Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It depends. As you say, it's not the law's responsibility to stop an author from being stupid, but in the UK at least there is a law called the "Unfair Contract Terms Act" which prohibits grossly unfair terms in commercial contracts. A publisher claiming rights in a medium which did not exist at the time that the contract was signed could be considered an unfair contract term, and an author could take legal action under the Act to recover those rights if the publisher refused to engage in that new medium.
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That's the case under contract law in the US as well, to be enforceable, a contract can not be one sided. Of course, there are specific technical terms used and one sided tends to depend more on the judge and jury thinks than a specific guideline. One of the more famous cases was Roberts verse Sears, in which Sears paid Roberts, the youthful inventor of a key improvement of the ratchet wrench, $10,000 for an invention that they knew was worth many millions. After some 20 years, it was eventually settled out of court for $8 M. The legal system in the US is rarely cut and dry.