Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
Publishers have lobbyists. Most authors and composers don't.
Barry
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The movie industry and music industry have massive lobbying efforts in the US.
https://www.newsmax.com/hirsen/holly.../06/id/545405/
The publishing industry? Not so much. Follow the money. The best selling book last year was Michelle Obama's Becoming, selling 3.4 million copies, outselling the number 2 book by 2 million copies. List price $32. Of course, books rarely sell for the list price (current price at Amazon $16) and the publisher sells it to the book seller for roughly half the list price. Just for argument sake, let's say that the publisher got $16 per book. That comes out to $51 M.
The top box office movie from 2018 was Black Panther pulling in $700 M at the box office. That doesn't include the DVD and digital sales, merchandising or anything like that.
Disney pulled in around $12.6 B in profits last year on $59 B in revenue. Penguin-Random House had a total revenue of around $3 B.
Disney, of course, holds the copyrights to their movies. Pengin-Random House holds the contracts with the authors holding the copyrights. Typically, the rights to a book reverts back to the author once it goes out of print, it depends on the contract. With the exception of a small handful of books that never go out of print, the publisher simply isn't concerned with copyright length because their interest in the book has vanished long before the original 28 year copyright, much less the current life plus 70.
There are exceptions of course, we read stories of authors who foolishly sign contracts where the rights to the book never revert back to them, but that's why you have an agent and have a lawyer experienced in such matters go over a contract before you sign.