LICENSING, AKAs, and END OF WATCH - 042

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This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, licensing, AKAs and P/K/As, and end of watch. I'm Adam Richardson, and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

This is episode number 42 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime related fiction. I'd like to thank Gold Shield Patron Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com and Gold Shield Patron C.C. Jameson from ccjameson.com, my newest Coffee Club Patron, author TL Dyer, and all of my loyal Coffee Club Patrons for supporting me month after month. Find links to their author websites in the show notes at writerdetective.com/42. And if you have your own author business, consider joining Patreon. It's free for you and it allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micropayments. Give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more, visit writersdetective.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.

Speaking of Patreon, on May 10th, Rick Wysocki, frequent listener and contributor here, sent me a message with a link to Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog post on passivevoice.com and it was titled Patreon, Copyright, and Personal Choice. And where it got interesting was her first sentence. It said, "Patreon's terms of use has a possible rights grab buried in them." And then later on in the article she says, "Even though the FAQ and Patreon's homepage contradict the rights grab, the grab is in the terms of use, the reassurances aren't."

So what this blog is about is how the terms of service on Patreon state that they need some sort of license to use your content in use of Patreon. And I'll link to the actual article the of from Kristine's blog. So, my immediate reply to Rick, who shared this with me was, "Thanks Rick, it brings up some really good points. Like the author, I'm not concerned about my nonfiction IP," meaning intellectual property, "But this may change my tune on recommending it to fiction authors. I will do some digging. Thanks again."

So you see, I really believe in the Patreon model. It's that Renaissance Era concept of patronage of the arts. But I wholeheartedly believe in defending your rights as a creator. And I agree with Kristine Kathryn Rusch's assessment, that the terms of service are what govern what you give up and what you hold onto. But more about that in just a moment.

So, on May 14th, four days later, I received the Patreon monthly Hang Time email newsletter that casually mentioned in there, their terms refresh this month. And this is what we, in my business, call a clue. So rather than click on the link in the email, I actually went straight to the Patreon terms page, which you can find at patreon.com/policy/legal. And I read through it all and Patreon has in fact refresh their terms of service, and I suspect a lot of that had to do with Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog post. And especially under the your creations subheading.

And this is what it now says, "Your creations, TLDR," which means too long, didn't read, "You keep complete ownership of all creations, but you give us permission to use them on Patreon. Make sure you have permission to use creations that you offer on Patreon." And then after the TLDR header, the full text is, "You keep full ownership of all creations that you offer on Patreon, but we need licenses from you to operate Patreon effectively. By posting creations on Patreon, you grant us royalty free, perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, sub licensable worldwide license to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, publicly display, or prepare derivative works of your creation. The purpose of this license is strictly limited to allow us to provide and promote memberships to your Patrons. We will never try to steal your creations or use them in an exploitive way. You may not post creations that infringe others intellectual property or proprietary rights, Patrons may not use creations posted by creators in any way, not authorized by the creator."

Now, I am an affiliate for Patreon because I use them and I believe in them as a company, but as a creator of fiction, of intellectual property that you hold the rights to, you should really have a think about what it means to your brand and to your library with regard to the license you grant Patreon, or anyone else, when it comes to the work you share.

If I was using Patreon as a fiction author, I might take a hard look at the fiction work I share with my Patrons through the Patreon system, or perhaps talk about it with an attorney.

Now, I personally am not concerned with this as I'm using the platform for nonfiction and to share this podcast you're listening to. In the extras I do give to my Gold Shield Patrons, like the secret invite only Facebook group for exclusive live streams, which I do twice a month, are, as I said, Facebook, so they're hosted elsewhere. So, I'm not really worried about losing IP licensing through this.

Now, I believe Patreon is being above board in explaining what they need and why, and the fact that they expressly state their intentions in limitations like, "We will never try to steal your creations or use them in an exploitive way." So, that may help you. And now, quick reminder, I'm not an attorney and this is not legal advice or legal counsel, but in my layman's opinion, the change to the terms may address some of what Kristine Kathryn Rusch called out. And frankly, I appreciate Patreon addressed it so swiftly.

