Re: L.Rev (C) Release

On Mon, 25 Oct 99, John Kasdan <kasdan[_at_]columbia.edu> wrote:
>
> I recently received a proposed contract from a law school (which shall
> remain nameless) IP Review. The clause that got to me was:
>
> 3. Grant of Rights. The Journal shall have the exclusive worldwide
> rights of first publication, and of republishing and authorizing the
> republication, of the Article in the English language, in any and
> all media now known or later developed, including but not limited to
> computerized storage and retrieval systems such as Lexis and Westlaw
> legal research systems, the Internet, and CD-ROM. The Author shall
> have the right to grant the non-exclusive right of republication of
> the article in any language other than English, after first
> publication in the English language by the Journal. (Other stuff
> about attribution and publicity.)
>
> So, as I understand it, I could place my piece on my class web site
> either with permission of the Journal, or if I translated it into
> French. I have a couple of questions about this. First, does anyone
> have any idea of why they want such a right? It's not like there's
> any money in all this.

Breaking up a right to publish by territory/language is fairly common in the book publishing business, where authors routinely retain foreign language rights, grant at most a right of refusal, or retain a reversion right if the publisher does not adequately pursue foreign language markets. I suspect they inherited this from some form agreement.

> Secondly, do people in this group sign such things? The Journal
> assures me that they have been using this clause for a while and
> that no one has objected. I can't imagine anyone who is publishing
> in an IP review even contemplating granting such broad rights.

Its fairly common. While I served as managing editor of a law review, every author we published executed our form letter. Frankly, the issue didn't come up -- the documents were usually sent back by return mail. This is not to say that these points would not have been negotiable under appropriate circumstances, but only to answer your question whether such language was/is routinely executed.

Andrew C. Greenberg
<werdna[_at_]gate.net> Received on Tue Oct 26 1999 - 12:21:18 GMT