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Selling Rights

‘It is an indispensable one-stop reference work for all those working in rights.’ The Bookseller

‘Every company – whether a trade or academic publishing house, a literary agency or a company at the electronic interface – should have a copy.’ Publishing News ‘As a one-stop reference for rights personnel, agents, lawyers, senior managers and even authors, Selling Rights is essential reading.’ Simon Bell, HarperCollins Publishers

Selling Rights is a practical and accessible guide to all aspects of selling rights and co-publications throughout the world. The fifth edition of this authoritative hand-book has been updated to include the changes which have taken place in tech-nology, sales and distribution, and legislation in the United Kingdom and overseas. Selling Rights covers the full range of potential rights, from English-language terri-torial rights, book club and paperback sales through to serial rights, translation rights, dramatization and documentary rights, and electronic publishing and multimedia.

Lynette Owen provides full details of the historical and legal background to rights, advises on aspects of negotiating licence contracts and explains how to get the best possible deal.

This fully revised and updated edition of Selling Rights includes:

• changes in legislation in the United Kingdom and the European Union fol-lowing implementation of the EU Directive on Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society

• information on the copyright situation in the United States, Australia and New Zealand

• advice on rights management systems and on the use of websites and e-mail promotion for maximizing rights sales

• low-priced licensed editions in developing markets and trading with non-copyright countries

• e-books, digital content aggregators, downloadable audiobooks, electronic rights for new platforms and digitization initiatives by new players such as Google and Amazon.

Lynette Owen is Copyright Director of Pearson Education Ltd. She has written extensively on the importance of copyright and licensing and is the general editor of Publishing Agreements. 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 52221 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

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Selling Rights

Fifth edition

Lynette Owen

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First published 1991 by Blueprint Second edition published 1994 by Blueprint Third edition published 1997 by Routledge Fourth edition published 2001 by Routledge This edition published 2006

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge

270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 1991, 1994, 1997, 2001, 2006 Lynette Owen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Owen, Lynette, 1947–

Selling rights/Lynette Owen. – 5th ed. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Authors and Publishers – Great Britain. 2. Contracts – Great Britain. 3. Copyright licences – Great Britain. I. Title. KD1340.096 2006 346.4104′82–dc22 2006017485 ISBN10: 0–415–36280–6 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–38652–7 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–01298–4 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–36280–1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–38652–4 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–01298–7 (ebk)

This edition published in the Taylor & F “To purchase your own copy of this or an

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Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgements and further reading x

Useful names and addresses xii

1 Rights: the historical and legal background 1

2 The publishing contract: who should control the rights? 29

3 An expanding range of possibilities 40

4 The rationale behind rights sales 47

5 Selling rights: who and how? 53

6 Tackling the task: essentials 57

7 Rights selling: a range of methods 71

8 Book fairs and sales trips: preparation, survival and

follow-up 78

9 English-language territorial rights 100

10 Book club rights 125

11 Paperback rights 139

12 Low-price reprint rights 147

13 Other reprint rights 160

14 Serial rights and one-shot periodical rights 168

15 Digest and condensation rights 178

16 Translation rights 181 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 52221 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

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17 Anthology and quotation rights 219

18 Rights for the visually impaired 229

19 Single-voice readings 234

20 Audio recording and video recording rights 237

21 Dramatization and documentary rights: stage, radio,

television and film rights 244

22 Merchandising rights 265

23 Reprographic and electronic reproduction rights 274 24 Electronic publishing and multimedia rights 316 25 Supply of duplicate production material to licensees 344

Index 351

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Preface

The interval since publication of the fourth edition of Selling Rights has exceeded the usual three-year cycle; in the Preface to that edition I remarked on major developments in the area of electronic media which had impacted on licensing, as well as flagging the fact that more attention was being devoted to the area of copyright and its relevance in the digital world. If anything, the last five years have seen even more dramatic developments in both areas, and in particular anti-copyright lobbies and movements in favour of open access to content, as well as focus from governments on the balance between the inter-ests of the copyright industries and of users.

I have maintained the rationale of the previous editions: that of a practical handbook for those working in the book industry, in particular rights staff working in publishing houses and literary agents, but also recognizing some readership from members of the legal profession with a particular interest in publishing rights. Again, the coverage assumes a main readership in the United Kingdom, but, as always, feedback from American and other overseas colleagues has been much appreciated.

I have also maintained the overall structure of previous editions, with initial chapters on the copyright background to trading in rights, the control of rights in literary works and practical aspects of the promotion and sale of rights, followed by individual chapters on different categories of rights sales. Some areas have undergone significant changes in recent years – in particular book club rights, where the stock supplied is now generally identical to that of the trade edition and where sales may be handled outside the rights department. Audiobooks have also seen changes, with new services for the downloading of audio content. In the area of reprography and electronic licensing, I have aimed to maintain the distinction between the use of, or access to, extracts from pub-lished works versus the development of the entire work in electronic form, either verbatim or enhanced in multimedia form. Inevitably there are new methods of exploitation in this area where categorization is difficult, in particular the recent digitization initiatives being undertaken by Google and Amazon.

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As in all previous editions, I have not attempted to provide model contracts, a range of which continue to be available in the collaborative work Clark’s

Publishing Agreements: A Book of Precedents (sixth edition, 2002, Tottel

Publish-ing; seventh edition due in 2007) and in other more specialized volumes of precedents for electronic licensing. I have also continued to provide only general guidelines on financial terms for licensing: I am conscious of anti-trust concerns not only in the United States but also within the European Union. In the case of permissions (Anthology and quotation rights, Chapter 17), the Office of Fair Trading no longer permits registration of guidelines originally agreed and regularly updated between the UK Publishers Association and the Society of Authors. In the area of electronic licensing, the last five years have seen some existing players retrench or withdraw, platforms collapse and new players and platforms emerge almost daily, which makes ‘norms’ in relation to payment models and financial terms far harder to establish. It remains the case that intellectual property rights are worth whatever a given licensee is prepared to pay for them at the time and much depends on the author, the property, the topicality of the content and the demands and indeed whims of the market. It is also true to say that there remain considerable differences in attitude and practice between educational, academic and professional publishers on the one hand, and trade publishers on the other.

