mhellwig

Comment Threads

• cepetit.myopenid.com commented on CMAP #3: What Authors sell to Publishers
  One clarification based on the particular facts you stated, Jules: If the reversions were six months prior to the petition for bankruptcy, that means that (under US law) the debtor was not just bankrupt, but insolvent — a technical definition that basically means "not just broke, but really, really broke. In an ordinary bankruptcy, the preference period is only ninety days prior to the petition; in insolvency, it's a year; and in the event of a fraudulent preference (as opposed to a fraudulent conveyance, which actually has little to do with a lay understanding of "fraud"), it's as much as...
• Charlie Stross commented on CMAP #3: What Authors sell to Publishers
  Sean: one minor nit -- for very specific reasons this particular US publisher contract included a bundle of territories in the non-exclusive tranche that would normally be reserved to the UK publisher. (I'm not going to discuss the reason it differs from normal practice in public because that would effectively de-anonymize the publishers concerned. Email me if you really want to know.)...
• cepetit.myopenid.com commented on CMAP #3: What Authors sell to Publishers
  You can just call me Jaws. Bruce doesn't work, because there are a few Australians who hang out here... In any event, I want to point out one critical distinction that often gets buried in discussions of territorial rights: The right to sell in Territory X is not congruent with the right to sell in the native/official language of Territory X. Consider, for example, Belgium. (Which, not coincidentally, is the general headquarters of the EU.) It's rather silly to refer to "Belgian rights" as somehow territory-unique, as there's a critical prior question: French, English, or Walloon? And now we can...
• julesjones commented on CMAP #3: What Authors sell to Publishers
  Jaws, I am still not sure exactly what happened in the Triskelion mess, because it was getting filtered through very unhappy authors, many of whom had not had the benefit of hanging out in fora where discussing the legal stuff is light entertainment. It may be that they had simply been warned by people with some knowledge that they needed to check whether there was insolvency involved because the back-dating was a potential consequence. I do know there were quite a few people, including at least one lawyer, suggesting that it would be an excellent idea to get the ipso...
• Charlie Stross commented on CMAP #3: What Authors sell to Publishers
  Before people start talking about CC licenses and so on, I will point out that nobody who has put a CC license on a book has given up copyright, only granted the general public particular licenses free of charge. You know that, and I know that. Funny how not everyone who uses CC licensed material knows that, however; like the charming folks I stumbled over in December who'd taken the free promotional edition of "Accelerando" -- released under the most restrictive Creative Commons license (no derivative works allowed, no commercial reuse permitted) -- and were selling it through the iTunes...