Great Question
Fast answer is that the Author retains the rights to his original ideas ( unless we pay you for your work, which unfortunetly we will be unable to do for quite awhile)
Our only request is that if you use your work in another product, point the finger towards us for using your article first if you would.
Long answer is that the Author Retains there copyright on material, solicited or not, but may be asked for the secondary rights of Emerald Press to use there work in the D20 Options Line of products that will begin coming out around August 2003 if not sooner.
Of course if we ask you for the rights to use your work a second time you may say no, but as D20 Options will be a PDF Line of Source material on a variety of subjects that will be offered for sale in or around the $4.00 mark you as a writer would have more of an opportunity to be payed for your written material.
In addition at some point Emerald Press may make availiable a PDF of the OGC from the Emerald Nights D20 Source, in the event of this happening all product identity remains the a part of the sole ownership of the Author/ Authors whose orriginal article the OGC is derived from, while the Rules, and any other product derived from the System Reference Document will be the Sole property of Emerald Press, and will be freely distributed for any and everyone who wishs to download the file from the Emerald Press site.
Summing it up
You Retain the copyright to your work, we may ask that some of your body of submissions be transported to a PDF product in the D20 Options line of material, for which you will most likely be payed an amount of money for the article at that time.
At some point Emerald Press may want to expand the amount of free open gaming content that availiable, and produce a free product that works on a gentlemens agreement with the D20 System community, (which simply put means that we may want to expand the non SRD, open gaming content, and we may provide an easy reference PDF for anyone who wants to download it.)
Emerald Press, and Emerald Nights the D20 Source are both dedicated to leaving a footprint of innovation in open gaming content, and as such we would like to follow in the path that Wizards of the Coast has taken with the System reference document. We will only retain the right to use this material from those articles that are derived from the system reference document. In addition the Magazine will contain a copy of the Open Gaming license that will credit the authors of each submission in the licenses Section 15.
I want to sneak this in but Emerald Nights is looking for an Astute individual with skills, and a want to help with the project on a Staff level in the Area of PDF/ Layout, if you have previous experience working in the PDF publishing community all the better, we are looking for the following PDF/ Layout positions to be filled.
PDF Department Lead - We are looking for an individual who has a good eye for layout, and a working knowledge of what it takes to make a PDF product for our Lead Layout Department Head, you will be responsible for those under you, and will work closely with myself and the other Editor in Chief Shane Garvey, as well as the Lead Artist Shawn Sines to produce a fine quality layout for each issue of the magazine, fitting artwork and borders together, with the subject matter of each issue.
Line Layout Editor Your job would be as assistant to the Department Lead, and as a fine tuning layout general appearance editor. Your the one that finds the errors in the layout of both the Layout Deptartment staffing, and your Deptartment lead, you will also be in touch with Shawn Sines while the magazine comes to its last and final tuning.
Layout Staff Looking for two people to take up jobs as a part of the volunteer staff of the magazine working on layout designs with both your Department Lead, and with Art Direction it will be your job to submit layout designs for issues in advance of when we actually start working on them (1-2 Issues ahead of the current issue) this work will then be submitted to the Department lead for fine tuning with the Lead Artist, and with the Line Layout Editor) you are the concept layout artists for the magazine working up new and better ways to make the magazine as succesful as it possibly can be.
The above jobs are immidiatly needed as our PDF/Layout lead left us for other work, a fact for which he will be sorely missed.