On the copyright front, the last five years have seen both positive and nega-tive developments. Increasing pressure on countries to become members of the World Trade Organization and to comply with the intellectual property oblig-ations inherent in membership of that organization has resulted in many of the ‘absentee’ nations of the world signing up (at least in the legal sense) to membership of one or more of the three major international copyright conven-tions; only a handful of countries now remain out in the cold. It would however be foolish to assume that full-scale piracy or casual infringement of copyright are features of the past; the internet and other technological developments have made it even easier to reproduce and disseminate the work of others without permission or payment. Perhaps of equal concern have been the burgeoning movements which either oppose copyright altogether as a barrier to free access to the user, or which seek open access of one kind or another which inevitably impinges on the activities of publishers who have made major investments in their goal to provide added value when bringing copyright works to market. Add to this renewed lobbying from some developing countries for access to educational and academic content to be free of copyright restrictions, and it is clear that the publishing industry cannot rest on its laurels but must itself lobby to promote the value of the services it provides.

As always, developments on the political and economic front can affect the sale of rights both positively and negatively. The last five years have seen an explosion of licensing activity to the People’s Republic of China – a boom which is unlikely to be sustainable at the present rate and which may indeed become subject to regulation by the Chinese government. There has been viii Preface

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recovery in some other markets in Asia after a ten-year period of recession. Mergers and acquisitions in the publishing industries in France, Germany and most recently the United Kingdom inevitably impact upon licensing possibil-ities. British and American publishers continue to work together on a number of fronts, but risk possible conflict over territorial requirements for contracts and market infringements. One thing is sure – the area of rights is never static. As for previous editions, I have been fortunate to be able to call on a number of colleagues for advice on specific areas and I would like to express my warm thanks to Des Brennan and colleagues from the CLA, Julian Friedmann of Blake Friedmann, Brian Green of BIC and Diane Spivey of Time Warner Books. Lastly, my thanks to my father – an author and editor of a very different kind – who, after many years of gentle goading, attentively read the book and to whom I am indebted for help in avoiding infelicities of style.

Lynette Owen London, March 2006 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 52221 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

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Acknowledgements and

further reading

The following publications have provided invaluable background information when preparing the present volume, and may be of interest as further reading and as a source of more detail on specific aspects of copyright, licensing, contracts and the digital environment:

A4 Publications, A Beginner’s Guide to Licensing, fourth edition (A4 Publications Ltd, 2002).

Association of American Publishers Rights and Permission Advisory Committee,

The New and Updated Copyright Primer: A Survival Guide to the Copyright and Permissions Process (Association of American Publishers, 2000).

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Faber, 1995).

Sven Birkerts, Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse (Graywolf Press, 1997). Carole Blake, From Pitch to Publication: Everything You Need to Know to Get Your

Novel Published (Macmillan, 1999).

Asa Briggs (ed.), Essays in the History of Publishing (Longman, 1974).

J.M. Cavendish and Kate Pool, A Handbook of Copyright in British Publishing Practice, third edition (Cassell, 1993).

Charles Clark, ‘The Answer to the Machine is in the Machine’ and Other Collected

Writings, edited by Jon Bing and Thomas Dreier (Norwegian Research Center

for Computers and Law, 2005).

Denis de Freitas, The Copyright System: Practice and Problems in Developing Countries (Commonwealth Secretariat, 1983).

Denis de Freitas, The Law of Copyright and Rights in Performances, second edition (British Copyright Council, 1998).

Esther Dyson, Release 2.0 (Broadway Books/Viking Penguin, 1997). Tony Feldman, Multimedia (Blueprint/Routledge, 1994).

Michael F. Flint, A User’s Guide to Copyright, sixth edition (Tottel, 2006). Julian Friedmann, How to Make Money Scriptwriting, second edition (Intellect Books,

2000).

Paul Goldstein, Copyright’s Highway: The Law and Lore of Copyright from Gutenberg

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Michael Henry, Publishing and Multimedia Law (Butterworths, 1994). Hugh Jones, Publishing Law, third edition (Routledge, 2006).

Lawrence Lessig, Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 2000). Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

(Vintage, 2002).

Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock

Down Culture and Creativity (Penguin, 2004).

Richard McCracken and Madeleine Gilbert, Buying and Clearing Rights: Print,

Broadcast and Multimedia (Routledge, 1995).

Robert W. Merkin and Jack Black, Copyright and Designs Law (Sweet & Maxwell, 1993 and looseleaf updates).

Nicolas Negroponte, Being Digital (Hodder Headline, 1995).

Lynette Owen (general editor), Clark’s Publishing Agreements: A Book of Precedents, sixth edition (Tottel Publishing, 2002).

John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and

Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Polity Press, 2005).

Alan Williams, Duncan Calow and Nicholas Higham, Digital Media: Contracts,

Rights and Licensing, second edition (Sweet & Maxwell, 1998).

Ingrid Winternitz, Electronic Publishing Agreements (Oxford University Press, 2000).

The ABC of Copyright (UNESCO, 1981).

Continuum’s Directory of Publishing (Continuum, published annually). International Literary Marketplace (Information Today, published annually). Literary Marketplace (Information Today, published annually).

Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook (A. & C. Black, published annually).

The Writer’s Handbook, edited by Barry Turner (Macmillan, published annually).

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Useful names and

addresses

Authors Licensing and Collecting Society

14–18 Holborn London EC1N 2LE Tel. 0207 395 0600; Fax 0207 395 0660 www.alcs.co.uk

Book Industry Communication 39–41 North Road

London N7 9DP Tel. 0207 607 0021; Fax 0207 607 0415 www.bic.org.uk

Bradbury Phillips International Ltd 29 Aubert Park

London N5 1TP Tel. 0208 202 9192; [email protected] British Copyright Council Copyright House

29–33 Berners Street London W1P 4AA Tel. 01986 788 122; Fax 01986 788 847

Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd 6–10 Kirby Street

London EC1N 8TS Tel. 0207 400 3100; Fax 0207 400 3101 www.cla.co.uk

Education for Change 17A Christopher Street London EC2A 2BS Tel. 0207 247 3370; Fax 0207 247 3371 www.efc.co.uk I E Partners Barley Mow Centre 10 Barley Mow Passage London W4 4P4 Tel. 0208 996 1766; Fax 0208 994 1533 www.iepartners.co.uk Inland Revenue Centre for

Non-Residents Fitzroy House P.O. Box 46 Nottingham NG2 1BD Tel. 0115 974 2000; Fax 0115 974 1919 International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM)

