California | Intellectual Property
Legal Question
What is or is not a derivative work?
I wrote a nonfiction book with a partner. He and his lawyer are now claiming that the book is a ''derivative work'' of a blog post that my partner wrote before we started working together, and therefore he owns the rights and can ''license'' me to be the author of the book. But to me, the book is a collaboration, and the ideas contained in the 135,000 word manuscript are absolutely not ''derivative'' from a 3 page blog post that I did not use as a primary source (for one, the blog post has inaccurate information, and secondly, it's 3 pages long!). I didn't even read the blog post until after we decided to write the book, together as a collaboration.
I feel that he's trying to steal the rights to a book that should rightfully be half my intellectual property. He has agreed that the book copyright is half mine, but the new contract states that I acknowledge that my book is a derivative of his ''original work'' (the blog post), and every item after that in the new contract is based on the assumption that he has the authority to grant (or withhold) my rights to the book.
How do I know if this is a derivative work?
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