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I know we have some writers around here
03-07-2013, 10:11 PM
So I'm gonna signal boost this: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/06/a ... rom-alibi/
Be alert. Trust no one. Keep your agent handy.
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......
EEEYYYUUUUUGGGHHH!!! KILL IT WITH FIRE!
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I'm more inclined to go with the Aliens option. "Nuke it from Orbit. its the only way to be sure"
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children
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I hadn't heard about Alibi, but I'm not surprised. SFWA just mass-emailed its membership with a warning about Hydra, its sibling imprint from Random House, which makes pretty much the same rights grab and which SFWA has declared is not a "qualifying publisher". (Which means that nothing published with Hydra counts as a "real" published work for the purposes of SFWA membership.) I wouldn't be surprised if I received a similar email about Alibi any day now.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Random House responds to the online commentary:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-t ... print.html
(OK, really now, they're not allowed to comment publicly until they talk to you directly? *BLEEP* that noise, guys. This is the Era of the Internet. You don't want the bad noise, don't do things to earn the bad noise. And music industry styled contracts earn the bad noise and then some.)
SFWA responds to that letter:
http://www.sfwa.org/2013/03/sfwa-respon ... ra-letter/
Random House is now "on notice" that their status as an SFWA market is no longer guaranteed.
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Does anyone besides me find it..... Interesting that the two subhouses involved are HYDRA and ALIBI?
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children
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Yeah, someone attached a comment on that to the Scalzi post. Something about how ALIBI sounded like a cheesy name for a comic-book villain's organization, and HYDRA ... "oh, wait...."
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Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.
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And here Scalzi basically explains his issues behind the #1 thing - writers should always be paid first, i.e., advances should always be on the table.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/08/advances-and-me/
Of course, this doesn't mean the rest of the contract is all right, the "net royalties after we take out fees for design work and marketing and such" and "we have a contract until the copyright doesn't exist anymore" are also big sticking points for him, the former because, well, publishers are supposed to have "skin in the game" by taking some risk on the author. The latter is just awful in general, in part because of the length of copyright terms.
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"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
Would a contract that lasts until the copyright ends even be legal? Copyright in the US extends long, long after the author is dead, and I'm pretty sure you can't enforce any other contract on someone's great grandchildren...
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Effectively making it "work for hire," which I think is kind of a shitty rights-management thing anyway...
120 years of "copyright" that benefits nobody but the publisher.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll
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Foxboy Wrote:Effectively making it "work for hire," which I think is kind of a shitty rights-management thing anyway... My career (graphic design) tends to work as basically "work for hire", or at least, I treat it as such, if only because a lot of what I do is at the behest of someone else.. I've looked askance at photographers treating their work as otherwise. (You hire the model and do the shoot yourself? Sure, you have the copyrights. Hired to shoot a wedding? The copyright should be provided to the couple. Especially in today's era where you can scan and print your own copies.)Now, those imprints trying to effectively treat a writer's novel as such? No go there, certainly.
Quote:120 years of "copyright" that benefits nobody but the publisher.
I can certainly agree with that. I personally think copyrights are too long, myself, but the debate over the particulars of THAT probably belong more in the Politics forum than here.
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JFerio Wrote:Hired to shoot a wedding? The copyright should be provided to the couple.
Isn't it usually not, or has that changed? I remember when my store had a photo lab, and we pretty regularly had to tell people that we couldn't make copies of their professionally-taken photos (including wedding ones). Always struck me as a bit of a scam.
-Morgan. And what if the photographer goes out of business, eh?
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Morganni Wrote:JFerio Wrote:Hired to shoot a wedding? The copyright should be provided to the couple. Isn't it usually not, or has that changed? I remember when my store had a photo lab, and we pretty regularly had to tell people that we couldn't make copies of their professionally-taken photos (including wedding ones). Always struck me as a bit of a scam.
-Morgan. And what if the photographer goes out of business, eh? As I recall, there's basically court precedence regarding photography and copyright that effectively says you have to specifically ask - or be provided - direct transfer of the copyright or it remains with the photographer. It's probably related to contract law, and few people think to ask about it when they hire the photographer, which would ensure it's basically the common setting.
When I was involved in a wedding about 12 years ago, there was an effort to actually find a photographer that did the "work for hire" copyright transfer as a matter of course. He explained his position as "I don't have to keep negatives for years, few do reprints, and if I retire or go out of business, my clients don't get screwed in the process."
I do think it's a scam, particularly since few photographers pre-digital maintained their own home color labs so you'd have the additional issue of marking up the processing charges.
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Oh, and now? Random House has more than just a bunch of authors making noise. Forbes is now adding to the cacophony.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/suwcharmana ... -imprints/
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Looks like it's had some effect. http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2013/03/r ... ms-at.html
http://www.atrandom.com/eoriginals/index.php
What I can see here is that they've at least backed off the chargebacks, at least for the epub part (that it's still for the "if we decide to go for hardcopy" is problematic, that should have also been changed, even if there is an option of "no, I'd rather stick with it being pure ebook"), and at least there is now a second model being coupled in there of the more traditional "advance and maybe royalties if it does well" type.
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Quote:Bob Schroeck wrote:
In even better news, the US Supreme Court upholds the "First Sale" doctrine.
And I already expect those corporations that seriously wanted that aspect of First Sale to fall (the way the case was worded had potentially bad possibilities to just ban used sales in a general sense) are already whipping their congress pets to see if that can be changed.Yes, I'm cynical.
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