For The Record

📧 essays with Sojo

Logan M. Isaac

— 5 min read
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📧 essays with Sojo

I gave Sojourners two full weeks to remove my unpaid, copyrighted work from its website. Sojourners failed to do so. [Chief Operations Officer] Matt Murphy has no proof of any agreement under which my rights were unreserved, licensed, or in any way extended, perpetually or not, to Sojourners. That being the case, Sojourners is in violation of federal copyright law.

By flaunting laws protecting authors, Sojourners has stolen my work and undermined my professional worth, forcing me to seek legal remedy. In order to do so, I have to assign a dollar value to my work. If I sought one dollar per day for only those 33 essays for which I withdrew my copyrights starting Saturday, that would only amount to $165. Since you have not furnished documentation for compensating me for publishing "The State and the Union" (published June 2009) and "The Right to Refuse to Bear Arms" (December, 2010), that would amount to $5,166 for the former and $5,714 for the latter. That would total $11,045.

If you continue to violate my rights as an author, your liability will only continue to grow. Below you will find a list detailing my work that you've stolen; I will periodically check the URLs to see whether you have compiled with my request and federal copyright law. In the meantime, consider yourselves put on notice that I intend to file suit for copyright infringement. If you have legal counsel I am happy to deal with them, but that will not delay my filing suit against a supposedly "Christian organization" for stealing someone's labor.

Here is the list of items I promised;

@ 1303

Hello Br. Isaac,

Thank you for providing this list. I would like to find a path forward that does not require legal intervention or Sojourners violating our editorial policies. Our take-down policy, published on our website, states that we do not grant take-down requests. When authors write pieces for Sojourners, they may in some cases retain the copyright, but the primary rights for publication are given to Sojourners for publication online. That said, we are deep diving into our files to determine what former employees you worked with and the context of those conversations. That takes time. Some of these conversations date back 17 years or more and several generations of employees.

Best Regards,

Matt

@ 1338

I'm happy to find that path with you, but I'm not waiting for you to sweep up your own mess.

I have some ideas for how to make myself whole, but I won't keep writing back and forth. If you'd like to have that discussion by Zoom or Google Chat (with or without legal representation or a mediator, etc.), my schedule is pretty flexible. But the liability will continue to grow by $35 per day until my copyrights are under my exclusive control.

Here is a link to get on my calendar; https://calendly.com/iamloganmi/60min

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