And with any contract that you enter into, always read the fine print. Better yet, have an attorney that represents you read the fine print, not just any attorney, one that is only there for your best interests. And do so especially if it involves the licenses to your intellectual properties.

I know many of you have a goal of getting a publishing contract and one thing I learned from Joanna Penn is to know exactly what you're agreeing to when it comes to what you're licensing. And I say this because many publishers will seek the rights to create audio books with your work as part of a boiler plate contract, even if they have no intention of pursuing audio books. So while signing a deal that includes audio books may sound great, what are you going to do if you're a publisher does not pursue audio books, but they've locked up the licensing? You'll be missing out on one of the fastest growing segments of book consumption.

You know that little site called BookBub? Did you know they recently launched an audio book version of BookBub and it's called Chirp Books. Check it out at chirpbooks.com.

So it is more important now than ever to have control over how your brand gets out into the world. So don't give up that control without thinking it through. Defend your rights, your intellectual property and the licensing vigilantly.

AKA, also known as. You might be surprised to learn that people, criminals in particular, lie to cops a lot. Often the lie comes when answering the question, "What's your name?" This happens quite often when the person being asked that question has a warrant for their arrest. Give another name and hope it comes back clear. You know, get a warning or even a ticket, but it's someone else's name, but you avoid going to jail, or at least that's the plan. And it's a plan that rarely works. In fact, it's a crime to do so.

So, when it's officially documented that someone used a different name, a different date of birth, social security number, driver's license number, any of those, or a combination of those, those identifiers that are different than your actual identifiers will be added to your criminal history or rap sheet as an AKA, an also known as. And thereby formally attached to your fingerprint record, assuming you've been booked and fingerprinted for a crime at some point.

I've seen rap sheets that have 12 different names with 12 different dates of birth and four or five different social security numbers or four or five different made up driver's license numbers. But the point is is that when you get booked into jail and they read your fingerprints, it's going to come back to you.

Now, it's one thing to use an AKA to avoid prosecution, but wouldn't it be nice to be someone else once in a while? Not for anything bad, but for safety or privacy reasons. Right now, I want you to seriously think about your writing career. Where do you want it to go? How wildly successful do you want to be? How about the next JK Rowling, Michael Connelly, Lisa Scottoline, Lynda La Plante, or sue Grafton. Will your stories become a TV show or a movie? Will it make you a multimillionaire?

Now with that in mind, I have another personal question. Have you ever Googled yourself? Get your mind out of the gutter, you know what I mean. Have you found what you get when you enter your name into Google and do the deep dive? Go to the search results page like 10 or 12, what did you find? How about your home address, your cell phone number, your children's names, or something seemingly random like the run times for that 5K you ran a couple of years ago, or old comments on your high school reunion page on Facebook. Think about all of the information someone with a computer and an infatuation could learn about you. And that's just Google.

In California, our law makers thought it would be smart in the name of government transparency to post the names, employers, pay, and benefits information for every public employee in the state. So let me say that again, but I'll rephrase it. You can find out how much I make and where I work by putting my name into a free website.

I won't even get started on the genealogy websites. Finding out mother's maiden names, dates of birth, city and state of where you were born. You know, all the information an identity thief needs to know in order to reroute your royalty checks or change your bank account information.

If this is starting to sound a little scary, let me introduce you to the sexier, smarter, and far more successful sibling of the AKA. Allow me to introduce you to the P/K/A. Now when it's written, it's P/K/A and it stands for publicly known as, and you'll see it most often in lawsuits involving celebrities. So for example, Katheryn Hudson, P/K/A, Katy Perry. This is the legal way of writing your pen name and it's something I not only use, but I highly encourage you to consider.

Sure, keeping your real name a secret reduces the stalker factor and will keep your hotel room phone from ringing off the hook at conferences. But using a pen name, or pen names, actually have some really practical benefits as well. You can use multiple pen names to keep from cross polluting your also boughts in an online marketplace for books if you write in multiple genres. If you're writing cozy mysteries and also nonfiction books about growing your succulents, it might be best for your business to have names, or at least different spellings, or initials that you use for each genre.

