All Rights Must Remain Reserved · Thursday March 22, 2007 by Crosbie Fitch
Can I remind all authors that they should surrender none of their rights.
By all means surrender commercial privileges – especially the unethical ones that suspend the liberty of your audience.
But, if you may be stripped of any of your rights simply through failure to reserve them, then naturally you should take all pains to reserve them.
For example, if someone could divest you of your right to assert authorship of your work, and claim entitlement to do this by default – because you had not reserved this right – then this would be strong reason to ensure that you always reserved your rights on all your works.
Rights are not something to surrender lightly. I don’t recommend surrendering any of them. Reserve them all.
However, do not exploit the compulsory surrender of the public’s rights.
You should rather restore the public’s rights, and not reserve the privilege of their suspension, whether to your commercial advantage or not.