Quote:
Originally Posted by Tex2002ans
As the Carnegie Mellon PDF I linked above also stated: Other publishers operate under the opposite assumption that if a right is not explicitly denied, then they do have that right.
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That reminds me of one local author. She wrote some local market YA books in the late 80's to early 90's with moderate success. After her books were not available for years, all rights reverted to her -- or so she thought since that's what the contract said. Since she had created the books on computer, it was a matter of converting her word processing files into epubs and then through Kindlegen for the Amazon market. So far so good.
After 6 months of selling the ebooks, she received a letter from a legal firm informing her that she was not allowed to publish e-editions of her books since her original contract's terms only mentioned physical books so the only rights that reverted were for physical books. The letter went on to claim that the rights for ebook editions remained with the publisher (not her original publisher but the result of multiple sales and corporate mergers). After quite a bit of back and forth, the publisher admitted that they had no interest in re-publishing her books in any form but they had to protect "their rights in their intellectual properties".
Lawyers occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. - Winston Churchill