Prins Willem Alexanderhof 5 2595 BE The Hague

Netherlands

Tel. 31 70314 09303; Fax 31 70314 0940

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UK address: Suites 301–2

344–354 Gray’s Inn Road London WC1X 8BP Tel. 0207 164 2022; Fax 0207 164 2024 www.stm-assoc.org

International DOI Foundation P.O. Box 233

Kidlington OX5 1XU Tel. 01865 843798; Fax 01865 843446 www.doi.org

International Publishers Association 3 avenue de Miremont CH1206 Geneva Switzerland Tel. 22 3463018; Fax 22 3475717 www.ipa.uie.org Klopotek UK Ltd 90 Long Acre London WC2E 9RZ Tel. 0207 716 5500; Fax 0207 716 5595 www.klopotek.co.uk Public Lending Right PLR Office

Richard House Sorbonne Close

Stockton on Tees TS17 6DA Tel. 01642 604699; Fax 01642 615641 www.plr.uk.com Publishers Association 29B Montague Street London WC1B 5BW Tel. 0207 691 9191; Fax 0207 691 9199 www.publishers.org.uk

Publishers Licensing Society Ltd 37–41 Gower Street

London WC1E 6HH Tel. 0207 299 7730; Fax 0207 299 7780 www.pls.org.uk

The Publishing Training Centre at Book House 45 East Hill London SW18 2QZ Tel. 0208 874 2718; Fax 0208 870 8985 www.train4publishing.co.uk Society of Authors 84 Drayton Gardens London SW10 9SB Tel. 0207 373 6642; Fax 0207 373 5768 www.societyofauthors.org That’s Rights! JDC Software 29 Harley Street London W1G 9QR Tel. 0207 681 2014; Fax 0207 681 2031 www.thatsrights.com 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 52221 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

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Rights: the historical

and legal background

To trade in intellectual property, it is essential that the work in question is protected by copyright and that a framework of mutual copyright protection is in place if the trading is to take place between different countries, perhaps with differing copyright regimes. This introductory chapter seeks to put in context the growth of the publishing industry in the United Kingdom and the development of copyright legislation in that country and in the countries which represent its major trading partners. It will also examine the growing number of movements lobbying against copyright, either in its entirety or at least in its present form.

THE RISE OF THE UK PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

In the United Kingdom, the publishing industry can be held to have been born when the University of Cambridge received a Royal Charter to print in 1534, followed by the University of Oxford in 1586. The first commercial publishing house was the family firm of Longman, founded in 1724, but the real burgeoning of the commercial houses, many of which still exist today under the umbrella of larger organizations, took place in the nineteenth century. This was the result of a variety of factors: an increase in population, the concentration of population in cities, and the development of literacy. The latter part of the twentieth century saw a movement towards the consolidation of many formerly independent small- and medium-sized publishing companies into larger groups, some of them part of multinational media corporations. The publishing cycle continues with the founding of more small independent publishing houses.

COPYRIGHT

The publishing industry – and by association the trade in publishing rights – is inextricably linked to the existence and recognition of copyright. Without copyright, it is doubtful whether the majority of authors would have the

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incentive to be creative. While some authors may still be prepared to publish without reward, perhaps in order to make known the findings of their academic research and as a means of furthering their professional careers, others have chosen to become authors in an attempt to earn their living directly from their writing. Without copyright and the laws and systems that underpin it, there would be total freedom for literary works to be reproduced, translated, adapted and exploited in a variety of ways without any obligation to recognize the interests of the creator. For authors, this would affect both their moral rights – the right to be recognized as the creator of the work and the right to prevent derogatory changes to the work (rights that are separate from although linked to copyright) – and their economic rights, the right to receive a fair reward for the use of their work by others. As Dr Johnson remarked, ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’.

The 1990s were a period of extraordinary activity on the copyright front, largely as a result of the development of the digital environment and rapid growth of the internet as a global force, and this has continued on into the twenty-first century. At the time of writing, it is estimated that there are over a billion internet users worldwide. There were national and international forums and conferences within the copyright industries, dialogue with players from other industries entering the field, changes and proposed changes to national and international legislation and treaties, and a number of high-profile court actions, all seeking to ensure the protection of content as radical changes were taking place in methods of delivery of that content. There remains a need to maintain the delicate balance between copyright protection and user access, with the requirements of the academic community a particular area of concern to the book and journal industry. The concept of copyright has never had a higher profile, both within the industry and at national and international governmental levels; it is under both scrutiny and attack as to its relevance in the digital world.

WHAT IS COPYRIGHT?

Copyright is a form of intellectual property; other categories of intellectual property now include patent, trademark and design rights. Perhaps not surpris-ingly (although ironically in the light of the later copyright history of that country) copyright is first identified as a concept in China during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) when the Imperial Court issued an order banning the making of unauthorized printing blocks for reproduction purposes. A scroll printed during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279) carries a notice spec-ifying that reproduction is forbidden and that the printer had registered the work with the appropriate authorities.

In the Anglo-Saxon common law tradition, copyright is classified as a property right, which can be sold, assigned, licensed, given away or bequeathed. The countries of continental Europe follow a different tradition, that of 2 Rights: the historical and legal background

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droit d’auteur (the author’s right), which is perceived as human right; it

places far more emphasis on the rights of the creator, and limits the rights which can be transferred to others such as employers or authorized users such as publishers.

It is not the purpose of this book to provide comprehensive coverage of the increasingly complex area of intellectual property rights (more detailed sources of information are listed at the front of this book in Acknowledgements and

Further Reading). However, it is vital that those directly involved in the

licensing of rights should have a basic understanding of the concepts of copy-right; they should also be aware of the different philosophies and terms of protection that prevail from country to country, and of the significant changes to legislation that are necessary to ensure continuing protection during a period of continuing and radical technological changes.

Copyright provides protection for what are often termed ‘works of the mind’; it covers not only original literary works, but many other creative works including music, recordings, films, art, sculpture and photography, as well as works in digital form such as computer programs and databases. The exact significance of the term ‘literary work’ may vary slightly from country to country, depending on the exact definition under domestic copyright law; in the United Kingdom it includes any original work in written form, including computer programs, compilations and certain types of database.

