On Tuesday, August 19, 2003 4:55 PM, Theodora Michaels
[SMTP:TMICHAELS[_at_]carlinamerica.com] wrote:
> Frankly, I'm disappointed that I didn't receive more responses to my
> Amazon question. Here we have a big and presumably well-represented
> company asking for not only more rights than they need, but rights they
> know are probably not available, which strikes me as very poor drafting.
> Granted, such incidents aren't shockingly rare, but have they really
> become so common as to be unworthy of any comment at all?
>
No, I just didn't get round to it yet....
What follows are comments. (Advice is extra)
My impression is the contrary: "grab everything" clauses have become less common as people realise the difficulties with them. It wasn't that unusual to find clauses that required not just a non-exclusive licence like this one but an outright assignment of the copyright.
This isn't a wholesale rights-grab: at least it's non-exclusive. It's been drafted to give Amazon the right to do what they want without further formality, and as such it suits their internal purposes almost as well as an outright assignment would, but it does make it very difficult for you to upload anything that you don't own the copyright to, including third-party reviews, band photos and cover art. You need to get your rights to use those sorted out whatever the Amazon licence says. Perhaps make sure that your licence from the third-party photographers and artists includes "sales promotion including uploading the content in digital form to online retailers according to their standard terms and conditions" or some such.
The Amazon licence has some other merits - it's short and readable, for a start. It could be improved with the addition of a use restriction such as "for the sole purposes of promoting the sales of the product in question, but excluding use for the production of saleable merchandise of any form".
Have you discussed the matter with your photographer or his agent? Concerted pressure through professional associations is likely to be the best way to get Amazon to revisit the matter.
Edward Barrow
New Media Copyright Consultant
http://www.copyweb.co.uk/
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Received on Tue Aug 19 2003 - 23:20:05 GMT
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