Forum - View topicHey, Answerman! - Know Your Copyrights
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ChibiKangaroo
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On the Copyrights question:
I haven't been following this story, but after reading the referenced blog post I do think it would be a pretty big story if the Japanese publisher(s) are actually pursuing this kind of expansion of the law. Based on what is said in the blog post, i'm not clear that what the publisher(s) are allegedly seeking is actually just "Neighboring Rights" or "Related Rights." So, this is kind of confusing because my knowledge is based on U.S. copyright law and not Japanese copyright law, but there are a lot of similarities. In the U.S., there is just "copyright" which encompasses all rights of authorship, whether its author, songwriter, performer, graphic artist, etc... Internationally, many countries split up author/songwriter type rights and performer type rights. The performer type rights are the "neighboring" or "related rights." Generally, whether you are in the U.S. or international, author type rights are the most powerful, because it usually means that anyone who wants to do anything with the work has to kick some fee back to you, whether you are talking about simply reproducing copies of a manga, or if you are talking about reproducing copies of an anime based on the manga. The original author is also the only person who can authorize new works based on the original work. So the question is, are Japanese publishers trying to become equal authors in the work or are they trying to secure some kind of "performer" right? Now, neither of these rights would allow them to be able to "steal" authorship away from the authors so to speak. In fact, they can already do that via contract. However, most authors these days are probably too smart to give them that via contract, whereas in the past the publishers could probably get away with that easier. Here is what the impact could be though based on each scenario. If the publishers could become "joint authors," they would essentially be empowered to do whatever they want with the work indefinitely. The only restriction would be that they would have to pay some fair fee to the actual author for whatever they did independently. That fee might be 50/50 base, but if the publisher put terms in the contract that shifted the split to, say, 10/90 or 20/80, they could do that. The main difference between that situation and what we have now is that they wouldn't have to contract for the authorship rights since those would be granted by law, all they'd have to contract for is the money split. The end result would be that authors would be in a worse bargaining position than they are now due to the law. If the publishers were just getting a kind of "performance right," then they wouldn't have all of the powers of authorship rights but they would still be able to reproduce their own work indefinitely without the author's permission/agreement/contract. They would still likely have to pay some kind of fee to the author for the money they made from that, but it would give them more control over a popular franchise and, as mentioned in the blog post, it would give them the ability to independently go after people who did anything that infringed the manga/anime. I think this would also put the author in a worse bargaining position than they are now. Brian you are right that the business of publishing is a business, and all parties are seeking whatever edge they can get, but allowing publishers to get authors rights or performers rights would be a big shift in the law since right now the only way publishers can get rights is via contract, and if you are a smart author, the only right you give the publisher is a reproduction right. |
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