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.
I sold the first serial rights for $100.
I would have sold all rights for $120 or so.
...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.
> That's rather the problem - asking every person
> who holds the rights can be genuinely difficult.
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.
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.
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.