Re: European authors

Henrietta Bensussen <henrietta.bensussen[_at_]forsythe.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> I've learned a lot by just following this list on copyright issues,
> and now I have a question (I'm a contracts manager at a scholarly
> press) especially for European readers:
>
> If a French scholar, say, publishes an article in a French or
> Italian journal and then this article is translated into English and
> is published in a book made up of contributions from many different
> authors around a particular subject, is it correct that the American
> publisher can assume that the French (or Italian) scholar has kept
> his rights in his original article? Would we then need to contract
> only with this scholar in order to publish?

There are differences between countries and regions of Europe. The Nordic countries (Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden) have had a special situation for a long period.

In 1948 was negotiated an standard publishing contract between the organizations of publishers and autors, which was used into the 1980s. According to this, only rights for trade editions (excluding book clubs and paperbacks) were licensed, and the right of translations (and sub-licensing to foreign publishers) were retained by the autors.

This standard contract was re-negotiated during the 1980s in the different countries, and today there is a larger variety of standard contracts, and typically different contracts for fiction (often varying for "adult" and "children or juvenile" fiction) and non-fiction.

You may also be interested to learn that in Norway, the government purchases 1000 copies of all new fiction titles (there are some variations, and there are some detailed regulation on quality control) for distribution among the public libraries, and with a clause rising the royalty of authors to 20 per cent (in some instances to 22,5 per cent) of retail price (there is currently an exception to the general rule in the competition legislation made for allowing the publishers to decide the retail price).

Jon Bing
Professor, dr juris
Bestyrer
Institutt for rettsinformatikk
Det juridisk fakultet - Universitetet i Oslo

Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law Faculty of Law - University of Oslo

PO Box 6702 St Olavs plass - N-0130 OSLO - Norway Phone: +47-22-850101 - Fax: +47-22-850102 http://www.jus.uio.no/iri/
<jon.bing[_at_]jus.uio.no> Received on Tue Mar 03 1998 - 21:52:13 GMT