The Leopard - ePub - USA

[vicnorton]

Hello. I'm Vic Norton. I am trying to find the answer to a simple question. How does international copyright work? How can Random House UK keep any ePub version of _The Leopard_ by Di Lampedusa from being sold in the USA? The ePub version can be purchased in just about any other country in the world, including Canada, Afganistan, Antarctica(country?),..., and Zimbabwe, just to name a few.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by vicnorton

Hello. I'm Vic Norton. I am trying to find the answer to a simple question. How does international copyright work? How can Random House UK keep any ePub version of _The Leopard_ by Di Lampedusa from being sold in the USA? The ePub version can be purchased in just about any other country in the world, including Canada, Afganistan, Antarctica(country?),..., and Zimbabwe, just to name a few.

I think di Lampedusa died in 1957 or so, right? That means the leopard is still copyrighted and the one holding the rights has the regional distribution rights, as well. You better buy a paper version wherever you want. Those are not restricted.

[Valmore Daniels]

Welcome to the boards, Vic

[ImogenRose]

Welcome to MR!

Imogen

[kacir]

Originally Posted by vicnorton

I am trying to find the answer to a simple question. How does international copyright work?

International copyright works this way:
Writer writes a book.
He sells the right to publish the book to the publisher. The contract is usually worded in such a way that the publisher can publish certain numbers of books, or can publish the books for certain period, or that he can publish the book as long as he wants, but the rights return back to writer when publisher ceases to sell the book. In return the author receives a lump sum and/or certain amount of money for each book sold.

In order to increase the profit, authors (or, to be precise agents working for writers) sometimes sell rights to several publishers in several countries. So in Great Britain they might sell to Random House (UK) and in USA they sell the rights for the same book to HarperCollins. In order to prevent direct competition of publishers, Random House in this example is not allowed to sell books in USA and Harper Collins is not allowed to sell in Great Britain.
With paper books this is it. If you live in USA, you can't easily buy paper book in a London book shop. You can order it by mail, but the inconvenience and postage chargers prevent most of the people doing this. I know, there is Amazon now, but they are not publisher (well, they *are* now ;-) but we are talking about a paper book published by Random House) distributing the book to the "forbidden territory" and they are just providing the service of shipping.

Everything is nice and reasonable. Now e-books enter the picture. And the contracts for e-books remain essentially the same. Often the e-book rights are negotiated in the same contract as rights for paper book. With physical, heavy, difficult and expensive to transport, paper books it is easy to accept this geographic restriction. But now you could buy an e-book in a London book shop with one click and have it delivered under one second with no extra cost. So now Random House (UK) in our example, has to use some technical means to prevent people from USA from purchasing the book, because in their contract they can't compete with HarperCollins (USA).

If author sells publisher international rights, the publisher will sell the epub to anyone. They would be stupid not to.

The situation is even more complicated with old contracts, because it didn't occur to anybody to have clause about e-book until recently. So there have been some lawsuits from owners of rights for old books. The publisher that bought the rights to publish the book for as long as they want in 1950s claims that this covers also e-book rights, estate owners claim that they are entitled to better deal for e-book rights.

[Sandra Edwards]

Welcome to MR!

Sandy

[vicnorton]

Originally Posted by kacir

International copyright works this way:
The situation is even more complicated with old contracts, because it didn't occur to anybody to have clause about e-book until recently. So there have been some lawsuits from owners of rights for old books. The publisher that bought the rights to publish the book for as long as they want in 1950s claims that this covers also e-book rights, estate owners claim that they are entitled to better deal for e-book rights.

Thanks for the input, Sandra. I guess I'll just reread my print version.

The whole situation is very curious. I am a retired mathematics professor from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. I mentioned this problem on a faculty mailing list. A BGSU professor who is on the list and lived in England for a year added his old UK email address to his Amazon account, switched the account to that address, and ordered the ePub from Amazon with no problem. So I guess you can buy the book in the USA if you can dig up an email address from some other country.

Regards,

Vic

[red_phoenix]

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