retain the copyright to their own artwork without needing broad rights to the author's fictional world or characters. These are two separate things, and a straightforward licensing agreement should be enough to protect everyone's interests. Trying to justify taking away an artist's rights in the name of protecting an author's rights makes very little sense. If anything, this kind of policy risks alienating the very creative people these magazines depend on. Transparency and fair contracts should be the bare minimum, not something artists have to fight for. |
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u/Jaxrudebhoy2 1d ago
Building a platform for their coming argument on why they switched to AI covers.
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u/IaconPax 2d ago
I think that everyone is misreading the wording here.
To be clear, I know nothing of the history of this publisher or if they do sketchy stuff. I am only commenting on the legal meanings of what they specifically wrote here.
Further, I think this statement a paragraph or two down puts it into context:
"To that end, we can license existing art or license new original art for our covers (not based on a story) with contracts for illustrators where the artist clearly retains the copyright in the underlying image, since there are no underlying rights owned by authors of the stories that are a part of these kinds of original works."
So, from a legal point of view, here is what appears to be being said, simplified:
Our authors give us limited rights to publish their story. We just realized that when an artist makes artwork of that story, they are basically doing an adaptation of the story which is a derivative work in the copyright field. If that artist then owns full rights to that adaptation, then could then go and sell prints or other things of that artwork other places, and that would be infringing on the author's copyright, since they're selling an adaptation. So, until we figure out how to handle this better, cover artwork won't be directly based on the stories inside.
That's basically it.
Think of it like this: if you had a story that is super recognizable, like Harry Potter, the cover artwork has the kid in the glasses and elements that are super recognizable, and if that artist can turn have all the copyright rights to it, then that artist can go and sell 1000s of copies of that clearly Harry Potter artwork without anyone's permission.
That's really it. It's just like a cover artist for an issue of Batman or Spider-Man, hired to illustrate a cover to that one issue, not being inherently allowed to go well 10,000 posters of that cover.
I think we're seeing some contract arguments leading to people realizing that their previous agreements actually didn't correctly follow copyright law.
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u/KingFriday13th 2d ago
I agree with this interpretation of the latest MRM statement, but it's important to acknowledge that their previous "work for hire" stance was unreasonably overreaching and was a terrible answer to the question of who should own copyright of derivative works (i.e. illustrations of stories). Doesn't U.S. copyright law settle this? After all, this isn't even remotely a new scenario.
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u/IaconPax 2d ago
Existing US copyright law considers derivative work to be infringing on the original work (generally, broadly speaking; there are always exceptions and things are almost always up to interpretation by the courts).
If you do a work like that, regardless of whether it is infringing, your copyright that you may own would apply to your own creative work and what you added, essentially, only.
When I have seen agreements like this, I've seen them try to keep things unambiguous by saying that the artist is hired to create the work and is assigning their rights to the person that hired that (like when you hire someone online to create a logo for your business, and they assign their rights to you standard, so you can own the rights to it, and don't go sell that logo to someone else, too).
The flip side is that, in my experience, the fact that they are assigning full rights to it, which is kind of a business necessity, is factored into the price that you pay them for their work.
When I had seen artists sell work for cheap, it's because they didn't really create it, or because they plan on making their money by reselling it to other people. You don't want that, usually, as a business, so you pay them appropriately for their time and skill.
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u/KingBretwald 2d ago
Nah. That's not how magazine illustration has worked for over a century. They know they're not doing it right. It's just a rights grab.
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u/TheOtherHobbes 2d ago
Text copyright is different to character/IP copyright. For the derivative work argument to apply the illustrator would have to be asked to illustrate explicit expressions of a character that have been copyrighted.
You can copyright the fact that your brooding superhero has a bat-winged cape which defines the franchise. If an illustrator includes those elements they own the rights to their interpretation of the image, but they also 'pay' for permission to use a protected image - 'pay' meaning some kind of mixed copyright is negotiated, or they work for hire.