Copyright has both positive and negative aspects in terms of the power of control it conveys. Ownership of copyright in a work enables the owner to authorize other parties to make use of the work in agreed forms, often through licensing arrangements. Such use is subject to appropriate acknowledgement to the owner, and is usually on the basis of suitable financial recompense to the owner. Alternatively, copyright owners may choose not to authorize exploitation of the work if they feel that such use would be inappropriate or detrimental to the nature or commercial value of the work. Infringement of copyright through unauthorized use is almost always an infringement of statutory rights and may also be a punishable offence, which may be dealt with under civil or criminal law according to the nature of the infringement and local legislation in the country concerned. In most cases, the first owner of copyright in a literary work is the author. An important exception to this, specified in the copyright legislation of countries following the Anglo-Saxon tradition, is when a work is created in the normal course of the author’s employment duties. Hence, full-time staff writers employed on composite works, such as encyclopaedias and dictionaries, do not normally retain copyright in what they produce; scientists employed by a pharmaceutical company do not usually control copyright in their research findings. In the United States, copy-right in works ‘made for hire’ (i.e. works prepared by employees as part of their normal duties, or where the writer and the commissioning party have reached agreement on this basis) belongs to the commissioning party.

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This is not the case in countries following the droit d’auteur tradition, where ownership of copyright is normally retained by the individual, but with the employer having an exclusive right to exploit the employee’s work, perhaps for a certain number of years.

In countries following the Anglo-Saxon tradition of copyright, the author, as the usual first owner of copyright in a work, will usually decide whether to retain ownership or whether to assign copyright at the point when a contract is negotiated with a publisher. It is common practice in trade publishing (books designed for readership by the general public) that authors retain ownership of copyright and grant to their publishers exclusive licences to publish their books in designated forms and media for a designated period of time in a designated geographical market. In addition to these prime publishing rights, other subsidiary rights may be granted to the publisher for exploitation within the agreed markets.

In educational and academic publishing, it is more common for the author to assign ownership of the copyright to the publishing house, whilst con-tinuing to receive payment for sales and other exploitation of the work; provi-sion is usually made for the author to recover the copyright if the book is allowed to go completely out of print and if no valid sublicences are extant. The main reasons for copyright to be assigned in such cases will be covered in Chapter 2. The duration of copyright protection varies from country to country and is covered by the domestic copyright legislation of the country concerned. In the case of the United Kingdom, literary works were long protected for the life-time of the author and for a further period of fifty years from the end of the year in which the author died. As from 1 January 1996, this period was amended to seventy years post mortem auctoris, following UK implementation of a European Union directive aimed at harmonizing the period of protection in the member states of the European Economic Area (see Copyright legislation in

the United Kingdom later in this chapter). The United States has now extended

its period of protection for works created on or after 1 January 1978 to seventy years post mortem auctoris (see Copyright legislation in the United States later in this chapter). However, at the time of writing, many countries (including a number of highly developed countries such as Japan) still have shorter terms of protection, so one can never assume that there is a totally level playing field.

As the publishing industry has developed, a whole sector of publishing activity has grown up whose sole aim is to explore all the potential copyright possibilities of a book, and to make licensing arrangements for those rights to be exploited as widely as possible so that the book can reach a wider audience – in the original language wherever that language can be read, translated into other languages, or made available in other forms through media other than the printed page. It is this aspect of the publishing business that this book aims to cover.

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THE INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT CONVENTIONS

In 1886 the Berne Convention was established as a multilateral copyright treaty. Its aim was to establish minimum standards of copyright protection that would be complied with in the domestic copyright legislation of its member states. Its main features are that no formal procedures (such as registration) are required in order to secure copyright in a work, and that for the majority of creative works the minimum term of copyright protection is the lifetime of the author plus fifty years. At that time, the provisions of domestic copyright legis-lation in the United States, which had a shorter term of protection and included a requirement for a formal copyright registration procedure, made that country ineligible to join Berne.

In 1952, the Universal Copyright Convention was established; its main features are a provision to allow for formal procedures such as registration, a minimum copyright protection period of the lifetime of the author plus twenty-five years, and a provision that every work will be regarded as complying with registration formalities if it carries the UCC copyright symbol ©, the name of the copyright holder and the year of first publication.

A further significant development of relevance to rights dealing was the introduction in 1971 of the Paris Revisions to the texts of both the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention. These revisions were introduced at the request of the developing countries, which felt that they did not have sufficient access on reasonable terms to rights in educational and academic works published in the more affluent countries. The provisions of Paris set out procedures whereby publishers in developing countries which have ratified the Paris text of the appropriate convention may apply for compulsory translation or reprint licences in essential books of this kind if they are unable to make contact with the copyright owner, or if they are refused a licence without adequate reason. Not all countries have ratified the Paris text of the two conventions; the United Kingdom ratified the Paris text of the Universal Copyright Convention on 10 July 1974, and that of Berne as recently as 2 January 1990. It is an undoubted fact that more voluntary licences have been granted to publishers in the developing countries since the introduction of these provisions, if only to forestall the granting of compulsory licences by local authorities. This aspect of licensing will be covered in more detail in Chapters 12 and 16.

By March 2006, the Berne Convention had 160 member states and the Universal Copyright Convention 98; of these, 95 states belong to both conventions.

The United States acceded to the Universal Copyright Convention on its inception in 1952, and thus for the first time gave formal copyright recogni-tion to the copyright works of other member states, although the United Kingdom did not accede until 1957. The United States revised its copyright procedures in 1988 to enable it to comply with the requirements of the Berne Convention; its membership of Berne took effect from 1 March 1989.

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It is therefore only comparatively recently that mutual copyright recogni-tion has been in force between the two largest producers of English-language books in the world. Many British authors, including Charles Dickens, found that their works were being published in this major English-speaking overseas market without permission or payment, since their books were considered to be in the public domain. The transatlantic traffic in unauthorized editions was not entirely one-way: American authors such as Mark Twain were published without permission in Britain. On the other hand, there is much evidence of reputable American publishers negotiating for rights in British books and making payment for licences when there was technically no legal obligation for them to do so. Much of Virginia Woolf ’s business correspondence is concerned with arrangements for American editions not only of her own books, but for those of other authors published by the Hogarth Press, which she and her husband had founded.

