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Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
Ok real life scenario : I sold all the rights to a short story years ago. The company I sold it to has since sold out. What are the chances I can get my rights back without a long legal battle?
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There was a case like that that's kind of famous among older programmers. Michael Abrash wrote "The Zen of Assembly Language Programming", which quickly became a standard in the field. Many considered it the first really excellent book on how to be a good assembly language programmer. It sold like crazy, at least in comparison to other very technical programming books.
Then the publisher was bought out by a company that decided to drop computer books. They had bought all the rights to Abrash's book and even though they had no interest in the book anymore there was nothing he could do to get it back. As I recall he sued them unsuccessfully, although I'm not sure I remember that correctly.
In any case the book went out of print and stayed out of print for a lot of years. Second hand copies started selling for a lot of money. Abrash wrote a sequel, to which he kept the rights, and it was very successful. He couldn't actually write a sequel to his earlier book so he named this one "The Zen of Graphics Programming" or some such. I'm typing this all from memory.
Finally, years later, he got the rights back to his original book, I forget how, and he put it on the web in PDF format.
I think most of us can agree that copyright is necessary to encourage writers, as the Constitution says. But it's ugly stuff. Kind of like bad tasting medicine.
Barry