But if the text says "The hacker grav-sledded through cybertown" and the image of the hacker, the grav sled and cybertown are the illustrator's own imagination, or the illustration actually shows a weird scifi scape with floating eyes and underwater buildings on a neon grid protected by polar bears, there is no sense in which that's a derivate work product.
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u/colglover 2d ago
The west has become so hamstrung with bullshit legalism that nothing can be accomplished. Pay an illustrator a fair wage for good work and have common sense legal doctrine that makes it so that nobody owns everything about their intellectual property in perpetuity and to an unreasonable and maximalist extent.
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u/geoffreydow 2d ago
It's not bullshit legalism, it's an an attempt to use (more or less legitimate) legalism to grab all rights from artists. They tried the same thing with writers first; I'm not sure how successful the pushback has been, but a lot of writers are still avoiding those magazines.
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u/thewimsey 2d ago
The west has become so hamstrung with bullshit legalism that nothing can be accomplished.
This has nothing to do with bullshit legalism. It has nothing to do with copyright duration.
There is regular copyright, and there is work for hire copyright. Both have their places.
This is about a publisher demanding work for hire copyright in a context where traditional copyright was the norm.
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u/peacefinder 3d ago
Hmm. I wouldn’t totally dismiss the possibility that they mean well and just phrased this poorly.
But maybe this is why sci-fi book cover illustrations rarely match the contents of the book.
Take this classic cover for Fire Upon The Deep. The illustration has nothing to do with the work, they could have portrayed Skroderiders or Tines or a character in powered armor or the Docks at Relay. But they didn’t! And this pattern is repeated in a zillion classic novels where the story has great illustrator hooks that the illustrator uses none of. The effect always kind of bugged me.
But maybe there’s a reason. If the artist were to include a recognizably specific character from the story, would that complicate IP rights for the book? The author created the character, the artist used the character in an otherwise original work, the publisher wants to put both together. No one has totally uncomplicated rights to the illustration, because use of the character makes it a derivative work. The artist gets hosed, maybe the author gets hosed, and the publisher has a mess unless their contracts clear it up in a way that’s going to make someone unhappy.
Rather than get in that mess, any original cover illustrations will no longer contain IP from the story?
I dunno, this is just speculation based on my reading of that statement. I’m not confident I took their meaning correctly. But if I assume they’re trying in good faith to express a real problem, this is what I get.
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u/KingBretwald 2d ago
I would totally dismiss that possibility. Writers have been complaining about blatant rights grabs in their contracts since they bought the magazines.
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u/peacefinder 2d ago
Yeah, I should keep my fool mouth shut that late at night. In cold light of day I realize the thing I’m talking about must be a solved problem, and must have been for several decades.
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u/KingBretwald 2d ago edited 2d ago
Artists are commissioned to do covers of magazines and books every damned day and they retain moral rights to their works. You're right that copyright law has figured that out long ago.
The cover of Lifelode by Jo Walton published by NESFA Press has a crop of the cover of Elantris published by Tor books and illustrated by Stephan Martinière. This was possible because Martinière retained the rights to the Elantris cover art he created for Tor and could license NESFA Press to use a crop of it on Lifelode.*
Must Read Magazine wants all the rights to the art and that is unheard of, especially in SFF magazine covers.
*Every year NESFA press publishes a book by the Author Guest of Honor to Boskone and, if possible, has it illustrated by the Artist Guest of Honor.
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u/Mahler_n_Trane 3d ago
All I know is from my own experience having had work published in illustrated magazines. At the bottom of the page, it says some variant of, "Text copyright [year][myname]. Art copyright [year][artistname]."
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u/paper_liger 2d ago edited 1d ago
There are a lot of reasons why sci fi has a history of the book covers not matching the books. Tight deadlines, a pressure to churn out work to make a living. The fact that often a publisher would give only the barest of descriptions, maybe a basic synopsis and genre notes, or a publisher would dictate the style and typography just due to what was selling.
Unless an author has pull, or is involved with the design, it's unlikely any of those artists even had an opportunity to read the book.
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u/KingBretwald 3d ago
Writer Beware has been warning about MRM's predatory contracts for some time and John Wiswell has a useful thread on Bluesky about this.