Rights management - a real problem with ebooks and digital publishing
By Paul Biba
The following is a short excerpt from a article by Mike Shatzkin, from his Idea Logical Blog. This is something we readers often overlook and we tend to simply presume that anything can be published anywhere or any way. This, of course, is a particular problem for ebooks, as we have seen with the audio rights on the Kindle and international publishing problems in general.
T
he Google settlement brings into bold relief what has been a quiet issue for book publishers, particularly the biggest ones.
They are largely in the dark about what rights they own.
It is not really hard to understand why they’re in this position and it isn’t really anybody’s “fault”, but it sure is a mess. The “rights database” or “contracts database” for most publishers consists largely of paper contracts in file drawers. That’s because all the big publishers gain a substantial portion of their income from backlist that was acquired years, decades, or even many decades ago, long before electronic rights databases were even conceived of. …
The challenge of building a comprehensive rights database for the many tens of thousands of titles the big publishers control is probably cost-prohibitive. And even if money were no object, there would be a lot of empty cells in that database where information should be because contracts would be lost or incomplete. Figuring out how to attack that problem cost-effectively is one of the most important puzzles facing the senior executives of the major houses.
April 16th, 2009 at 11:59 am
It absolutely is the someone’s fault, and that someone is the publishers. They wanted this. This is why they pushed for copyright to be extended to all works regardless of whether they were commercial or not (who — honestly speaking — wants to copyright a letter to Aunt Martha?). They wanted a situation where all — as opposed to very little — information was subject to their monopolies. They wanted a situation where ambiguity protected works that authors did not wish to protect, where publication would be suppressed by doubt (as opposed to the law). They wanted a situation where all information was government by law. They wanted a situation where information could be called “property”.
And they succeeded — in the very face of the First Amendment. So, the publishers all owe society for what they stole from us: Our Right to Free Speech. They should begin to pay us back my creating a database for us at their expense.