Copyright laws protect speakers.

Q: We recently published a speech given at our annual meeting on our Web site. We received a letter from the speaker demanding that we remove the speech, claim. ing its publication was a copyright violation. Is the speaker right?

A: Yes. Absent a contractual assignment or license to the sponsoring association, a speaker hired as an independent contractor to speak at aa association event retains all rights to his or her speech. U.S. copyright laws protect the creators of original works, and unless the speaker assigns or licenses the applicable copyright interests to the association, the association has no right to the speech and can't publish it. Associations can avoid this problem by including appropriate copyright assignment or licensing language in their agreements with independent contractors, such as volunteer or paid authors or speakers, who develop copyrightable materials.

Submitted by Michael E. Reed, partner, Vedder, Price, Kaufman, and Kammholz, Chicago, and a member of the ASAE Legal Section. The "Legal" item is not intended as legal advice but rather as an educational overview