 This session looks at three areas of rights having to do with publication and translation. These are not necessarily the three most important areas of rights. We're looking at subsidiary rights, moral rights, and termination of transfer rights. Because even my eyes glaze over when I say termination of transfer rights. I'm referring to that as divorcing your publisher. You will not find it in any legal dictionary. Look under termination of transfer and you'll find things that will make your eyes glaze over. So, your team today, I'm Jeff Ancrow, this is Chris Tamici. Chris, if you'd like to say a few words about yourself, then I'll follow up. Should I stand up to talk? Hi, so my name is Chris Tamici. This is my third out of out conference that I'm attending. I went to Tulane University in New Orleans. And after I finished my undergraduate degree, partly because I didn't know what to do with myself after that, I went to law school at Tulane. And while I was there, I took some classes studying intellectual property and copyright law. Also, it's interesting, Louisiana has a sort of unique, you know, their law is based on the European Civil Code law. They're very proud of that. And so, studying that was interesting and kind of then learning about European law. I can see where there's similarities. Since then, I took the bar exam in Louisiana and then I moved to D.C. and lived there for a while and took the bar exam in D.C. And I was working in the legal industry for maybe about five years and then decided that I wasn't really passionate about what I was doing. I had been doing some technical legal translation and I'm interested in literature in general. And, you know, I was thinking about going back to school. And so now I am in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas, which has a specific, as part of the Creative Writing MFA program, a specialty in literary translation. And I'm in my fourth year of that now. And oh, and I'm so, I'm a translator and I translate Italian, primarily 20th century and contemporary Italian. Right now I'm working on a novel by a contemporary Italian writer whose name is Mauro Kovacic. And I'm kind of just starting to learn the way contracts and intellectual property and copyright law, how it affects translators specifically. And, you know, it's a sort of own little niche thing that I didn't really know much about until the last couple of years. So I'm kind of navigating that now. And that's me. And last year Chris was an altered fellow. That's right. I could have mentioned that. Yeah. But you didn't want the two-year-old horn. You were brought up right. I'm Jeff Ankrum, grew up in Indiana, went to all states, taught high school French for a year. I was not very good at classroom discipline. Eventually ended up in academic publishing. I was at a university press for about 13 years. And became interested in copyright and the contracting process on the ground. And eventually got the notion that it would be interesting to do this sort of work full-time. So in my 40s I went off to law school and have been particularly interested in how law works for translators. I think translators are very underserved population when it comes to legal issues. Because you get some of the most complicated international legal conundrums. Conundrum? Anyway, and in general translators don't have the budget to call in the international specialists. So anyway, that's sort of my path. I came through foreign language publishing law. And my interest in translation is French and especially North African literature. I should point out, you know, it's inevitable that there will be a disclaimer. And we get used to disclaimers and sort of laugh about them because you see the olestra ad and then there are all the descriptions of gastric distress. The pharmaceutical ads where you can't understand things. But when it comes to legal matters, those disclaimers are important. And I want to take just a moment to explain part of why those are important. So we are not giving legal advice today, meaning we're giving information about legal systems and how subsidiary rights, moral rights, divorcing your publisher, how those things work. We're not licensed to practice in Arizona. If you came to us with a specific problem and we said, here's what you need to do. We would be engaging in unlicensed practice of law in Arizona. Why are the laws so fussy that way? Often it's frustrating for me and for people in Alto when they say, I've got this particular problem. I say, I'm not admitted in the right jurisdictions. We can talk some about what the rules are in the big picture, but I can't give you specific advice. It's frustrating. Why is it like that? Law relevant for publishers and for translators varies tremendously from state to state. When I was studying law in Paris, we started the international law course. And I was stunned because it sounded exactly like a U.S. course on civil procedure, how law works. Because the relations between states are like relations between 50 different countries here. So your contract law, it's not the same through the country. Each state has its set of contract law. And for most states, contract law is not an tidy body put together by the legislature. It exists in that tradition of court decisions. So if I need to figure out whether something is lawful or unlawful in Indiana in the interpretation of contract, I'm not going to be going to the state code. I'm going to be digging through court decisions. It's really messy and when you're dealing with multiple states, it's a big mess. So for publishing contracts, New York law, California law have a lot of peculiarities, special provisions for publishing that don't exist in other states. For tort law, if someone is going after a publisher or translator for defamation, there was a dispute between some people in the plain state and a publisher in the Midwest. They brought