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To satisfy my curiosity, does anyone know who benefits from the copyright for books published by the big companies? Is it the author, or the publishing company? As part of the contract to publish a book, do the larger corporations require authors to sign over copyrights to them? I believe this is the case in the music industry, for all but the biggest artists. The actual artists get pennies per sale, and it's the large companies that draw all the profits. Evidenced by the legal push against music pirates a few years back - those threats and lawsuits were brought by the RIAA, not the artists.
I'm all for authors making money off of copyrights, but I'm undecided about publishers being able to leverage them away from the authors via contract, with the author ending up with basically nothing in the end and the publishers taking all the spoils. Lord knows patents and trade marks are massively abused ("preemptive patent" - you patent an abstract idea that is useless to you, but you think your competitor might want, just so you can squeeze money out of them). Are copyrights for books in the same category? i.e., Meant to protect the authors, but being abused to create profits for corporations instead?
I'm not arguing for ignoring copyrights. But the discussion in this thread tends to assume that the copyrights are protecting the authors. Do they really? This isn't a rhetorical question - I'd don't know the answer, but would like to. Are there any authors here that are using the large publishers that can comment? What percentage of a books selling price actually goes to the author?
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