The entry of other countries with major publishing industries into the inter-national copyright fold was even more recent; the then Soviet Union joined the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) only on 27 May 1973, before which it had both translated and reprinted foreign works on a large scale. The People’s Republic of China acceded to the Berne Convention on 15 October 1992, and to the Universal Copyright Convention on 30 October 1992, after many years of utilizing foreign works on a vast scale, usually without permission or payment; Vietnam, which has also made liberal use of foreign works, joined the Berne Convention as recently as October 2004. Even now, membership of an international copyright convention does not necessarily operate retrospectively. When Russia acceded to the Berne Convention on 13 March 1995, it was with the proviso that foreign works first published before 27 May 1973 (the date of the Soviet Union’s accession to the UCC) would remain in the public domain in Russia. Countries may also seek to impose reservations when joining; when Saudi Arabia joined the Berne Convention in February 2004, it did so with a general reservation on copyright protection for works ‘contrary to Islamic law’, a condition generally considered incompatible with Berne.

There had long been a need to update the Berne Convention, the stronger of the two conventions, in order to take into account the copyright implica-tions of the digital environment. Following a number of meetings of the Com-mittees of Experts on the Berne Protocol and New Instrument, a Diplomatic Conference of delegates from 160 countries was held on 2–20 December 1996 in Geneva under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) with a brief to discuss ‘certain copyright and neighbouring rights questions’ aimed at strengthening the provisions of Berne, and in particular to take into account the impact of the new technologies. The intellectual property industries and creative organizations were represented at the confer-ence, as were the hardware manufacturers, and ‘passive carriers’ such as the telecommunication industries and internet service providers.

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Topics included whether acts such as digitization, temporary storage and ephemeral display should be included as part of the reproduction right; also discussed was the possibility of introducing a telecommunication right, and the question of whether there can be any ‘fair use’ exceptions to the use of copy-right material in the electronic environment when the distinction between communication to public and private users is no longer realistic in the context of the internet. Other topics included a proposal for a sui generis right for data-bases (stemming from the 1998 EU Database Directive) and the need to prohibit encryption-breaking devices designed to circumvent electronic coding devices employed by copyright owners to protect their property.

On 20 December 1996 the Conference adopted two new treaties: the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT). The WIPO Copyright Treaty contains a number of key points. Rights holders have a new exclusive right of communication to the public, which includes communication by digital means. There is still a need to further define the word ‘public’, since electronic access via media such as the internet is normally undertaken by individuals. Regrettably, the Treaty does not include revised wording on the right of reproduction, but the conference endorsed a state-ment from the United States that Article 9 of the Berne Convention on the right of reproduction should be held to apply in the digital environment. A right of distribution is included in the Treaty, although this is limited to works in tangible form and allows contracting states to deal individually with the question of international exhaustion (for more detail, see Territorial rights

and parallel importation in Chapter 9). The Treaty also permits each contracting

state to provide for limitations and exceptions to the rights of reproduction, provided that these meet the requirements of the so-called ‘three-step test’ derived from Article 9 (2) of the Berne Convention: that they are special cases; that they do not conflict with the normal commercial exploitation of the work; and that they do not prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights holder. This area remains the subject of some contention between rights holders and users in the digital environment.

The Treaty requires contracting states to implement civil and criminal penal-ties for the circumvention of electronic protection systems (e.g. encryption systems and unique identifiers for copyright material). The Treaty extends protection for photographic works in contracting states from a minimum period of twenty-five years to fifty years from the date of their creation, and also confirms that computer programs and original databases are considered protected under the category of literary works.

The Treaty came into effect on 6 March 2002, after the thirtieth state (Gabon) had ratified the text. By March 2006, the WCT had fifty-eight signa-tories; the original fifteen EU member states have not yet signed and will only do so after they have all implemented the 2001 EU Directive on the Harmonization of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights into their

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domestic legislation (see National, multinational and international copyright

initiatives later in this chapter).

The WIPO treaties, once their provisions are implemented by member states, bring those countries into line with the requirements of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The WTO was established on 1 January 1995, and has the responsibility for administering new global trade regulations as agreed in the Final Act of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The WTO administers a unified package of agreements to which all member states are committed; the GATT included important side agreements whose membership was limited to a few countries. All 125 members of the GATT automatically became members of the WTO on acceptance of the Uruguay Round, and the WTO currently has 149 members. The People’s Republic of China is now in membership, but Russia is not yet a member.

TRIPS is the most comprehensive multilateral agreement on intellectual property rights to date. It covers copyright and related rights (the rights of performers, producers of sound recordings and broadcasting companies), trade-marks, industrial designs, patents, trade secrets and test data. TRIPS reco-gnizes that problems arise from widely varying standards of protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights; as a minimum standards agreement, it seeks to apply basic GATT principles and standards of the international treaties to intellectual property in all member states by complying with the basic provisions of Berne and the more recent WIPO treaties. It requires member states to provide enforcement measures under both civil and criminal law. The agreement requires each member state to guarantee national treat-ment for the intellectual property of other member states (i.e. a standard of protection equivalent to that which it would accord its own nationals). The WTO Secretariat in Geneva provides facilities for the settlement of disputes. Developed-country members were obliged to comply with the provisions of TRIPS from 1 January 1996; developing countries had until 1 January 2000 to comply, whilst countries classified by the United Nations as ‘least developed’ had until 1 January 2006. Countries classified as having economies in transi-tion had until the year 2000 to apply if they were able to meet three requirements: that they are moving from a command to a free market economy, that they are planning reform of their intellectual property system, and that there are special problems in implementing revised intellectual property laws and regulations.

All countries were required to offer national treatment to the works of other countries, regardless of their date of entry into compliance. During 1999, many countries amended their national legislation in order to comply with TRIPS requirements, but actual compliance is dependent on enforcement measures and implementation of satisfactory penalties for infringement. As far as the book industry is concerned, problems range from systematic mass photo-copying of textbooks and journals, undisclosed overruns by printers, full-scale 8 Rights: the historical and legal background

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piracy and exporting of English-language reprints to other markets, unauth-orized translations (which are harder for copyright owners to detect) and digital piracy, which has been massively facilitated by the all-pervasive influence of the internet.

NATIONAL, MULTINATIONAL AND

INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT INITIATIVES

The last twelve years have seen the establishment of many national, multi-national and intermulti-national forums for the discussion of new issues on intellectual property rights arising from the development of the new technologies. Discussions have included whether copyright in its present form provides an adequate protection for the framework of those rights, whilst many users have questioned whether copyright now represents a barrier to the dissemination of content (see The Anti-copyright movement, open access and other initiatives later in this chapter). A number of major discussion documents have been issued, and new legislation has been introduced at both multinational and inter-national level which has had a major impact on the domestic intellectual property legislation of individual countries.

