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Originally Posted by Fbone
Do the major publishers confirm the author has copyrighted the material?
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Probably not. Under the Berne Convention, copyright exists on completion of the work. You don't need to explicitly claim it. The usual reason to actually register copyright with the Library of Congress is that you can sue for far greater damages in the case of infringement if you have registered it.
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Does the legal dept do a copyright search to confirm the material hasn't been published or copyrighted by someone else?
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Probably not. I believe the contract has language stating things like the author asserting that the work is their own and they own the rights. If the publisher
does somehow publish a work already published or to which the authors does not own the rights, it's on the author, not the publisher, as the author lied in claiming rights.
And I can't recall any stories of attempts to publish an entire
book like that. I
have heard stories of attempted plagiarism by authors submitting someone else's short story under their own name. That's actually more likely to slp through, as no editor can read everything, and the person accepting the story may be unaware of the prior publication.
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Do the publishers purchase title insurance against future infringement claims?
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Not that I'm aware of. See above for reasons why.
Publishers will worry about being sued over
content in some books, not ownership of the work.
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Dennis