Iconic Star Wars Book Author Claims Disney Owes Him 4 Years of Overdue Royalties
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As it stands, the irrefutable evidence from the US Copyright Office is that these novelizations were works-for-hire, so ADF would never have been owed any royalties, let alone for the past 4 years, unless he had a non-standard WFH agreement which he has thus far failed to produce.
Since he didn't sign the NDA yet, they haven't thought of any of his communications since then as a 'response'.
Given that ADF was a big name back in the day, he was probably getting some generous sales-based bonuses. He claims he was getting paid through at least 2014 for the Star Wars novels, which would mean Disney was still paying him for 2 years after the Lucasfilm acquisition. That would have been about right for Disney to have had time to review all of the Lucasfilm contracts and stop payments on the ones where they weren't actually required to pay. (This isn't all that rare; at my former job we were paying $20k a year to a former employee and it wasn't until one of the new general counsels asked why that we actually looked at the contract to see why were were still paying it. It wasn't questioned until them because the company been making those payments for years, and in the scheme of things, was fairly immaterial. Ultimately, the former employee had been entitled to those payments for several years, but the contract term had long since run out. However, anyone with knowledge of the expiration date had since left the company, and their replacements just kept paying.)
It's extremely rare for WFH novelizations of movies to provide for royalties, because authors of novelizations are generally not creating significant (if any) new creative IP; in most cases, they're simply converting a script to prose format.
ADF might have such terms in his contract, since movie studios were more generous about these things back then, but he's had the power to show us this part of his contract for almost a week now and he's chosen not to. Nor, for that matter, has the SFWA, which has similarly had access to at least one of those contracts.
DC did use the term royalties in their work-for-hire contract as of 2008:
http://jimshooter.com/2011/09/few-more-thoughts-regarding-ar...
At any rate it's not clear to me what you mean by "normal means of resolving contract disputes rather than through the application of copyright law". Once you have a contract between the parties it's going to be resolved primarily as a contract dispute. It's not going to be resolved the way someone posting something on the pirate bay will be resolved.
I'm not saying what you wrote is incorrect so much as I don't think it's going to make much of a practical difference whether you call it a royalty or not.
DC specifically changed the terminology of its "royalty" payments because they were not actually royalties, but calling them royalties was causing headaches for its legal dept with respect to licensing, because the existence of "royalty" payments implied that DC was not the owner of the IP, and thus that they had to seek additional licenses from the actual owners of the IP.)
And that is why Marvel switched away from calling them royalties a long time ago.
Copyright law has a special regime for enforcement. I.e., statutory damages, etc. It applies in addition to relief available under contract law. However, for "royalty" payments that aren't actually royalties, only contract law remedies are available.
I assume SFWA and ADF have discussed this beyond what they are posting to twitter. Him not posting the contract to everyone on the internet seems like a weird detail to call out as a point against him.
While 70s/early 80s era Fox was known for its artist-friendly legal deals (see, e.g., letting Lucas keep Star Wars), it would have been extremely unusual for Lucasfilm to have hired ADF on anything but a WFH basis. And indeed, the copyright record for the novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye shows that the "Star Wars Corporation" owns the copyright, not ADF, and was an "employer for hire." (https://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=4&ti=1,4&...) On that note, the copyright registration for Aliens (the novelization) also shows that it was a work-for-hire. https://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=65&ti=51,... (Contrast to an original work, where the author is the copyright claimant: John Scalzi's Old Man's War https://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=2&ti=1,2&...)
In other words, ADF is not being denied royalties. He wasn't owed any in the first place, unless he somehow negotiated a non-standard WFH agreement that almost nobody in the industry gets. (ADF was a big name for sci-fi novelizations back in the day, so it's possible that he did have such an arrangement, but if that's the case he needs to show that he has that type of contract.)
EDIT: grammatical fixes and added links
EDIT 2: Note that the SFWA has unilaterally made claims about what they think Disney is trying to do (acquire assets without the corresponding liabilities). This claim would be correct if, as ADF claims, he owned the copyrights to the novelizations or his WFH agreement somehow obligated Fox/Lucasfilm to pay him royalties. But otherwise it's simply wrong, and Disney itself has never actually made statements to that effect. Moreover, such a claim would not comport with how M&A works in the U.S.
