Publishing Law Question?
Mike
intl. conference, and got published as part of a new book which has
been on sale on amazon.com for around $130 today price.
The publishing source was a British University in the UK.
My question is: Where has the money, from selling that book since
1996, gone? I have never received a penny and not even a free copy!
Is this legal?
Thanks,
Mike
Barry Gold
Way too little information for us to tell.
The first thing to check is the submission form for that "major intl.
conference". As a general rule, those forms allow the conference to
publish your paper in the "proceedings" or other summary of the
conference. Some of those grant additional rights, e.g., a license
(exclusive or non-exclusive) to publish the paper anywhere they want.
If your submission included such a grant of rights, and if the UK
university was acting on behalf of (or with permission of) the
conference, then, yes, it is legal.
Example: In 1975 and 1976 I submitted papers to SHARE and the ACM.
Neither was particularly earthshaking, but both were accepted and I
made presentations about them at the conference. In both cases, the
paper was then published in the proceedings of those conferences, and
I had no say in that and neither I nor my employer received any
royalties.
Had my paper been more significant, it is possible that ACM would have
later published a book of "The Best of ACM" or "signicant papers on X
subject". And again, I doubt if I or my employer would have received
anything.
You are basically entitled to two things when you submit a paper to an
academic conference:
1. Attribution: that your name will remain attached to the work, so
that you will retain the benefit of being known as the author of that
(we hope) excellent paper.
2. Accuracy: the paper as published should be essentially the same as
the one you submitted. That is, you don't win any lawsuits merely
because they made a typo (even if it causes people to laugh when they
read the paper), but you *might* if they intentionally edited the paper
in a way that changed its meaning. Or maybe not -- sometimes the
conference reserves the right to edit papers for publication.
--
Barry Gold, webmaster:
Conchord: http://www.conchord.org
Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, Inc.: http://www.lasfsinc.org
D.F. Manno
Did the terms of submitting papers to the conference state that accepted
papers would be published without compensation to the authors?
Did you otherwise agree to publication or to waive your rights to
compensation for the work?
--
D.F. Manno | dfm...@mail.com
And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would
have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His
existence. (Bertrand Russell)
Doanbee Krehdulous
You ask a question that has partly to do with contract principles,
partly to do with principles of copyright law, and partly and maybe as
a practical matter mostly to do with many considerations of
practicality. However, you prevent rather than enable answers because
you do not say what you and the conference's organizers or the other
relevant persons affiliated with the university in its role as
eventual publisher or as intermediary with the publisher if someone
else is such had agreed shall be their and your respective
entitlements associated with sales of the published book.
One therefore cannot tell only from what you say whether or not the
nature of your affiliation with the university or with the conference
included you having agreed that someone other than you shall own the
copyright in what you wrote and this inability will remain for those
whose know of these matters only what you say above until you have
answered at least these questions:
What did you and the conference's sponsor and, if this is another
party, the publisher agree ought be the answer to your question above?
Have you asked the persons at the university who you estimate based on
your experience in submitting your work to and in otherwise
participating in the conference are most likely to know whether you
are entitled to some sort of remuneration what they believe the answer
to your question above ought be? If not, why not? If so, what have
they said? If not and if you have some reason to want to refrain from
asking them, what, fairly and realistically estimated, would they
probably say?
Assuming you refer to some sort of academic research, it is common
practice in the UK and in the US for publishers of papers presented at
a professional meeting to provide to participants one or more courtesy
copies of the published proceedings even if they had relinquished
their copyrights or had otherwise agreed not to seek compensation.
Indeed, one might think that so doing is required as a matter of basic
courtesy without regard to what is and is not required by law.
However, too, one might wonder why at the very end of 2009 you ask
apparently for the first time about events you indicate occurred about
fifteen years ago while you neglect to post information that answers
any of the above questions.
Mike Jacobs
> In 1994, one of my work won an international recognition in a major
> intl. conference,
What did you have to do to be selected as a speaker at the
conference? Did you have to sign some papers? Are you a member of
the professional association that sponsored the conference, along with
whatever things you signed to join that association? It's highly
possible that at some point along the way, possibly years before you
presented this paper, you had signed away your copyright and/or signed
away your right to receive any royalties from re-publication of your
work in certain limited ways set forth in your agreement, where you
licensed the association or the conference sponsor to use your work
without charge as part of a collection of the papers presented at the
conference.
> and got published as part of a new book which has
> been on sale on amazon.com for around $130 today price.
I'm sure it's soon to be a best seller. 8*)
How many copies do you think have been sold, altogether? How many
different authors' papers are collected in that book? If you (and
the rest of your co-published colleagues) _were_ entitled to any
royalties, how much do you think _each_ of you would get from each
sale of this $130 book? Keep in mind that even a best-selling
fiction author is likely to get _at_most_ a dollar or two from each
hard-cover sale of a popular monograph (not an anthology where they
have to _share_ the per-book royalties with a couple dozen other
authors) you probably would be entitled to approximately a few cents
per copy in royalties if this were a purely commercial publishing
venture. So, if 10,000 copies of your conference proceedings have
been published and sold (which would be a pretty good press run for
that type of book) you may have given up commercial rights worth, say,
a couple hundred bucks or so at most.
