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. 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.
Folks,
For what it's worth, I never agree to such clauses even though I have gotten them about half the time that I have published with law reviews. I all cases, I have successfully negotiated around the issue by asking why they want such broad rights (they never have had a good explanation) and then explaining why I want the ability to act without their permission. In all cases I've managed to get law reviews to take nonexclusive rights to authorize republishing and reprinting (sometimes restricted to limited contexts such as future law review anthologies), along with an exclusive right of first publication.
Whenever I have asked how they wound up proposing a grant of rights which is that broad, I have generally been told something like "the business manager got something written up" or "we followed language in some other contract for a book" or whatever. I get the impression that the people who draft the agreements operate on the principle "if we can get the rights, we might as well, because more rights are presumptively in the journal's best interests." When I explain that it is in the journal's best interest to allow me to spread the work liberally, thereby getting the journal publicity, law review editors seem willing to redo the agreement.
Finally, on the "flip side" of the issue, I've also been surprised that some law reviews operate without any copyright agreement. Have others encountered that?
Anyway, my 2 cents worth. And congrats on the publication.
Fred Yen
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