And another brilliant benefit that was mentioned to me by my writing accountability partner, Joy Sephton, who is a brilliant book editor by the way, and her editing website is justemagine.biz. I highly recommend her, but Joy's recommendation is to use a pen name that will, in a brick and mortar bookstore, is going to put your books within eyesight of customers that are looking at the books of the big names in your genre.

As you are undoubtedly aware, fiction is arranged alphabetically by author name. So if you imagine a heat map of a bookstore, like if a store, hypothetically, tracked where customers spent the most time standing in front of bookshelves, wouldn't you want your book on that shelf? Now, I'm in no way saying that you should create a pen name like JR Rowling, or Michael Connelly, only Connolly spelled with two O's or one less L or something like that, I'm just suggesting that if your last name starts with a Z or Zed, and you write legal thrillers, you might consider a pen name with the last name like Gregory or Green or something that might put you a little closer to that writer lawyer guy named Grisham.

And Coffee Club Patron Siobhan Pope writes, "Hi Adam. I know a bit about the muster or shift handover process that uniform police undertake as one shift ends and another begins. How about detectives working in investigations? Do their shifts align with uniformed officers and do detectives attend the shift handover or muster or is there a different process for criminal investigators? How are cases handed over as one investigator goes off shift and another comes on. Many thanks, Siobhan."

Thanks for the question, Siobhan. Here in the US, first of all, we usually refer to it as a briefing or a roll call, and of course that changes throughout the world on what they call it. And patrol shifts usually do start with one for the uniformed officers and it's a rundown of what happened the previous shift or the previous few days if it is your Monday, the start of your workweek. And it can be info on, you know, the rash of burglaries in a particular neighborhood, wanted bulletins and so on. Basically information that needs to be passed down to the oncoming shift.

For detectives, we only attended briefing if we specifically needed patrols help with something like locating a suspect or a witness, but more often than not that was done by putting a bulletin in the briefing book. And the briefing book is a D-ring binder that the patrol shift supervisor, usually a sergeant, goes through to conduct the briefing. And I'm sure there are agencies where detectives regularly attend briefings somewhere, but that's not usually the case with the agencies that I've worked with, at least.

And also detectives usually start their work day later in the day than patrol. Patrol will often have longer shifts to allow for more days off in a week. So if you're working a three or four day work week on patrol, you may be working a 12 hour shift and starting at five or six o'clock in the morning. And then detectives may start at 8:00 AM and working eight or nine hour or a ten hour day.

And finally, for the vast majority of police departments in the United States at least, we don't have too many night shift detectives, or at least the agencies that do tend to be really big and have bigger cases or at least a higher crime rate. But for the vast majority of the agencies in our country, we don't really have detectives that are working a night shift to hand anything off to. We will have an on call rotation. So, if something major happens, there's a detective that's already assigned the duty of having to come in for that. But we don't have an oncoming shift of detectives to brief as we are leaving for the day.

And the key thing to understand as well is that once a case is assigned to you, it's yours to close. I mean that's our job is to take the case that was started by patrol and then we do all of the followup. So, that's pretty much a personal case at that point. And we call it our case load. So the detective sergeant is the one monitoring the case loads of all of the detectives working for her or him. And the detective sergeant is also the one assigning the new cases.

So, each morning the detective sergeant would divvy up the new cases that needed to be worked amongst the detectives working for him. Not all cases get assigned to a detective. So if a car was burglarized and there are zero leads on who committed the crime, that case may not get investigated by a detective. The detective Sergeant may, however, pass around a stack of these reports without leads for the detectives to review as an informational thing and to see if they matched with any cases they're already working.

Where I work, that stack of NFLs, or no further leads reports, would have my sergeants initials on a kind of a hand drawn tic-tac-toe hash looking design where each square was for each detective in the unit to initial when he or she had read the stack and passed them onto the next detective in the unit. And this way we can see who still needed to review that stack of reports before it got shredded.

Now, I'm showing my age by referencing hard copy reports, but these were computer printouts created just for this purpose. So, some detective bureaus may still operate this way or it may be completely done on the computer now.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Writer's Detective Bureau podcast. If you want to read a transcript of this episode, check out the show notes at writersdetective.com/42.

So, if you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe and don't forget to send me your questions. Just go to writersdetective.com/podcast.

Thanks again for listening, have a great week, and write well.