Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

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Some of my written work was once pirated by a coporation.

In 1984, when I was 13, I wrote an article on revising the AD&D combat tables, sent it in to Dragon magazine, and it was published the following year. Before it hit print, I was given a contract to read and sign. The contract specified that I was selling "first serial rights" only, and retained all rights for republishing, putting in anthologies, etc.

I signed the contract, and got a $100 check.

20 years later, Dragon released a CD-ROM compendium of all content. My article was included, without my permission.

This was not "initial" serial rights - this was a republishing.

I sent an email saying "you owe me additional payment".

They wrote back saying "no".

I filled out a small claims court form in MA, submitted it along with a $40 processing fee, and waited.

A few weeks later I was given a court date.

I showed up. The Hasbro magazine rep (Dragon was published by TSR, which had been acquired by Wizards of the Coast, which had been acquired by Hasbro) did not show.

I won the case by default.

The court mailed the judgement to Hasbro.

A month later Hasbro mailed me a check for $2,000, in accordance with the judgement.

I'm pretty sure that cases like this is why that CD-ROM compendium was pulled from the market. Ironically, it's probably a collector's item now.

It's actually quite frustrating, because there are a number of magazines that want to publish back issue electronic archives, but can't because in they never imagined that they'd want to republish articles electronically and there's no practical way to chase down all the authors, artists, photographers and potentially the advertisers to get the rights.

I know one magazine publisher that just shrugged his shoulders and gave up. There are decent-quality scanned copies of every issue on the torrents now, but he isn't pursuing any action to stop it.

Reasonable copyright term limits would go a long way towards solving this issue.

This has nothing to do with copyright law.

I sold the first serial rights for $100.

I would have sold all rights for $120 or so.

...but they never asked.

> ...but they never asked.

That's rather the problem - asking every person who holds the rights can be genuinely difficult.

In your case, the original magazine was published years ago. Even if the publisher had kept your contact information - and didn't lose it when the got bought out by another company, and THAT company didn't lose it in the next level of buying out, etc. - the contact would no longer be accurate all those years later.

Even if they did somehow manage to contact you, it's possible that you wouldn't have responded to the letter asking for rights anymore than they responded to your letter asking for payment.

There could be this same problem for every article in every issue for the entire span of the magazine.

Hasbro could have noticed somewhere along the path to you initiating court procedures and have offered a quick payment of $120 to make you happy instead of the $2000 default judgement, but a corporation as large as Hasbro probably gets a lot of complaints, some of them nuisance complaints or crank calls.

It's quite possible that the $2,000 they had to pay was cheaper - maybe even dramatically cheaper - then the filing and/or legal footwork involved in accurately determining that it was necessary to pay you.

And when determining what you need to do in order to comply with a law is very burdensome or difficult, I would say that it's fair to call that a problem with the law. A good law should make it easy to obey the law - not easy in a moral sense where it's a low standard, or easy in the loophole sense that you won't get caught anyway, but easy in the accounting sense that accomplishing non-nefarious, law-abiding objectives should cost small amounts of money in overhead activities.

I'm guessing for a Hasbro lawyer just to look at the brief, let alone travel out to the court, would have exceeded the $2000, especially given the risk that the other party might actually win. They probably have a minimum threshold under which they just ignore complaints and lawsuits and see what happens.

  > That's rather the problem - asking every person
  > who holds the rights can be genuinely difficult.

I think that he means that he would have sold all rights when they originally published the article for $120 instead of $100 for first serial rights. He's not talking about this after-the-fact contacting of the rights-holders that you're talking about.

Or they could have just bought all rights at the start. Then the author gets paid / is happy and they can do what they want.

That gets back to the other part of ja27's argument "...they never imagined that they'd want to republish articles electronically...".

I'd be willing to bet that almost no print media is currently securing the rights to directly load content into the brain. They may regret that 50 years from now.

Actually, most rights clearance agreements have boilerplate language about the agreement covering "all mediums and distribution forms, existing or yet to be developed, throughout the universe, in perpetuity."

Basically, 'anything, everywhere, forever'. The language was probably developed by the insurance companies that handle claims for E&O (Errors & Omissions), and who know exactly how common these problems are. Chances are, that's where the $2k came from too; not Hasbro, but Hasbro's underwriter.

I wonder how someone like National Geographic does it, since they seem to have no problem publishing electronic versions. Maybe they've just automatically secured all rights? Or only used staff writers/photographers so they only publish things produced as "work for hire"?

It's been a legal issue: Greenberg v. National Geographic Society

http://www.publaw.com/erights3.html

Paying for rights that you don't intend to use until 20 years later sounds like a good way to ensure that your company doesn't last long enough to take advantage of those rights.

Well, depending on how good the article was and how long they retained the rights, it might make it difficult to publish one of their "Best Of" collections. I would imagine (haven't see a contract lately) that everyone is reserving all "electronic" means.

Thank you, Captain Hindsight!

It wouldn't be hindsight for Dragon magazine. They were publishing "Best of" volumes throughout their run. It isn't like we are talking ancient history, the CD-ROM and collections of magazines were well within the time era of most of their issues.

When the ink on the constitution was barely dry, the first US copyright law gave authors a right to their work for 14-years, with an option of one 14-year renewal.

If that were still the copyright law, you'd have had no case unless you renewed your copyright in 1998. And even if you had, by 2012, the work would be public domain, republishable in collection/digital/etc. format by anyone.

So, yes, copyright law is relevant, and shorter terms would free up a lot of magazine material now in limbo because it's impractical to clear the rights.

If it weren't for copyright law they could anything they pleased, so this has everything to do with copyright law.

Wouldn't the situation be avoided (mostly) if they had just paid him the additional money after he contacted them?

> there's no practical way to chase down all the authors, artists, photographers and potentially the advertisers to get the rights.

I wonder if that's why there is no huge PDF archive with all issues of BYTE magazine since #1

This is a great story, and the outline of it parallels my own experiences with small claims court. When big corporations mess with you, small claims is a very effective way to level the playing field.

Here is some additional information on the process. You have to find the "registered agent" for the company, which can usually be looked up online at the Secretary of State site for the state where the company is located. If they are out of state, serve the complaint by certified mail, with return receipt.

They ran into a lot of legal issues with that CD. Supposedly KenzerCo got the rights to all the pre-3.0 D&D stuff so that they could make Hackmaster by agreeing not to sue.

I'm kind of surprised that worked, since at first glance this would seem to be a copyright case, which no MA court has jurisdiction over.

Take another glance...

This could probably be argued under contract law as the defendant having exceeded the use they contracted.

Awesome. Sadly, this person is getting advice to "lawyer up" when it's really unnecessary to even get a lawyer involved. In these types of cases lawyers would just complicate things.

Actually this is one of the types of case, that is one person is clearly and obviously in the wrong but absolutely refuses to admit it, where having a lawyer is particularly helpful.

A lawyer isn't necessary, file a small claims action against them in your local area. If you're a writer you claim jurisdiction where you work (like the poster of this thread did), which generally means the other person will never be able to get there. They're either hiring a lawyer/paralegal to go to court or they sit and wait for the court to order payment.

Personally, I'd be filing small claims against them on the order of a thousand dollars or so and include a claim for expenses. Good chance it's job done and you got the cash.

This case seems so cut and dry though that a lawyer is hardly necessary. Small Claims court will do the job perfectly fine.

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