that suit in the Midwest and the people claiming that they've been defamed in a book won $7 million. If they had brought the same suit in the state where the publisher is, they would have gotten tens of thousands of dollars. The one state has no cap on how much you can be awarded in court. The other state had a very strict cap. And by the way, a third of those tens of thousands of dollars you get would actually go to the state. So if I'm standing here giving you advice on Arizona law, and I don't know those things about Arizona or your state, you're going to be very badly served. So that's part of why we go through these things saying, I can't touch what you're talking about because I don't know what I'm talking about. So we're not doing it for commercial. We are not inviting you to become clients. This is information. Anything we say, it's possible that because of lack of sleep or because we're so enthralled with wonderful Tucson, we misspeak. So do not take anything we say as gospel. We're peddling as fast as we can, but remember there are limits to our reliability. Thank you for indulging, very long disclaimer, but I think it may have been helpful. I'd like to say a few words before I really get going on possible sources for legal help and places to turn for information. In your welcome packet in the bank, you had a copy of the model contract from Penn. It's a useful document. There's no such thing as a one size fits all, but it's a very useful document to have as a reference when you're trying to negotiate a publishing contract or when you're talking with a lawyer about your publishing contract. It's a good resource. I was delighted to see it again. Penn's website, Alta's website, the author's guild website. They're all very useful. If you can afford, you know, for a translator to join, the author's guild, you have to have fairly substantial income from translation every year. That knocks out a lot of the church mice in translation. But if you can join, it's a wonderful source for really top level legal advice. If you cannot afford advice from those other areas, don't give up. Volunteer lawyers for the arts are very good about connecting people with legal help. The author's guild has information that may be useful to your family attorney. If you can find an attorney who really can't take your case, but who's well versed in this area of law, it's possible that that person will be willing to work with your own lawyer as an advisor. Finally, many law schools now have intellectual property clinics where a law student or a group of law students will work on your case under the supervision of a fully qualified attorney. And those clinics, often the students have access to resources and to time to allow them to do more in-depth work than if you've asked your brother-in-law, the lawyer, to step away from real estate work for a while to try to figure out your dispute with a publisher in the Netherlands. So the students can be helpful. So Chris, is there anything else I should disclaim? I think you've covered it. Okay. If you have gastric distress, we probably are responsible for that, and I'm really sorry. So we've broken things up into three sections today. I'll be talking about subsidiary rights. Chris will be talking about moral rights, and then I'll come back with divorcing your publisher. So what are subsidiary rights? Last year, after a couple of sessions, people said, wait, you've been talking about subsidiary rights. What are you talking about? And there really wasn't time to address it. And so I thought, next year let's come back and just talk about subsidiary rights. When you do a publishing contract, you and your publisher are normally contemplating a certain kind of product, forgive me. You may be planning to do a bound book. We're doing a hardbound edition, and with Locke we'll come along and do a paperback. You may be doing an online publication, and the contract says we are going to produce an e-book, and if we're lucky, we'll do a print-on-demand edition. So you can think about the thing that you and the publisher are planning to do as sort of the primary rights. That's the main thing on the table. That's what you and the author are there to produce. The contract will have a lot of what-if provisions. So what-if, after you bring out that hardbound edition, somebody gets in touch with you or the publisher and says, we'd like to use this for readings on the radio, or for readers' theater. I want to option this for use in a film. I want to do a translation. You translated this from the Urdu. I do things into Inuktitut for an Inuit readership. I don't know anybody who can speak both Urdu and Inuktitut. So we'd like to use your translation as a bridge. Your publisher and you are not going to be doing that work. Those are cases where someone comes along, negotiates with your publisher, depending on how you've worked out the rights, negotiates for those rights, and then writes a check. So the subsidiary rights section of your contract says, who gets to make decisions if an offer comes along about an e-book, dramatic adaptation, producing a musical, a film? Who gets to make the decision? You or the publisher? And if money comes in, how's it split up? That's what subsidiary rights are. Whatever is not the main thing on the table. So what happens when you're negotiating? The normal contract will just spell out all these things, book club rights, serialization rights, dramatic adaptation, reprint rights, which can include use of sections and course packs. They just give a listing of those and the breakdown of the percentages and who holds those rights. So you're negotiating, if you're dealing with a publisher who will actually negotiate with you, instead of just saying, we don't negotiate. One question is, is it to your advantage to hold on to those rights? Frankly, I don't know much about trying to get something placed with a