Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

Studying IT/IP law is a fascinating example of comparative law, especially the approaches between US v EU. The copyright system was OK for small-medium group of creators as private property but collective property start hitting Coasean bargining costs (cf Hollywood studio model). One wonders what would have been the outcome if the EU database directive had been the substantive law for this situation. Fortunately we now have the CreativeCommons license.

Tim O'Reilly, the computer books publisher and open source advocate, describes strategies such as CRC's as "pissing in the well" (Fosdem conference, Brussels, 2004). He was referring to the abusive patents filed by Amazon, like the infamous "one-click purchase". Amazon has vastly benefited from the community, with more than 10 million user reviews provided for free which now constitute an essential element of Amazon's value.

How can we go about boycotting a publisher which seems to have quite a bit of market power in technical journals? I went to their website, and was prompted to authenticate by the library proxy server. It looks like UC Berkeley does some business with these people.

Is it credible even for UC to threaten to stop providing access to key technical journals, or to cease buying their new books, due to some publisher misbehavior?

While Eric's treatment by CRC is completely unforgivable, I think it's worth noting (as he did) that he made a critical error of judgement at the very outset -- he signed the contract without negotiating (or indeed fully understanding) it. In general, if you are ever sent a publisher's contract you should bear in mind that you can haggle over the small-print and, in the final analysis, you have the ultimate privilege of walking away from it if it isn't satisfactory. Moreover, when reading publishing contracts you should always ask yourself the question: "I get on fine with my editor today, but what if in six months' time she's replaced by a flesh-eating zombie?" ... and plan accordingly.

I think Eric's biggest mistake was in not insisting on retaining all electronic rights to his book, and in not negotiating a reversion clause (such that if the book went out of print or became unavailable for even three months, all rights should revert to him and the contract be terminated). These are negotiable points in publishing, to a greater or lesser extent, and if he'd done so he would have been able to tell CRC exactly where to go.

So that's why Mathmatica is so expense ;-)

Did Eric intend to share his CRC royalties with the volunteers who had contributed to the site?

Reading his rather brief explanation for why he signed a contract he did not understand and did not hire a lawyer to vet, in which he signed away rights many academic authors manage to retain, I'm wondering if he also invested in Nigerian Bank Accounts. My sympathies are more for his foolishness than for his having been "exploited".

I've always wondered how the work of many graduate students got turned into this for-profit book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0387008926/qid=1107207813/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/104-8403874-5148732?v=glance&s=books&n=507846; maybe the author re-did all the problems himself, but I doubt it.

None of this should surprise anyone that's worked in the textbook publishing business.

I guess I should add a data point here: I also made what Charlie described as the terrible mistake of signing a book contract exactly as presented, without negotiating over individual terms. I read all of it, didn't find anything that struck me as horrible at first glance, but didn't read it in maximal suspicion mode or show it to a lawyer. Even worse: this was a technical book with slightly complicated IP history, in that it was based on a Web site that I wrote for my employer and that I continued to update even after the book was published. So in a way this is very similar to Eric's story.

The difference is that I was dealing with reasonable people. Maybe I shouldn't have counted on that, but I did, and things worked out. The Web site in question is the SGI Standard Template Library Programmer's Guide (http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/); my book is _Generic Programming and the STL_, published in Addison-Wesley's Professional Computing Series, and I've been very happy with the nice folks at Addison-Wesley who published it. If I write another book I'll be glad to deal with them again.

So if nothing else, this is an explanation of why people take the risk of signing a book contract without nailing down every corner case: it often works.

Your editor is unlikely to be a flesh-eating zombie. Back-stabbing weasel, yes, flesh-eating zombie, no.

I'm perplexed about how Eric W. could have assigned copyright to CRC press, since it looks like he never got the copyright from his contributors. I just checked his site, mathworld.wolfram.com, for any requirements for contributors to assign copyright, and found nothing.

I'm a bit surprised that Eric thought that Stern's characterization of the contract as "standard" would have applied to his situation, which was very much non-standard.

Andrew J. Lazarus writes: "Did Eric intend to share his CRC royalties with the volunteers who had contributed to the site?"

How much did the contributors pay him to defray the cost of hosting their contributions, prior to it being hosted by Wolfram?

> Reading his rather brief explanation for why he
> signed a contract he did not understand and did
> not hire a lawyer to vet, in which he signed away
> rights many academic authors manage to retain, I'm
> wondering if he also invested in Nigerian Bank
> Accounts.

Which may well be true (it was my thought when I first heard this story, after seeing Mathworld evaporate before my eyes). But does that excuse the "sharp dealing" of CRC? Should everyone have to expect that they are going to be maximally ripped off by every publisher or (so-called) IP broker they meet?

Yes, I know, the history of publishers ripping off authors predates the printing press. But again, in a world of values is that right?

Cranky

Or why we should kill intellectual property protections that are currently in place and replace them with something more efficient.

Marc> How can we go about boycotting a publisher
Alternatives = {Civil disobedience, alternative (Library of Science), legal action (unbundling), new market entrant, parallel market}

Charlie> Eric's biggest mistake was in not insisting on retaining all electronic rights to his book

But in those days electronic rights were originally argued to be same as print rights (later rejected by courts) and technically, database rights is in the care and arrangement of facts, not the actual linear presentation (typography)

Jonathan> [how] could have assigned copyright to CRC press, since it looks like he never got the copyright from his contributors

Collection of factual info (assuming maths terms qualify) are a different copyright and thus protectable - there are various tests like creativity, sweat of brow, etc ... non-trivial for non-lawyers ... even now there are debates if not acrimonious arguments

Summary: Internet copyright for literary works are not exactly "fixed" (eg on CD) and I've written on how we are moving towards floating (think licensed to subnetwork) and fungible works (transformational). Also many difficulties with type, subsidiary and scope of rights. Personally I like the Chinese law on software copyright (10 year renewable option) but then the US bullied ... err .. .convinced the officials to classify it as literary with ye Bono Act and continuous term extensions (see Lessig). IANAL (licensed) but have done comparative IT/IP law so #insert caveat=different jurisdictions have different interpretations.

Steve> kill intellectual property protections that are currently in place and replace them with something more efficient
As soon as you convince everyone in the world to switch to a new spam-free email protocol with a 1 year hiatus then I'll agree that your idea may have execution merit