[PLUG] google docs

Michael M. Moore michael at writemoore.net
Wed Jul 29 14:42:15 UTC 2009


On Tue, 2009-07-28 at 16:43 +0000, TedKubaska wrote:
> 
> This has nothing to do with copyright law as one person suggested. If you sell First North American Serial Rights, you still retain copyright. Apparently also some publishers buy FNASR and never publish the story, which is something I find hard to understand, but it happens. And you're right, they pay essentially nothing. As an unpublished author he'd be lucky to give his story away. 

Copyright only comes into play in the sense that it is the copyright
holder who has the right to sell any type of publication rights at all.
With general-interest publishing, the copyright holder is typically the
author.  Unlike the recording or film/television industries, the
publishing industry doesn't claim copyright over works it publishes,
except in some more specialized forms (some academic or technical) of
publishing or work-for-hire situations, like, say, an author contracted
to write a Star Trek novel.

> The group he hangs out with discusses electronic publishing a lot, but no one understands it .... either technically or legally. 

They aren't alone.  Most people in the publishing industry don't
understand electronic rights.  The situation may be a bit clearer now,
but back when I was negotiating publishing contracts with agents,
electronic rights were a big black hole and often a source of
contention.  Some agents would insist on retaining them, even though
they couldn't say what electronic rights encompassed or what they would
do with them.  And publishers' subsidiary rights departments would
insist we try to obtain electronic rights even though they were just as
clueless about those rights.  Nobody knew what they were worth, but
nobody wanted to give them up in case they became important.  That made
it difficult to put a dollar value on them when trying to negotiate a
royalty advance.  The blind leading the blind.

I guess that's among the reasons so many things like this end up in
court.  Honestly, I'm not sure even a good lawyer well-versed in
contract law, EULAs, and publishing industry standards would be able to
give definitive answers to all these types of questions, because the
answers often are open to interpretation until pushes come to shoves and
judges are presented with cases that must be decided one way or another.
And even then, sometimes you end up with contradictory rulings.  So far,
the various forms of the GPL that have wound up in court have stood up
well, but that's no guarantee that they will continue to do so, or that
further tinkering with the GPL will lead to a case where some claims
made under it won't, one day, hold up in court.

-- 
Michael M.




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