movie producer. The publisher might, so you might want to have a discussion and say, what these rights you're looking at, how aggressive, how entrepreneurial are you at trying to place those rights? If you as a translator have connections, have energy, a real entrepreneurial spirit, and you think, I'm sure that I can get this place for a Japanese translation, you can make a really good case for holding on to those rights and just saying, I'm keeping this right, I'm not splitting or anything, I'm going to try to place it. If you just want to move on to your next translation and you insist on holding on to rights, and you're not going to be pushing to exploit those rights, you're really not gaining anything by holding on to them. Unless you think there's a good chance that your book is going to be high-profile and people are going to come to you. So, I'm not advising you on what to do with it, but those are things to think about. If you hold on to the rights, what are the chances that you're actually going to get them exploited, get some use out of them? So, let's say you get a phone call and say, I read your translation of this novel, I loved it, I adapted it for Radio Theatre. Can I have the rights? If I give you so much money, can we do this? As translators, we need to remember that they cannot use the translation with only our permission if that underlying work is also under copyright. So, if I've translated something from an author who still has rights to that French edition, and I say, fine, go ahead and use it, and I don't control the rights, I'm in really hot water. And often, authors, often translators and authors don't realize which rights they have and don't have. So, if you're asked for rights to do something, they're probably controlled by the publisher, look at your contract and remember to be nice to your author, and not to give your author cause to sue you. If your source text is in the public domain, knock yourself out. When you're looking at your contract, look at the royalty rates laughter is now heard. If you're getting royalties, you may be getting one percent of something or other, one and a half percent of something or other, and then, let's say you've translated something that's in the public domain, maybe you've got an older contract and it says, if a foreign publisher wants to re-print in South Asia, you get 50% of anything we get on it. Why this huge difference between 50% or these days maybe more like 15% or something on subsidiary rights and pennies on the main product? You're there to produce that hardbound book, you're getting one percent, you don't care about Radio Theater because it's not going to happen, but they're quoting 50%, are they just trying to make you cry? The point is, to produce that hardbound book, they're using the marketing department, the design department, they're paying the typesetter, the designer, the compositor, the printer, the shipping, the warehousing, they have a lot of costs in that main product you're producing. If somebody's doing the radio play or the dramatic adaptation, your publisher is just receiving money, doing a little bookkeeping, and sending you a check. So, their overhead in those subsidiary rights is really low. That's why those royalties tend to be much higher. Now those of you who have contracts going back 20, 30 years may have gotten a letter at some point saying, Dear author, in our older contracts, electronic book rights held a subsidiary right royalty of 50%, but times have changed, and so those royalties will now, and henceforth, be 12%. It has been so delightful working with you, and we hope to hear from you about your future project, yours sincerely. So, yes, this has happened. There have been legal battles over this. I'm pretty sure the author's guilt has been involved. I can't give legal advice, and I don't want to give blanket statements here, but there are publishers who have learned that what they were trying to do in their specific circumstances was not permissible. A contract is a meeting of two minds, and something of value is exchanging, and you don't normally get to say, I promised I'd give you 50 bucks if I could borrow your car for the weekend. It was great, and I'm modifying our contract. Here's a cheeseburger instead. So, I don't get to do that, so do not just simply accept it if you get one of those letters from the publisher. I really wish I were making this up. Is there any difference if you're working with a really huge, diversified, conglomerate in the publishing world? Yes. Those subsidiary rights, those really nice, higher royalty rates, tend to kick in when it's an outside entity. So, you've published the novel. It's in hardback. They say, oh, we're going to do an e-book, but you know we have an e-book division. So, even though your contract talks about subsidiary rights with other publishers, they're actually a subdivision of our mothership. So, you're going to be getting your 1.5% royalty on that e-book instead of 50%. I'm so glad that we're continuing to work together. The other thing that can happen, I've seen some contracts with escalator clauses. So, if we sell up to 1,000 copies of the book, you will get 1.5% of 1% in royalty. If we sell between 1,000 and 5,000, you will get a 3% royalty. If we sell 5 million, you are going to get a golden carriage, et cetera. These are escalator clauses. Some publishers, but especially the really big ones, will say those count only for sales of the same edition. So, if you sell 999 hardbound copies and 999 paperback copies, they both stay at that base rate. We don't combine categories. So, when you're looking at contracts, one thing to pay attention to that may pay off is see if you can get total sales to count toward the escalator. And one thing that will sound a little bit funny, but try to be a most favored nation. If you're negotiating or your publisher's negotiating something where your