BUCHANAN AUTHOR SUCCESSFULLY NAVIGATES LICENSING AND COPYRIGHT HURDLES

By Scarlet Thalman
BCR Correspondent

BUCHANAN, MI – On Saturday, Buchanan native Meagan Francis, a hometown author and podcaster, greeted readers at Glendora Bookshop and signed copies of her newest book, The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read. The event was the latest stop on her book tour, which began in early May when the volume was published.

Francis has pursued writing professionally since 2002, and was among the early content creators who expanded into home and family life podcasting. She has experience on a variety of publications, and she has also successfully cohosted and founded podcasts including The Mom Hour podcast — where she collaborated with writer Sarah Powers to achieve over 20 million downloads — and The Kettle — her solo podcast and Substack publication that reaches thousands of monthly listeners.

Through her 23 years of publishing experience across multiple platforms, Francis has experienced the significant evolution of publishing laws and policies. Publishing contracts grant the publisher and author the rights to the original piece of work and how it is handled.

Some specific rights often built into contracts include editing rights, to ensure the author’s work is not changed significantly without the author’s input; licensing rights, which grant the author the rights to publish, print, copy, translate, sell, and dramatize work; and multimedia rights — one aspect that has especially seen drastic changes following the large number of media platforms that have emerged in recent years.

Multimedia rights determine how a work can be adapted in forms beyond print and are now a heavily negotiated aspect of publishing contracts. Many publishers seek broader rights that cover many or all forms of media. According to Francis, this evolution, along with other factors, has led to contracts becoming “more wordy” and “hard to read.” This can prove problematic for authors to understand and navigate without previous legal experience.

She also went into the legal aspect of podcasting, specifically music rights and how these have the potential to be affected by AI. “Music rights are a challenge,” according to Francis; she discussed how including music in a podcast involves ensuring music is royalty-free or that proper licenses are purchased if otherwise.

There are also sometimes regulations on how much of a song can be used and what content it can be used with. “AI is making the issue more complicated,” added Francis. Though she hasn’t dealt with it personally, she mentioned this is becoming “a big thing in podcasting,” and raised concerns about how this will affect music usage across the board. She noted that while AI-generated music is not attributed to a specific author, the software may have been trained on specific songs or artists, and the music produced may have a similar sound.

The legal aspects of publishing have evolved significantly, and with the increasing prominence of new technologies — especially artificial intelligence — even more changes can be expected.