Rights Management & Royalties

“When you lose control over your price point you are on the way to death,” said Hachette Livre Chairman and CEO Arnaud Nourry when asked if he was worried about perceptions of the value of books created by Amazon’s drive to discount. “We have to be very careful and never think it is behind us,”…

Trade negotiators announced their agreement over the terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on Monday, and yet the exact terms of the deal remain as secret as ever. For more than five years, we have been given a series of dubious justifications for keeping the text under close wraps. Now that it's done, there is…

A federal appeals court this week held that copyright holders must consider fair use before sending a DMCA takedown notice.

It was the most ambitious library project of our time—a plan to scan all of the world’s books and make them available to the public online. “We think that we can do it all inside of ten years,” Marissa Mayer, who was then a vice-president at Google, said to this magazine in 2007, when Google…

Of all the contract-reform issues being discussed today around publishing and its contracts with authors, the non-compete clause is among the most bitterly derided. And the “non-compete,” as the clause is called, is the focus of the fourth white paper in the Authors Guild’s Fair Contract Initiative series of articles outlining author contract reform.

Authors should not assign their copyrights to publishers. As our Model Contract emphasizes: “CAUTION: Do not allow the publisher to take your copyright or to publish the copyright notice in any name other than yours. Except in very unusual circumstances, this practice is not standard in the industry and harms your economic interests. No reputable…

Three major education publishers this week filed a copyright and trademark infringement suit against a U.S.-based textbook reseller for allegedly importing and selling pirated foreign editions of popular textbooks.

DRM free (Digital Rights Management) or hard DRM – which approach best protects the intellectual property of authors and publishers whilst maximizing revenues? The book industry has the advantage of not being the first to be faced with this challenge since many other industry segments such as games, video and music have faced the same…

In the fourth installment of the its Fair Contract Initiative, the Authors Guild argues that book contracts should be time-limited.

With remand briefs now filed by both sides, the stage is set for a new decision in a closely watched copyright case.