work will be in an anthology, such as a course pack, if you have a most favored nation clause in your contract, that will say, okay, Indiana University, your biology department is using my extract in a course pack. I will let you do this for 50 cents a page, but if you give better terms to anyone else, you agree to match those terms for me. So, if Princeton University Press says 75 cents per page and you agree to it, you automatically have to give me 75 cents a page because I have most favored nation status. So, that's... You are now in full possession of your subsidiary rights. So, Chris will now lead you down the path of moral rights. You actually want to use the lectern of... And we'll do this in inquisition style. So, I'll start throwing out questions. So, are you ready, Maestro? Okay. So, we hear about translation rights, subsidiary rights, moral rights. When you're looking at moral rights, what do we mean by rights? Right. So, what are moral rights? When I was talking to Jeff yesterday, he was saying how it's sort of an unfortunate term in English because, I don't know, it sort of sounds like human rights or something that should be, you know, like the UN or something like that. You know, it sounds sort of abstract. It comes out of the European civil law tradition and the first civil code. It began in France, you know, and it sort of arose out of the Enlightenment and the first civil code. It was during the Napoleonic era. But at any rate, in the civil code, they often use this term. They talk about, you know, legal obligations and then they talk about moral obligations. And so, that's where the use of the word moral comes from. And there is an idea then that talking about the rights of authors that they're sort of splitting economic rights and moral rights. And the idea is that you can, you know, have a contract where you assign your economic rights to somebody. In practical terms, we'd be talking about, you know, your translation, signing a contract where you'd get some sort of compensation, hopefully something upfront like an advance and, you know, royalties, perhaps, and, you know, some hypothetical future. And then in turn, they have the right to print and commercialize, sell your translation. But the idea was then there's this separate set of moral rights that the author retains and which are inalienable, which means, you know, non-transferable and you can't sign them away. And this recognition of moral rights exists in other countries like in Europe, the European Union in their copyright code specifically mentions moral rights. So what are the specific moral rights then? It talks about the right of divulgation, the right of attribution, and the right to integrity. What do those mean? So by divulgation, which probably is the most mystifying, sounding one, maybe, it says that the author has a right to decide whether and how the work will be made public or published, basically, for the first time. And it specifies in the European code that this lasts for the life of the author. And we could think of perhaps hypotheticals where you might, I don't know, where perhaps you translated something, you're a professor and you just, you know, wanted to use it for instructional purposes and somehow somebody gets their hands on it and puts it on the internet or something. You know, that would be, that would certainly go against this right of divulgation. I know there's going to be a panel on Saturday later on that talks about students in graduate programs. At the end of your program, you know, you have to produce a thesis or a dissertation. And for creative writers, you know, if a writer or poet, it would be, you know, a collection of poems. And for a translator, it would be, you know, a translation of a work. And, you know, they're going to be talking about, you know, how can you, you know, to what extent can you control, you know, whether the school or whoever they've contracted out to, you know, put it in the library or something, was the way it normally works. You know, a panel chaired by Jean Anderson. Wade, please. Friday. Friday. Friday. Right. So, you know, I thought about that as a time where this sort of thing could happen. So then moving on, there's the right to attribution then, which says the author has the right to be identified on the work, you know, named on the work. And also the author has a right to use a pseudonym or have it published anonymously if he wants. But basically, the idea that the author has the right to have his name appear on the work, his or her name. And, you know, talking about us specifically as translators, you know, to the extent that you're the author of the translation, then you would have the right to have your name appear when the translation is published. Then there's the right to integrity, which, I don't know, has the most possibility to, I don't know, lead to, I don't know, to disputes between people, perhaps. The author has the right to object to any distortion or immutilation or other modification of his work or her work that is prejudicial to the author's reputation is what it says. And what would this entail? You could imagine a translation, you know, maybe there's an unauthorized abridgment of your translation, which you're not happy about, or you could think of perhaps censorship, especially if the translation was going to be brought into different markets where, you know, perhaps for political reasons or, I don't know, something sound offensive, you know, they've made some sort of editing without, you know, running it by you. This would sort of fall into the rights of integrity. So I'll hit you with a question. So, okay, if I can go into court and sue on my moral rights in France and Germany and Egypt and China, can I go into a U.S. court and sue for violation of moral rights? Very good question, because that's what concerns us all the most, I'm assuming. The short answer is