Re: Authors' rights (Was- R

Fairly recently John Lederer johnl[_at_]ibm.net wrote:
>
> On 04/05/96, "Martha Luehrmann" <Martha_Luehrmann[_at_]macmail2.lbl.gov>
> > wrote:
> >
> > If creators would create works regardless of the amount
> > of copyright protection their works will receive, why is
> > it that they will fight so determinedly for those
> > 'unimportant' rights?
>
> It may be irrelevant, but the core of those fighting for greater
> protection seems less composed of the authors ("creators") than
> distributors.

I may have made the point before (something strange has happened to my cni-(C) feed) but:

The reason you have this impression is simply because the distributors (publishers, producers) are more able to throw money at the issue. Often at Berne Convention meetings there are dozens of them, plus two or three people from the International Federation of Journalists, the musicians' organisations, and the like, wearing four or five "hats" each. I did say earlier that in the UK it's very difficult to lobby the appropriate politicians on rights, because the publishing industry keeps them so well-fed. Throw money at us and we'll throw it at the problem, and do you nice write-ups of the resulting lunches :-)

Some of the distributors' (publishers', producers') efforts are aimed at _changing_ copyright protection in their favour. I'm sure they'd like a world-wide (C) regime where the person who pays for first use of a piece of work by default obtains assignment of all rights in it. This is what the New York Times, Murdoch's London Times, and others have been trying to achieve. If they pick off freelance writers and photographers then, for example, musicians will be next: they wouldn't even have to get them too off their faces to read the small print in the oppressive contract, because there wouldn't be any small print. (If Muddy Waters had been protected by French law, he'd have received royalties on his work: it wouldn't have been _possible_ for him to assign the rights for the apocryphal $100. Please remind me of documented examples...)

Mike Holderness
<mch[_at_]cix.compulink.co.uk> Received on Thu Apr 11 1996 - 00:30:53 GMT