I am always amused when an author tells me, their editor, before they give me the manuscript, "Remember, I own the copyright. You can't take it from me." I know this is because it is not common knowledge that copyright belongs to the creator until it is expressly assigned.
Of course, it is normal to worry about who owns copyright to your life's work. Sometimes, however, it is amusing. I had a potential client recently who told me he was not going to give me the manuscript until he heard back from the U.S. Copyright Office that he did indeed own the copyright. To me, this set off a red light.
As it turned out, he had taken someone else's nonfiction ebook and paid someone to rewrite the book. I know that means he owns copyright and I'm sure there was no flagrant plagiarism, but to me that is unethical. I refused to edit anything he had that had been "rewritten" because it was not his work or the work of his ghost writer - it was the work of the original author.
Copying is still cheating, even if you change the words around. Copyright is for the expression of ideas and sometimes for the ideas themselves. But rewriting someone's work is cheating, is unethical, and is not something an editor like me (who prides himself on his ethics) can edit and still be "clean."
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