In the United States, what was then termed ‘the information superhighway’ was given considerable attention during the Clinton administration, with Vice-President Al Gore giving a number of well-publicized speeches on the topic. In 1995, a working group under the chairmanship of Bruce Lehmann, then Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner for Patents, issued a report entitled Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure, which supported the role of copyright in regulating the digital environment and recommended various amendments to US domestic copyright legislation. Many of its recommendations were later incorporated in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA – see Copyright legislation in the United

States later in this chapter).

In July 1995, the European Union issued a Green Paper on Copyright and

Related Rights in the Information Society, which perhaps raised more questions

than it answered; however, it did recognize the substantial investment neces-sary to develop new works and services in the digital environment, and the need for adequate protection of that investment through copyright and related rights. The Green Paper was widely circulated for comment by interested parties, and was followed by proposals intended to harmonize certain aspects of intellectual property legislation within the EU. These included a wide definition of reproduction rights to include acts such as digitization, storage and temporary display; a right of communication; and proposals for legislation to protect anticopying devices.

The result was the EU Directive 2001/29/EC on the Harmonization of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Soci-ety, which came into force on 22 June 2001. This required member states to

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implement its provisions into their domestic copyright legislation, bringing them into line with the requirements of the WIPO treaties. Of particular concern were provisions for limitations on copyright, as the legislation of many conti-nental countries has more liberal provisions for ‘fair dealing’ than the United Kingdom.

The Directive included a reproduction right, a right of digital transmission and a right of communication to the public, and required member states to provide remedies against the circumvention of technical systems of protection and identification of copyright material. It was recognized that at the moment there is a lack of harmony on moral rights provisions between EU countries, and it is not impossible that a further directive on moral rights may follow in due course. On the question of territoriality and parallel importation, the general rule in the EU has been that the first sale of a copyright product in one country with the consent of the rights holder exhausts the rights holder’s right to prevent resale elsewhere within the EU.

The implementation of the EU directive has resulted in substantial changes to UK domestic copyright legislation (see Copyright legislation in the

United Kingdom later in this chapter). At the time of writing, three EU member

states have not yet implemented the Directive: France, Spain and the Czech Republic.

The EU has already issued a number of directives for implementation in member states: Legal Protection of Computer Programs (1991); Rental and Lending Rights (1992); Copyright in Satellite Broadcasting and Cable Retransmissions (1993); Harmonization of the Term of Protection of Copyright (1993); Legal Protection of Databases (1996); E-Commerce (2000) and Anti-Counterfeiting and Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights (2004), the latter designed to crack down on infringements in member states. The EU is conducting a major survey of existing copyright legislation (copyright acquis) within the region during the course of 2006; Bernt Hugenholtz of the University of Amsterdam (co-author of the Dutch Creative Commons licences; see

Creative Commons later in this chapter) has been chosen to conduct the survey.

COPYRIGHT RECOGNITION BETWEEN

COUNTRIES

There is no such thing as an international copyright law. It is important to remember that even if two countries both belong to the same international copyright convention, the level of copyright protection in those two countries will not necessarily be equal. Membership merely ensures that certain minimum standards are set, but the provisions of domestic copyright legislation are para-mount, and local enforcement may be inadequate to say the least. A classic case of discrepancy in protection between countries remains the works of George Orwell, under present UK copyright law still firmly in copyright in the UK until the end of the year 2020, seventy years after his death in 1950. 10 Rights: the historical and legal background

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In 1975, Orwell’s work passed into the public domain in the then Soviet Union, since Soviet domestic copyright legislation then offered protection for twenty-five years post mortem auctoris, the minimum requirement for a country belonging to the Universal Copyright Convention. Works such as 1984 and

Animal Farm, long banned in the Soviet Union for political reasons, were

published as soon as censorship was relaxed in the late 1980s without any payment required. Russia has now extended its term of protection to fifty years

post mortem auctoris, but at the moment Orwell’s works remain in the public

domain there, since they were first published before 27 May 1973.

While most countries in the world now belong to the Berne Convention, the Universal Copyright Convention or both, and many have also now ratified the newer WIPO treaties, there are still some absentees: Taiwan (precluded because of its continuing ambiguous political status), Afghanistan, North Korea, Myanmar (Burma), Iran, Iraq and Yemen.

Changing political circumstances in the 1990s also resulted in copyright anomalies created by the break-up of states that previously belonged to one or both conventions (e.g. the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia). Each new state had to introduce its own domestic legislation to a sufficiently high standard to apply for membership of one or more of the conventions; at the time of writing, only one former Soviet republic (Turk-menistan) remains outside membership of any convention; it has a bilateral trade treaty with intellectual property components with the United States, but compliance has been unsatisfactory.

When dealing in rights, it is therefore vital to be aware of the overall copyright picture, since it is only against a background of mutual copyright recognition that publishers can conduct satisfactory international business.

UNAUTHORIZED USAGE AND PIRACY

The original act of publication seemed at first a simple one: to make an arrange-ment with an author to write a book, to take the manuscript and turn it into book form in its language of origin, and to sell that book in that form as widely as possible in the markets where it could be read. Even at a comparatively early stage in publishing history, however, problems arose. Samuel Richardson, master of the epistolary novel, was a victim of piracy as early as the mid-eighteenth century when the second part of Pamela and the whole of Sir Charles

Grandison were reprinted in Ireland (not then subject to English copyright law)

from sheets of the legitimate editions stolen from the printers.

A century later, Charles Dickens was outspoken in his condemnation of the unauthorized reprinting in the United States of his works and those of other leading authors such as Sir Walter Scott. Although that country had intro-duced its first federal copyright law in 1790, there was no reciprocal arrangement for the protection of works from other countries. Dickens became an ardent activist for the mutual recognition of copyright.