no. The U.S. doesn't recognize this, particularly, you know, the inalienable part is maybe the most important distinction. The U.S. doesn't recognize this idea of the moral rights of the artist or author. We have our own set of copyright protections and different laws that can protect the rights of authors. Talking a little bit about the distinctions, maybe like I said, the biggest distinction is the idea that these are inalienable and that even if you assign your economic rights, you know, you would always retain these rights. That's not the case under U.S. law and, you know, there's the idea of freedom of contract and basically you could sort of sign away anything. You could certainly sign away these rights, like, you know, in the contract if it doesn't specify that your name has to appear on the translation, then it might not. As a practical matter, I guess literary translators, I think, would normally agree and want to, you know, at least on the title page or something, put the name of the translator, if not on the front of the book, which you may or may not be a big deal for you. But perhaps you have to think about, you know, you maybe want this to be in the contract though because who knows, you know, again talking similar to subsidiary rights, hypotheticals, what could happen down the road. Who knows, maybe your publisher that you'd like, you know, they might be bought out by a bigger publisher or go out of business and, you know, somehow your contract could be assigned to some successor or right, who maybe aren't so concerned about the rights of the translator or naming the person who translated it. I'll hit you with another question. Let's say I'm in the U.S. I'm dealing with the U.S. publisher. I do my beautiful translation of the Divine Comedy. My publisher, allowed under that particular contract to modify it as they see fit, turn all of these little sections into limericks. I'm outraged, but there it is. I go to France to try to forget and I see a copy in a bookstore in France. Do I have, France has very robust moral rights. Can I do anything? Counselor, please help me. That's a tricky question. And I want to say the answer is close to no. One thing to consider is there's the burn treaty on copyright law or the rights of artists and authors, which was originally written in 1886. And the U.S. didn't sign on until about 100 years later, actually, 1988. The burn convention, the big thing is the idea that the nations that sign it are going to give the same protection to authors from other signatory countries as they would to authors from their country. And it also mentions moral rights when the United States signed on to it. Basically, they wanted to change the law as little as possible like from what the pre-existing law is. So there used to be complicated rules about how you had to register your copyright and then renew it over the 25 years down the road or something like that. So they got rid of those formalities. But in terms of recognizing moral rights and when they were implementing the treaty, they said, well, the laws that we have today more or less cover moral rights. And there's moving away just from copyright protection. There's laws against libel or slander or unfair competition or false or misleading commercial practices. And so to some extent, if we're talking about the whole idea of integrity, you might be able to say that they're putting my name on this work but it's not the thing I wrote. They've butchered it unless it says into the contract that they're allowed to do that in which case, I don't know, basically they are. This is a possibility of where this right or something similar to it could be enforced. But the US and US courts don't really like the idea of moral law or moral rights that we're talking about. And I don't know. It's not a basis for bringing suit in a US court. And if you brought suit in France as far to the extent that what is happening in France matters, it would help you there. But I'm not sure to what extent you could take that. I think the answer is that if you took that judgment then to the United States to try and get it executed, they would say that you have to have a case based on US law and that the moral rights recognized by other countries don't apply in the same way in the United States. So I could get it off the market and maybe get damages in France or Germany, Italy, and other countries where they have moral rights. Where you can't sign the law. But not in the US. Basically, right. And probably we're most concerned with what's going on in the US, I would think. Are you taking questions now or are you going to wait till the end? Wait till the end? Okay. Generous time for questions. Yeah. Anything else you wanted to ask me about moral rights? Well, if I'll save it for the question. Okay. I think we covered the important things. So, of course I'm really tempted. Since we're sort of, I would be a terrible parent like producer rule, but I can't resist. So what's the question? I'm just curious. We're talking about moral rights not being actionable in a court of law in the US, but my experience or the experience of people I know, sometimes when there's been a breach of contract, you don't necessarily need to or even want to actually bring a publisher to court, but you might want to have a lawyer from the author's guild or if you have your own lawyer, write a letter to the publisher pointing out that they are in breach of contract, which is generally a preferable way to go about it. So I'm just wondering what about that approach to moral rights, where you're not necessarily taking it to court, but having an official letter could be from a lawyer if that would be helpful, but go to the publisher, what about that? Right. That's basically the way we need to protect our rights in the United States, what's enshrined in the contract. And so if it says in the contract that they have to run