Quote:
Originally Posted by GA Russell
[SNIP]Let me suggest this solution. It would be possible for Congress to pass a law that calls for an end to the publisher's monopoly (as public domain would) upon the death of the author, but would nevertheless require the heirs to receive a stated percentage of whatever gross income any publisher receives from the publication of the work.
This would allow publishers to enter the field and publish works currently overpriced or not in print, and would allow heirs to receive part of the cash, if any, that was being exchanged for the work.
|
I missed something here...
As written above, this law would allow publishers to produce a "non-profit" version of a work and pay the heirs their due %age of...
nothing. I'm not sure whether that's a bug or a feature, but it's an interesting edge case.
Contracts that fail to specify a minimum can be extremely problematic. For example, Microsoft licensed the original version of Internet Explorer from, um... I-can't-remember-who. The contract required a per-copy royalty payment from Microsoft to the original developers, specified as a percentage of the retail selling price. Microsoft chose to give IE away for free; they happily sent quarterly royalty statements noting that no royalty was due because no sales were made. Big mistake by the lawyers on the non-Msoft side! The ensuing lawsuit eventually caused Microsoft to pay some millions of dollars to the company who had the rights originally, but it was a pittance compared to what they'd have gotten at even $0.01 per copy.
(note: I can't remember whether this was a settlement, or whether it was due to Microsoft losing the case. Either way, it was way less paid way late.)
That's one example of how a clause like that can go wrong.