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The establishment of the international copyright conventions represented the first step towards providing a framework for copyright recognition between member states, although the conventions have by no means eradicated the misuse of works protected by copyright in their country of origin and else-where. This misuse continues to take place both in countries that officially subscribe to the concept of copyright through membership of one or more of the conventions (in which case it is classified as piracy) and in countries that remain outside the framework of membership (unauthorized usage). The result of both types of abuse has been the loss of billions of dollars to the copyright industries over the years; the exact figures are difficult to quantify, as many examples (particularly in the remoter countries) do not come to the attention of the copyright owners or the appropriate copyright authorities.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) was founded in 1994 as a coalition of trade associations representing major creative industries in the United States, the largest exporter of intellectual property in the world; revenue from those industries is now estimated at 6% of US annual GDP. Apart from the publishing industry, these include the powerful lobbies of the music, film and software industries, where the United States dominates the world market. IIPA estimates losses to the book industry through piracy, photocopying and un-authorized internet usage in sixty-eight key countries in 2005 at $606.5 million. IIPA maintains a detailed register of the copyright status of countries worldwide which is regularly updated; it comments on proposals for national copyright reform, and regularly recommends whether or not countries with inadequate intellectual property legislation or a poor track record in protecting copyright should be maintained on or added to the US Special 301 Watch List (301 refers to the relevant section of the 1988 US Trade Act). Countries that fail to comply with their obligations as members of the international conventions or as signatories to bilateral treaties covering copyright may then be subject to lobbying and international trade pressure (e.g. the occasions on which the United States threatened to remove ‘most favoured nation’ trading status from the People’s Republic of China unless that country improved its record on the protection of intellectual property).

In its February 2006 Special 301 Report on Global Copyright Protection and Enforcement submitted to the US copyright authorities, IIPA named Russia as the main priority country; Paraguay for the 306 monitoring list (306 refers to a section of the 1974 US Trade Act); fifteen countries for the priority watch list (including Egypt, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey and Ukraine, as well as several Latin American countries) and twenty-nine countries for the watch list (including Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malaysia, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and many of the former Soviet Republics). The IIPA stresses the importance of implementing copyright protection in every country to TRIPS standards, and urges the need to implement the WIPO treaties. It warns of the increasing tendency for piracy 12 Rights: the historical and legal background

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to be linked with international crime syndicates, and has flagged a substantial increase in the level of internet piracy.

In the United Kingdom, a cross-industry alliance against piracy and coun-terfeiting was launched in July 1999, bringing together the publishing, music, audio-visual, software and brand manufacturing industries. The aim of the alliance is to lobby Parliament to introduce tougher penalties for intellectual property infringement, and to strengthen the hand of the enforcement agen-cies. On a practical note, the UK Publishers Association has long worked together with the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and with local publishers associations in the countries concerned to target key areas of piracy, collecting data, organizing police raids and taking legal action; apart from the piracy of obvious trade bestsellers such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, piracy of English language teaching materials and academic textbooks is rife in markets such as India, Pakistan, Thailand and China. Infringement takes the form of full-scale commercial piracy, printers running on extra copies of authorized printings, large-scale photocopying of whole books and passing off local works under the names of well-known western authors, or the unau-thorized use of brands such as that of the Harvard Business School.

COPYRIGHT LEGISLATION IN THE UNITED

KINGDOM

There is a lengthy history of copyright protection in the United Kingdom. A form of protection existed under the Licensing Act of 1662, which granted perpetual protection to anyone who registered a work with the Stationers’ Company. In effect, this created a monopoly for the stationers themselves; their justification was that the system prevented the publication of seditious works.

The Licensing Act expired in 1694 and the stationers pressed for further legislation in the hope of reinstating perpetual protection. However, their requirements were not entirely met by the first official Copyright Act in the world, the Statute of Anne in 1709; this established copyright as a personal property right and provided for a term of protection of twenty-one years from the date of publication in the case of works already published and fourteen years in the case of works not yet published, renewable for a further four-teen years if the author remained alive at the end of the first period. For the next sixty-five years, the provisions of the Act were frequently circumvented in practice and via lawsuits, until in 1774 the provisions were enforced by a House of Lords decision in the case of Donaldson v. Becket, which affirmed the common law and statutory rights of the author. This was followed by the Copyright Act of 1775 and the Copyright Act of 1814, which extended protec-tion from fourteen to twenty-eight years and then for the lifetime of the author if he or she was still alive at the end of the twenty-eight-year period.

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This was followed by the Act of 1842 and then by the Act of 1911, which extended protection for the first time to the lifetime of the author plus fifty years, although any assignment of copyright by the author was valid for only the first twenty-five years of that period, after which rights reverted to the estate. The 1956 Copyright Act also provided protection for the lifetime of the author plus fifty years, and this period was carried forward into the current Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which came into force on 1 August 1989. Computer programs were accorded more specific protection under the Copyright (Computer Programs) Regulations 1992.

The move towards harmonization of legislation within the European Union led in 1993 to the issue of Directive 93/98/EEC on the duration of copyright and authors’ rights; this required the then member states of the European Union (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, the Irish Republic, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) coun-tries (Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway) to amend their domestic intellectual property legislation if necessary to extend the duration of protection for copy-right works to seventy years post mortem auctoris for all works still in copycopy-right in a single EU member state on 1 July 1995 (only Germany already had this term of protection for literary works). In the United Kingdom there was consul-tation with the copyright industries and the creative societies, followed by a Statutory Instrument known as the Duration of Copyright and Rights in Related Performances Regulations 1995 (SI No. 3297), which came into force on 1 January 1996.

The extension of the copyright period in the United Kingdom had complex implications. Not only did it extend the term of protection for works still in copyright; it also revived copyright protection in the works of many major authors, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, John Buchan, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and Beatrix Potter. Copyright in the works of authors who died between 1925 and 1945 is likely to have been revived, provided that those works were still protected by copyright in another European Economic Area (EEA) member state as at 1 July 1995 – in effect, Germany (which already had a seventy-year period of protection) and possibly France or Spain. Ownership of the extended or revived copyright in the United Kingdom lies with whoever owned it immediately before 1 January 1996 or before the work entered the public domain, although any exclusive licences in place at those points should continue to be honoured.

Anyone who took steps to publish a public domain work in good faith was considered to be the holder of ‘acquired rights’ and could continue to publish under a ‘licence of right’ if they had already made a commitment to publish the work in question as a result of arrangements made before 1 January 1995 or had manufactured copies before 1 July 1995. Arrangements made before 14 Rights: the historical and legal background

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1 January 1995 might include the commissioning of new editors for the work, placing a print order or (arguably) announcing a new edition. Valid holders of acquired rights were required to give notice of their intention to publish (or to continue to publish) to the owner of the revived rights, and to pay reason-able royalties or other remuneration to that owner. The question of what might constitute reasonable remuneration was open to some argument; since under the new system no such arrangement could be exclusive, users could maintain that any royalties rates paid should be lower than those payable for an exclu-sive licence. Any disputes on the question of revived copyright between owners and users could be taken to the Copyright Tribunal; on a less formal basis, the UK Publishers Association also offered a mediation service, in consultation with the Society of Authors.