modifications by you or that you have a right to review a translation before they put it out, and then under contract law, they were in breach of the responsibilities and performance under the contract, then you would have a right to tell them that they have to perform the way it says under the contract. But that's not a moral right anymore because it's in the contract. Yeah, so the idea that this is an inalienable right that no matter what it says in the contract, you know, you necessarily keep what you don't have in the United States. Yeah, and actually if we could, I'll shift back, we'll probably come back, I'll just pin on to it a little bit. When the U.S. was in negotiations for joining the Byrne Convention, they said, you look at the text in the Byrne Convention, you join the Byrne Convention, you're signing on to moral rights. You guys said, look, joining the Byrne Convention means we agree to modify our national laws to satisfy the standards of the Byrne Convention, which includes moral rights. But we have existing law that covers the same territory. So with, you know, when they turned my beautiful Dante into limericks, I'm going to have my lawyer write a letter saying, pull this off the market immediately or we're going to nail you for a trademark infringement because you're misrepresenting the source of goods or services. You're making my client look like the author of this atrocity. It's a violation of the Lanham Act, a violation of trademark law. So if you assume saying this is a violation of moral rights, you've got nothing because you're suing on a ghost. You sue for the same substance, but under a different name, you've got something to work with. Since I made one exception. If I'm not mistaken, under U.S. law there is one art form. Yeah, so for some visual arts... For moral rights in India, and it's movies, of course. Vara, the visual arts, something acts. Anyway, there is a provision for moral rights for some visual arts. So a series of fine prints, you know, numbered prints under a certain number. And so we sort of take the wrinkles out of things and don't give you all the messy details here, but yes, only in some visual arts. There was a French suit over a film where moral rights were found in a French court. So moral rights exist in the U.S. only for limited works of visual art. If I could just bring it back to a practical question for us as translators. You mentioned damages, for example. And it seems to me that if you're a lechy copyright infringement, it might have some way to sue for damages. But in a case where your contract has been breached, and the publisher didn't do something that they were supposed to do, I think it's very difficult in practical terms to look for a legal remedy because the publisher knows it will cost you thousands of dollars to sue. And the only thing you can sue for is your alleged economic loss, which is going to be tiny under most of our books, right? So there's no disincentive to them as far as breaking contracts go. So if they're not going to abide by the contract, then they're not going to abide by the contract. I think it depends a great deal on the terms of the contract. The normal publishing contract has contradictions, sort of messy. So there are some cases where people don't have the resources. It depends on your walking, getting, and the terms. So it's not easy. Sometimes the good guy wins. And sometimes not so much. But yeah, it shows. I'm not sure if this question concerns subsidiary rights or what, but it's a situation that I know has happened. Somebody translates a book, the original is made into a movie, and then when the subtitles come up, the subtitles reproduce the dialogue. The movie reproduces the dialogue in the original book. The subtitles substantially reproduce the dialogue in the translation. So that's where you go to the contract and see who had the rights to authorize or not authorize the use of that translation that way. One thing that happens with subsidiary rights a lot is the publisher makes a deal, you don't hear about it, and you get an email from a friend saying, I was so delighted. I was in London and I saw the British edition of your book in Faber's window. The jacket looked wonderful. My book, one, didn't come out with a jacket because the publisher was too cheap. And to what British edition? Well, yeah, it exists. It's just nobody told you. That happens with sort of sickening regularity. But depending on the contract, that could be authorized or it could be a big nasty deal. So it's possible to foresee that situation and put it in your contract? Yeah, so you can ask for it. It's sort of like Christmas is approaching. You can ask for anything you want. And some publishers, I've had publishers say, no, we're not allowed to modify anything. I say, look, it doesn't make any sense. You've left something out of the sentence. No, we can't change it. Two years later, somebody shows me another contract from the same publisher. They fixed it just not in the contract of the person who has to have it fixed. It's not a pretty world. I will agree with you there. If I could add something on that point. That's an interesting hypothetical. One thing when we're talking about negotiating in general contracts with the publisher and things like subsidiary rights. Of course, as a translator, you're really not in a position of power really in any way. Probably this was a work of love that you've spent years working on and you're happy to have anybody who's willing to put it in print and get it out there to get some sort of compensation, which you can't live on off of that. The publisher knows very well that you don't have another publisher lined up if you decide, well, forget it. I also think things sort of get tricky then because, well, there's the original author and his publishing company that have to make an agreement with the publisher of the translation too. Maybe