The American Authors Guild has been reacting strongly to Random House's misguided attempt to assert e-rights over older titles whose contracts pre-date the e-book.
I love the Authors Guild's response: "A fundamental principle of book contracts is that the grant of rights is limited. Publishers acquire only the rights that they bargain for; authors retain rights they have not expressly granted to publishers. E-book rights, under older book contracts, were retained by the authors."
I'm interested by the developments here, just because it's kind of fascinating to watch a whole new species evolve. (Is this what linguists felt watching Hawaiian Creole develop over the course of a generation?) And because in the industry I work in, whatever happens in the foggy world between digital and paper is going to have inevitable repurcussions.
It seems like no one knows what the rules are, and they're bashing them out as they go. Unfortunately, publishers sometimes emply people who make less-than-thought-through blanket assumptions, like, "losing copyright is bad, therefore we should just jump on and assert copyright we don't legally have because you just never know."
How will it all shake out? It won't. A vivid line I have heard a couple of times from Cory Doctorow: "We're in a period of perpetual, wrenching technological change, and it's never gonna level out and settle into something stable."
Hey, if you're me, that just sounds kinda exciting. If also a bit 'interesting' in the Chinese Curse sense.