Don't rely on my figures, do your own research into the publishing
industry and decide what your actual numbers would be. Maybe I'm all
wet.
> The publishing source was a British University in the UK.
So UK law would probably apply. I have no idea what it requires and
I can't help you with that. You would probably have to hire a British
lawyer, or at least find a major firm in USA that had a UK branch
office.
> My question is: Where has the money, from selling that book since
> 1996, gone?
I thought you said, above, it was a NEW book. IOW, that the
conference papers had NOT been published previously. Are we talking
about a decade and a half of book sales already to date, or is this
book just coming out of the starting gate? I'm confused.
> I have never received a penny and not even a free copy!
I bet the publisher would give you a free copy if you asked. If it's
still in print. If the sponsoring entity still exists. If you're
still a member. Anyway, it doesn't hurt to ask.
> Is this legal?
I have no idea. But I _can_ tell you IMO it would probably cost you
more in legal effort to find out than you would be likely to obtain in
return. DO NOT rely on that statement or take it to the bank, and DO
NOT come back and sue me later if you find out you could have won
millions. If you WANT to hire an intellectual property lawyer and pay
him to let him go at it for you, be my guest. He or she may be able
to uncover some grounds on which you might succeed beyond your wildest
dreams. All I'm saying is, I don't personally see any grounds on
which you are likely to do that.
If your name were John, Paul, George, or Ringo, and somebody had
published an anthology of your collected works without your permission
and did not pay you any royalties, we might have a different case.
But I suspect the proceedings of your conference are nowhere near as
popular as the works of the Beatles, so you would have to adjust your
financial expectations accordingly.
Whatever you decide to do, good luck. Keep up the good research, and
I hope you have many more publications to your credit in the future.
You will probably make more financial hay in the long run just from
having those feathers in your cap to put on your curriculum vitae (if
you are in any kind of academic profession) than you would by trying
to make it in popular culture as a commercially-oriented author, which
is a VERY tough row to hoe. So, it's up to you to decide whether
it's all for the best for you that things happened the way they did.
--
This posting is for discussion purposes, not professional advice.
Anything you post on this Newsgroup is public information.
I am not your lawyer, and you are not my client in any specific legal
matter.
For confidential professional advice, consult your own lawyer in a
private communication.
Mike Jacobs
LAW OFFICE OF W. MICHAEL JACOBS
10440 Little Patuxent Pkwy #300
Columbia, MD 21044
(tel) 410-740-5685 (fax) 410-740-4300
Seth
>intl. conference, and got published as part of a new book which has
>been on sale on amazon.com for around $130 today price.
Did you present it at the conference? Did you sign away any rights in
order to do so?
>The publishing source was a British University in the UK.
>
>My question is: Where has the money, from selling that book since
>1996, gone? I have never received a penny and not even a free copy!
>
>Is this legal?
What have you signed that might be relevant?
Were you working for an employer who would own the rights to your
intellectual property produced through that employment?
Seth
Cy Pres
wrote:
>Is this legal?
It depends. Did you sign anything when you submitted the work for the
conference, and if so, what did it say? Did it give them permission
to republish it and keep it in print? Did you, in fact, submit the
work at all, or did they just grab it from somewhere?
grendal
OP wrote a paper in '94 that was published as part of a book in '96.
Hasn't been compensated and wonders why...
The standard answer is ... it depends.
You submitted a paper to a conference. When you submitted the paper,
what was the terms and conditions of your submission?
Did you assign your rights to the conference?
IANAL, but you may have released the rights of your work to the
conference which then licensed it to the book publisher.
You didn't say what type of book it is. Is it a copy of the collected
works from the symposium or did someone cut and paste your work in to
their book?
I would suggest contacting the publisher and asking them the
questions.
At a minimum, they probably will give you a free copy...
I'd also consider talking to an attorney, but before you walk in to
his/her office, get your facts straight.
Deadrat
116fc0...@u7g2000yqm.googlegroups.com:
The proper answer is that no one can tell given only the information you
have posted. Based on the depressing state of the treatment of
intellectual property, a good guess is probably. And if that guess is
wrong, then another good guess is that it will be expensive to recover
anything.
You'll have to go back and check what you signed when you submitted your
paper to the conference.
Just out of curiosity, in what field does a fifteen year old paper merit
publication in a "new book"?
Mike
> Mike <mas_it_2...@yahoo.com> wrote in news:56d49693-3a96-4c4e-b3c5-
> 116fc021a...@u7g2000yqm.googlegroups.com:
Here is the link to the book on amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3540606629?tag=openlibr-20
My chapter is about 30 page in a 200-page book. The chapter title is:
"Generating Pareto Solutions by Entropy-based Methods"
Seth
Deadrat <a...@b.com> wrote:
>Just out of curiosity, in what field does a fifteen year old paper merit
>publication in a "new book"?
A couple of years ago, I was asked for (and granted) permission for a
couple of 1982 papers I co-authored to be published in a new book. So
Computer Science (specifically, Quantum Cryptography) is such a field.
Seth