A further Statutory Instrument came into force from 1 December 1996: the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations (1996, No. 2967). This contains a number of different provisions. Regulation 9 amends Section 18 of the 1988 UK Act (on the ‘issue of copies of a work to the public’) in somewhat ambiguous language; it appears to reinforce the provision for free movement of goods within the EEA, which would prevent British publishers from taking action against parallel importation of US open market editions into the United Kingdom from an EEA country (see Chapter 9).

Regulation 10 extends rental and lending rights to all literary, musical and dramatic works, films and sound recordings, and to most artistic works. Regulation 11 then (as a derogation from the 1992 Rental and Lending Directive) exempts from the lending right loans by most educational estab-lishments, and also the present UK Public Lending Right scheme, which is entirely an author’s right (see Chapter 3).

Regulation 16 introduces a so-called ‘publication right’. This gives a new publication right to anyone who first publishes a previously unpublished work that has entered the public domain. Publication is defined as ‘any communi-cation to the public’, which could include public exhibition (e.g. of an unpublished manuscript). The new right is in effect equivalent to a copyright, except that it runs for a period of only twenty-five years from the end of the year in which the work is first published. First publication must take place within the EEA, and the publisher must at that time be an EEA national. There are no moral rights in the work.

The 1988 UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act introduced the full concept of moral rights for the first time into UK copyright law; they had long been established in the domestic copyright legislation of many countries in continental Europe (French droit moral).

Moral rights include the right of paternity (the right of the author to be clearly identified as the creator of the work), the right of integrity (the right of the author to object to derogatory treatment, i.e. to prevent any distor-tion of the work that would be damaging to their reputadistor-tion), and the right

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to prevent false attribution of authorship. Under UK law, the key moral rights of paternity and integrity do not apply to computer programs, computer-generated works, employee works, works written for publication and published in a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical, and works written for publication in encyclopaedias, dictionaries and other collective works of reference.

The 1988 Act requires that an author must formally assert their right of paternity in writing; this may be covered by a provision in the head contract between author and publisher, or by a statement printed on the title verso of the book itself. Moral rights are personal to the author and the author’s heirs, and are thus a separate right from the actual copyright in the work; under UK law they generally endure throughout the period of copyright protection of the work, although there is also provision for them to be waived. This is not the case in countries with the droit d’auteur tradition, where moral rights are normally inalienable and perpetual. In the former socialist countries, legisla-tion (even when recently revised) often provides for the state to take over responsibility for the administration of moral rights if there are no remaining heirs of the author to undertake this task.

The moral rights of an author are directly relevant to the licensing of literary works; if the author has not waived his or her rights, there will be an obliga-tion for the licensor to ensure that any licensees respect these rights in terms of proper acknowledgement of the author, and preservation of the integrity of the work. It should, however, be remembered that there is one particular area of licensing where the right of integrity cannot be guaranteed, that of film and television rights (Chapter 21) and, by implication, some merchandising rights if these are handled via the film or television company (Chapter 22). Insistence on the right of integrity could well affect the licensing of electronic and multi-media rights (Chapter 24).

The Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997 were introduced from 1 January 1998, implementing EC Council Directive No. 96/9/EC; this created a new category of copyright work and also a subsidiary database or sui

generis (free standing) right in recognition of the rights of database creators.

Databases had previously been covered by UK copyright law as compilations, but it was necessary to implement new legislation because continental copy-right laws view creativity rather than ‘sweat of the brow’ as a prerequisite for intellectual property protection. The sui generis right is a property right rather than copyright, and also covers computer-created compilations such as tele-phone directories. Under the new Regulations, databases (whether in electronic or other form) are protected from unauthorized extraction and reuse for a period of fifteen years from the end of the year in which the database was completed. If the database is subsequently updated and the revisions are viewed as substan-tial, the fifteen-year period can be extended accordingly. Some fair dealing for educational and academic purposes is permitted.

A further EU directive of relevance to publishers, the E-Commerce Directive COM (1998) 297 was due for implementation by member states by 17 January 16 Rights: the historical and legal background

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2002; in the UK, this has partly been implemented by passing the Electronic Communications Act 2000. This provides rules regarding the liability of inter-mediaries such as service providers, and allows for electronic signatures to be legally recognized and admissible in court; it also provides for the establish-ment of a register of approved providers of cryptography support services.

The most recent major revision to UK copyright legislation has been the implementation of the EU Directive 2001/29/EC on the Harmonization of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society. There was considerable discussion of the proposed changes amongst the copy-right industries; key elements of the Directive include a transmission copy-right and the right for copyright holders to use encryption and identifier systems to protect their works. It was implemented in the United Kingdom not through full-scale redrafting of the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, but via a Statutory Instrument (SI 2003 No. 2498), the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations. These came into force from 31 October 2003; key elements include clarifica-tion that copyright protecclarifica-tion extends to the digital environment by widening the definition of the term ‘broadcast’ in the 1988 Act to be technologically neutral and to include the supply of content online (the ‘making available’ right). The SI also includes legal protection for electronic rights management systems and confirms that there are new criminal penalties for the circum-vention of technological protection measures (TPMs, see Chapter 23). It also clarifies the permitted exceptions to copyright protection and, in particular, places tighter restrictions on fair dealing (see Fair dealing in Chapter 17), making it clear that this is permissible for research and private study, criticism and review and news reporting but that it does not extend to commercial use of any kind.

Now that implementation of the Directive is complete, the United Kingdom is in a position to ratify the WIPO treaties (see The International copyright

conventions earlier in this chapter) but can only do so when the remaining

member states have also implemented the requirements into their domestic legislation.

The 2004 EU Directive on Anti-Counterfeiting and Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights was due for implementation by member states by April 2006; it covers only civil remedies for copyright infringement, but there are separate proposals for criminal sanctions. The United Kingdom imple-mented the Directive on time, but at the time of writing other member states are running behind schedule.

On the purely domestic front, no formal registration procedure is required to establish copyright protection in the United Kingdom; however, publishers have long been obliged by statute to supply one copy of each of their print-on-paper publications to each of the six deposit libraries (the British Library, the university libraries of Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, the National Library of Wales and – an anomaly – the library of Trinity College Dublin). The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 extended the requirement to deposit

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