: Re: Intellectual Property Rights & Reuse of the Written Material Many times a client asks that the content delivered should be his/her Property and me ( the original writer) won't have any right

@Nimeshi163

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In principle, the author is copyright holder of a work, but this principle is often deviated from. When the work is commissioned by another party, some countries automatically transfer copyright, some leave it with the author. Some countries do not even allow copyright to be transfered voluntarily. International treaties such as the Berne Convention and the WIPO Copyright Treaty offer very little clarification on the subject.

The fine details of these arrangements are usually complex and often up for debate. It is therefore advisable to explicate who shall hold the copyright on a commissioned work. It is not uncommon for a writer to merely provide an irrevokable, non-exclusive license for publication. Of course, as copyright holder, you are free to reuse your own work, as long as you abide by any contractual obligations. The following will assume someone else now holds exclusive rights to the writings.

"But you write a sentence, 'two plus two is four' then you cannot reuse this sentence in same context in same way again. That will be considered as copy paste and reusing old content. In writing you can not use exact same sentences again."

This, I suspect, is the heart of your problem. You're in luck; it's false. Generally, the entire work is protected by copyright. Parts of a work, for example several pages from a book, are still protected, but some exceptions may apply, most notably fair use and the more restrictive quotation rights. Sufficiently small parts no longer qualify as original expressions and do not meet the criteria for protection under copyright law.

A single sentence, such as this, carefully crafted in a deliberate attempt to be eligable for my monopolisation, may more than meet the minimum. On the other hand, a more factual news article may contain entire unprotected paragraphs. The distinction is unclear.

The events, facts, ideas and opinions you have described are not protected themselves; their expression is. When writing another piece on the same subject, I would advise making an effort to rephrase. That should be fairly simple. If at any point it proves too difficult to express a thought differently, the wording you used in the first place probably was not original enough and can freely be reused.

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