At their most basic level, magazine-writing contracts are about the ownership of rights. When you put pen to paper, or start tapping away at your keyboard, you are not just writing a story; you are creating content that, according to United States law, you automatically own. The law protects newly created works through the legal mechanism known as copyright. You need not register the words you write in order to possess copyright. It is automatically assumed the minute you create new content.

This means that, by default, you own the rights to the stories you create as soon as you create them. And, if you want to sell your stories to magazines, you need to give the magazines the legal right to publish your copyrighted work.

If a magazine simply took your story from your computer's hard drive and printed it for the world to read, the action would be a form of theft. You have to give the magazine permission to publish your copyrighted work. Contracts make this possible. They are the written permission to publish that magazines require.

Historically, contracts allowed magazines to publish a writer's story once. After the magazine published the story, the ownership of the story reverted to the writer, who was free to sell the story again, in part or in whole, to whoever would buy it.

Today, magazines often demand far more rights, sometimes for the entire copyright throughout eternity. The difference from previous contracts is massive, especially considering that writers often are paid no more for the entire copyright than they were paid for one-time use permissions.