Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
By the way, let's keep in mind that Open Road is hardly a scrappy outsider; it's a startup from a former CEO of HarperCollins.
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Huh. That should make things more interesting, as one would think that said former CEO would know how HC would be likely to react and what sort of stuff they had in the old contracts in general.
And as a poster mentioned above, HC is now a Murdoch-owned company, and the entire Murdoch-owned group has been getting a well-deserved reputation over the years for some seriously skeevy and exploitative and outright illegal practices*.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
In fact, I really can't see any particular reason to side with one over the other in this case. The real question -- in fact, the only question -- is what is in the contracts.
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Myself, and I admit this is emotionally-based, I'd side with whichever side the author herself picked, as she seems reasonably enthusiastic about having this particular book published by this particular company, given that she went and recorded a
new video message talking about the writing the story in the book for said company's website.
It's really rather unfortunate that she appears to have signed a contract that turned over all control for either publishing or blocking publication of her book in any textual format that might ever be invented to HC for the duration of the copyright (
), which seems especially ill-advised, as IIRC that was after the US no longer had its 28+28 renewal thing going and thus they'd basically control the copyright for her entire lifetime.
For the author's sake, I hope that her other non-disputed Open Road e-books do well, and it seems like no matter how the court rules regarding the HC contract, OR can still distribute
Julie of the Wolves throughout the rest of the world, since the 1971 agreement is only for US/territories/Canada.
* And finally being brought to court for some of them,
at least in the UK as regarding the quote-unquote "journalism" end of things.