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Comment by gameshot911 | Hacker News Reader

If this case is as slam-dunk as it appears, why doesn't Alan find a lawyer to sue Disney on contingent?

> why doesn't Alan find a lawyer to sue Disney on contingent?

A lawsuit will take years, and Foster provides quite a good reason to suggest that delayed recovery has substantially discounted value, so while that would be a possible route to recovery (probably for his estate by the time it was resolved), a quick resolution now, even if involving less money than a successful suit would recover, would probably be strongly preferred.

That said, I would think that filing suit would be the way to kick that process off, as that would reduce the perception that "ignore him and the issue will go away" might work.

I have mixed feelings about this, but what if someone bankrolled this lawsuit? eg paid out to the author and pursued the case on their own. In the event of the author's death the suit still would continue, while the author gets the money they need immediately. It would change the incentives for Disney.

Apparently Disney is doing delaying tactics. And they have the money for big lawyer delaying tactics.

Wouldn't be the first time when delaying tactics were used by big corp to make it so that there would be zero payout through some BS or that the suing person died.

Even if the plaintiff dies, wouldn't the royalties still be owed to the next of kin?

That may be of little consolation to the author if an inability to collect in a reasonable timeframe leads to an inability to afford medical expenses leading to a sooner death or less comfortable treatment prior to that point

The article says Disney has ignored his legal representatives. I don't know how that's possible, but it's what the article says.

Failure to appear in court is sometimes a ruling in favor of the plaintiff. He could go ahead and file the lawsuit.

It means they haven't yet filed a court case. If you ignore the other side once they file, the courts tend to impose very real consequences.

This pressure-in-public approach may still be cheaper than jumping to that immediately, or offer other benefits – like raising expectations for Disney to fairly treat other authors.

One reason it's not quite as slamdunky is probably because Alan Dean Foster doesn't actually own the copyright to these works. Here's a bit from the front matter of one of the books mentioned that you can take a loo at yourself with Amazon's 'Look Inside'.

https://i.imgur.com/pZwfy2B.jpg

He may not own the copyright, but if he has a contractual royalty agreement then he certainly retains legal claims on use of the copyright.

Whomever owns the copyright is entitled to do whatever their control of it allows them to do, but they are obligated to fulfill any claims others have on the revenue derived from those uses.

Do you have an illustrative case in mind? The claim is it's a slam dunk, I'm trying to understand the basis of the claim.

Not exactly a case, but an example: it's the same reason why MS Windows will have, on "cover", "copyright Microsoft", not a complete list of licensed components for some of which they might still be paying royalties. Similarly in other works.

In this case, the book as a whole would be copyright Star Wars Corporation, probably a holding entity specially to handle multiple involved copyrights (the copyright to Star Wars itself, etc.), and unlike a Windows install media you won't find a page listing "this work contains parts copyright X, Y, Z". But the contractual obligations still exist.

Both the previous reply and this sound more like convoluted motivated reasoning towards the desired outcome - that the author gets paid. I'd love to see the author get paid too! But I don't think these are particularly strong analyses of what looks like a complicated contract case. As far as I can tell, nobody (in thread) had as much as checked the copyright ownership. But I'd love to be wrong and learn me a thing or two!

How is being required to fulfill their half of the contract complicated?

Why would a Wookiee, an 8-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of 2-foot-tall Ewoks? Something morally trivial can be legally complicated.

While I'm not privy to the specific contracts in question, who holds the copyright probably isn't relevant to the dispute, at least not in the most obvious way -- namely, it doesn't matter that the copyright was never held by Foster. The relevant questions are, I suspect, (a) whether or not the contract included royalties to be paid to Foster, and (b) whether the obligation to pay said royalties survives transfer of ownership of the copyright.

A lot of "work for hire" contracts don't pay royalties, just a flat fee, but I don't think we'd be talking about this at all if this were the case here -- Foster was evidently being paid royalties until Disney took over Lucasfilm. So the dispute is over the second question. Disney is implicitly arguing that they get out of paying royalties to every single author who created works for companies that Disney subsequently bought, regardless of whether those contracts specified royalties that the predecessor corporations would have otherwise been paying.

Disney's contractual obligations to pay the originally-agreed royalty aren't copyright-dependent.

On top of that, these kind of contracts often come with a 'flagrant breach of contract means that copyright reverts to the original author' type of clause.

I mean, when a lawyer takes a case on contingency, they're essentially gambling their time on hopes of an outcome where their share (30-50% isn't uncommon, if I remember correctly) would make the time and effort spent on the case worth it. Against a company the size of Disney, with incentive to make the case as long and painful as possible to try and discourage other creators from trying to get what they're owed, it would likely take thousands of man hours, and tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket. Between discovery, filing fees, appeals, all for a victory that would result in (and I'm just completely guessing based on essentially no data) only hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lawsuits can very much end up being pyrrhic victories based on the costs incurred alone, not to mention the emotional toll that fighting a protracted legal battle can inflict upon a person.

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