: Intellectual rights for a guest blog submission I have written several guest blog posts for a website with a large readership. I didn't ask for payment because the site is set up primarily

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"Articles cannot be reproduced for resale" and "Your writing will always be your own intellectual property - even if it’s published on our site" aren't necessarily contradictory. If I was the judge and saw those two statements in a contract, I'd think the obvious interpretation would be that articles cannot be reproduced by anyone other than the original author. In the absence of any agreement, that would likely be the default understanding of a court: you own what you wrote, you allowed them to publish it, but the fact that you let this site publish it doesn't mean that you are allowing anyone else to re-publish it. By submitting it, you either explicitly or implicitly gave them permission. But no one else.

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I agree with what Mark Baker and S. Mitchell said, but I would make a few additional suggestions.

After you review whatever agreement you made, if you are still unclear, go back to them (in email, so it is in writing) and explicitly ask what they mean by anything you are unsure about, such as "what do you mean by reproduce?" It may mean they don't want someone printing out the article and selling it, etc.

Many places that publish guest article or contributions to their journal/magazine/etc. ask that the author reference them if and when they have the article published again later on (such as in a collection). I would suggest that you have an Acknowledgements page that includes a reference to these folks, and let them know you are planning on doing that. It's common courtesy and may make them feel better about you re-publishing.

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I agree with what Mark Baker said, but you might want to consider the following.

If she said it is your intellectual property, that suggests you still own the copyright and you didn't give it away. However, you can't just copy what is on the website because they have added to what you supplied (font used, heading colour, etc.).

But if you are writing a book, you won't want something that is exactly the same as you would find on a website. You would want it formatted differently and you would change at least some of the text. This would mean that you are not reproducing the article, you are reusing the ideas, which you supposedly own.

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