EDIT: Deleted my original second paragraph. Disney is not claiming that they acquired the rights to the novelizations without the corresponding liabilities. The SFWA claimed that on their own. Disney hasn't actually made a formal response yet on this other than to say that they want to work this out with ADF. Presumably, that is because they are still trying to find a copy of the now 30+ year old WFH agreement in the Fox warehouses in Century City.
The SFWA president is clearly not a lawyer and doesn't understand how M&A works in the U.S. What they are suggesting about what Disney was trying to do isn't legally possible.
They are clearly negotiating about SOMETHING.
Your conclusion is unfounded.
Disney hasn't said that they're negotiating anything. They're still trying to figure out what ADF is talking about. The NDA part is standard (for Disney).
I stand by my conclusion, unless ADF can cough his WFH agreements showing that he was entitled to royalties.
As ADF is claiming extremely special treatment, the obligation is on him to prove that he's owed special treatment. It's not our obligation to take him at his word.
The statement about them not acquiring the liabilities of author contracts when they acquired the contractual rights was made by the SFWA in describing what they thought Disney was doing.
I've processed many contracts which use the term in exactly that sense, and evidently SFWA use it that way too.
Thus, a sales-bonus for a WFH product isn't a royalty. Moreover, the original WFH payments would not be royalties either.
Unless you can show a court case where the contract said a work-for-hire author is entitled to royalties and the court threw out that contract provision as "illegal" or "not royalties" then I'm skeptical what you wrote here is correct.
Yes, we agree on that point. However my point is that a WFH contract that entitles the author to royalties is extremely rare. ADF apparently has copies of these contracts (per the SFWA president) and they haven't yet shown any portion of the contract actually provides for royalties, which would be extremely rare for a WFH contract.
Unless you can show a court case where the contract said a work-for-hire author is entitled to royalties and the court threw out that contract provision as "illegal" or "not royalties" then I'm skeptical what you wrote here is correct.
There are plenty of court cases analyzing what a "royalty" is for both copyright and tax purposes, but the remedy isn't to throw out the contract provision if something isn't a "royalty." It simply informs how the contract between the two parties is enforced or the non-contract effects of the transaction. (For example, on the tax side, a royalty is generally subject to different tax rules.) In the IP realm, if a payment isn't a royalty, than that would simply mean that it's not paid for the right to use IP (but was paid for some other reason).
I'm not saying that ADF isn't entitled to get paid something by someone. I'm simply saying that the facts as provided, given the nature of WFH agreements in Hollywood, suggests very strongly that he isn't entitled to royalties.
This comment (https://www.sfwa.org/2020/11/18/disney-must-pay/#comment-214...) from the SFWA president says that Alan’s contract says that it is binding on “the successors and assigns” which is Disney. I presume that "the successors and assigns" is a direct quote from his copy of the contract.
The SFWA president has made some earlier misstatements of the law, and it appears she doesn't have a clear grasp of the timeline, so I'm not putting much weight into anything she says. She's correct that the WFH agreement is binding on Disney, but Disney isn't disputing that (though the SFWA claims otherwise). The issue, from Disney's standpoint, is that clearly they don't think there is anything in the contract requiring them to pay.
It is very possible Disney reviewed all of its payments and ended the ones for which it could not find a contractual basis for continuing payments, such as for example, paying royalties on a WFH contract where they owned the rights to the work. But as neither side has actually coughed up a WFH agreement entitling the author to royalties, it's just speculation.
Apparently, ADF actually has a copy of his contract, per the SFWA president (but again, she's made incorrect statements about the parties before). If that's the case, ADF could resolve this very quickly by showing the part of the WFH contract where it says he will be getting paid royalties.
Would be nice if they just paid him what he's owed.
Leaning towards cancelling my Disney + , aside from the Simpsons( first 10 seasons) , Original SW trilogy and The Last Jedi there's not much good content. Might stay until Soul comes out next month.
Only need to watch those 4 Star Wars movies once a year
I'd never condone piracy, but hypothetically that's what I'd do.
And if someone were hypothetically worried about getting copyright infringement notices on their home IP, a put.io subscription could be valuable.
N N T P
Can you (or anybody) suggest a decent service provider?