Re: droit de suite

On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, Tyler T. Ochoa <tochoa[_at_]law.whittier.edu> wrote:
>
> On 04/07/2000, Marty Hayes <9ball[_at_]hostsite.net> wrote:
> >
> > I think *that* is really the crux of the issue -- the perception that
> > the big nasty publishers *fleece* creators out of their rights by
> > paying them a pittance of what those rights are worth. BUT, at the
> > time of negotiation, the true value of those rights is not yet
> > established. Prior to Grisham's first hugely successful book, the
> > perceived value of his rights to a work in manuscript form certainly
> > wasn't the same that as a manuscript would be today.
>
> U.S. law attempts to provide for this problem by giving to authors and
> heirs the right to "terminate" any transfers of copyright, and thereby
> recapture the copyright for themselves, after a certain period of time.
> The provisions require a minimum of two years' notice prior to
> termination, to allow the parties' to renegotiate and come up with a
> new deal. See sec. 203 and 304(c).
>
> I would have preferred retaining copyright renewal, which places works
> that are not renewed into the public domain at an earlier point. The
> problem with renewal was that the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the author
> to assign the renewal period at the time of the initial transfer, which
> defeated the purpose of allowing authors to renegotiate if their works
> became famous. It would have been preferable, in my opnion, for
> Congress simply to make the renewal period non-assignable until shortly
> before the renewal term began.
>
> The difficulty with applying these theories to original works of art
> is that artists traditionally made/make money from selling the original,
> not from selling reproductions. Even if the work becomes well-known
> and valuable, it increases the royalties from reproductions only
> slightly. If you believe the artist should be able to capture a bigger
> share of the work's value [natural rights view], then droit de suite
> makes some sense. If you believe in the utilitarian view of copyright,
> then the existence of the work is proof that traditional copyright
> provided a sufficient incentive to create the work. Then the only
> question is whether droit de suite would increase the incentive for
> other artists, and thereby increase the store of copyrighted works;
> and whether it is in the public interest to do so.

Tyler, I'm sure that you are right on target -- some of them are difficult to apply to works of art. I guess I should qualify that my comments were strictly intended to respond to the theme at the time in the thread which suggested that it was reprehensible for heirs of a "writer" to hold the copyright and collect the due royalties. A subsequent comment was made (which I disagreed with) that it was the publishers, not creators, who primarily benefit from copyright law.

The comments of mine that you are referencing were specific to the only instance in which I could imagine a publisher owning a copyright -- in the (unlikely) event that the copyright owner would have transferred his/her rights to the publisher, and what that would have had to entail.

Marty Hayes
<9ball[_at_]hostsite.net> Received on Tue Apr 11 2000 - 21:44:19 GMT