Developers are accustomed to giving up all artistic agency and authorship, and those who can’t bring themselves to do so give up on being developers. (I’m partly in the latter category.) Thankfully, that isn’t (yet?) as ubiquitous among writers.
The guy got £20,000 for some pages of babel. He should be elated.
The definition of “keep” in that sentence is the principal question of copyright, isn’t?
That is to say, if I produce a physical object at someone’s behest, I have to completely give up on the result in order for them to have unrestricted use of it, for reasons of physics. There are no such reasons for texts, computer programs, and so on, unless imposed artificially by law.
(I’m not going to call something good just because it’s the natural state of things, but neither am I going to automatically consider something reasonable just because it’s the law.)
For example, if I’m employed as a teacher, a good portion of my work is producing notes to give lectures from or to hand out to students, so that’s partly what I’m being paid for. Yet it’d be pretty normal for me to then publish them in some form, for money or not, without my employer trying to lay claim to them.
Even a developer who is employed by virtue of his experience in databases is generally not precluded from publishing a book summarizing that same experience for others to use.
> The guy got £20,000 for some pages of [babble]. He should be elated.
I don’t know anything about his situation, but a freelancer’s budgeting always has to account for the time spent waiting or searching for the next gig; being paid fabulously for a job that occupies your every waking hour for a month, then spending the next two sucking on your thumb (and recovering from the overtaxing sprint you’ve just had) is pretty normal, and on average the money ends up much less abundant than you’d guess just looking at the numbers. (Unless you’re Brandon Sanderson and can finish a novel a year, I guess.)
But there is definitely a lot of consulting where you're working more or less full-time to stay current, market yourself, etc. and when you do get work the day rate may be eye-watering--but those jobs may be short and/or infrequent.
When I was an industry analyst, in addition to our regular subscription clients, we did present at company events, did a la carte consulting days, and things like that for which we got about $10K per day. But we didn't have a lot of those.
There are, I believe, a non-negligible number of companies who will write software for you, to a specification, and grant you a (sometimes non-exclusive) license to use that software but absolutely will not give you the copyright. Pretty sure there's a lot of IT companies, for example, that UKGOV contract to which do this.
Get the tax payer to pay you to build a product and then continue looting the public to rent it out perpetually.
Well, it's less common for fiction but if you're working for a company and writing content you're almost certainly giving up any rights.
If you're ghostwriting without credit, it's not explicitly spelled out but the way it works is they'll slap it on their copyrighted website, possibly under someone else's byline. And they'd reasonably expect you not to publish the same thing verbatim somewhere else.
Though you also have cases where cross-posting is at least tolerated.