you feel like you as the translator, you don't want to be the person gumming up the works by requesting things. You wouldn't want the deal perhaps to just fall through because of your stuff, but it's still important to negotiate. Also, talking about this whole idea of the subtitles, it would be interesting. If the publisher had the subsidiary rights, did the publisher know about that and sign off on that and get some sort of compensation for that then perhaps it says in your contract what percentage of that you should get in which case they should be handling that. Yeah. So it could be that they don't even know about it. And then if you retain the subsidiary rights yourself, then it would be even a little bit more difficult because then you would have to be the person that they negotiate that with. Let's divorce the publishers. And then we can run back to questions. I have a question. There seems to be this intriguing difference between the French and the British American systems is that the French have a concept of natural law that came out of the environment. So they have a firm concept of those rights. And the British Americans took the empirical or pragmatic way of just going by precedent. So here's my question. Publishers appear to give, to sort of concede moral rights. That is to do the right thing for authors who matter and for contracts that they feel are important to them. Whereas there'll be more camelier for the ones that aren't. So when you brought up the idea of most favorite nation status and I want to know whether they really do use that term. Oh, absolutely. Then if you could find out a proof that they gave this moral right, for instance, for attribution to some other translator, but not to you, can you go and say that you should follow your own practice if you didn't sign away attribution? Who wasn't specifically in the contract giving this assignment away? Could you do that? Forgive me, but that's a situation where I'd say I need a lot more specifics. So I would have a client on the phone for about an hour and a half getting particulars, sending me the contract of that. But some kids get the three-scoop ice cream cone and Oliver Twist's body who doesn't ask for anything gets whatever falls on the sidewalk. Okay. And it's like I want to finish this section because we need to be out of here at 12.30. Termination of transfer is what we're calling divorcing the publisher at a few times when Congress has length in the term of copyright. Congress sort of surprisingly has said, you know, authors and publishers don't have the same power of bargaining when you're starting out with a contract. Part of what you're saying, they're the big dogs and they don't think they're going to get much from your book, so they don't see much. You're in tough luck. Some publishers are sweethearts, not always. And Congress said, at a certain point in the life of the copyright, we are going to give the author the opportunity to take back the rights, to rescind the contract. It doesn't undo what's done before. They don't, you know, you're not giving back the royalties over the years, but there's certain points where you can stop, terminate, essentially tear up the contract. There's a limitation. If yours is a work made for hire, you don't get the candy. So this is, you know, the distinction between assigning rights and a work made for hire for most things, not much difference. Neither picture is very pretty. The one thing where the difference between saying, okay, I will assign the rights, I will not call this a work made for hire, makes a difference, is your ability many years later to get the rights back. How is this different from a reversion of rights? Reversion of rights has to be written into your contract. It's an agreement that if the book goes out of print, they stop, they're selling under a certain number, or you're getting royalties under a certain number, they will give back the rights. Termination of transfer, you know, divorcing the publisher, if your contract was signed, or if you got the copyright, the copyright for the work was assigned to either publisher or you. Before 1978, the, and I've just lost my train of thought, it will run over me again in a moment. But there's a great divide in how things are handled for publications before 78 and after. So where do these rules come from? If they sound sort of murky, they're all from Congress. They're right in the copyright, the modified copyright act today. With those older contracts from before 1978, you cannot give up those, that right to get your rights back by contract. So if your contract says, I will give these rights to the publisher in my will, I give them up in perpetuity, the time comes, you demand them back, that clause in the contract doesn't count. If the work is from after 78, it does count. For those later works, it is possible to give up the right to get back the book. Earlier works, it is impossible to give it up. You maintain that. So if I get those rights back, can I make new agreements for whatever I want? Am I just free to act? Again, if the work you translated is still under copyright, maybe you own the rights to your translation now and you want to try to place it with Dover. The underlying work is still under copyright. Dover can't publish your translation unless they have the right to use the work you translated. And if those rights are still with the publisher that you've just abandoned, it could be messy. So you want to think strategically as you're going through these. Also be aware, if you take the rights back, and there have already been agreements, like for a film, a foreign edition, a translation, book club editions, those agreements that already exist before you take the rights back get to continue. So you're not taking them over. You're not cancelling, making them go away. It's just that your old publisher can't make new agreements for that sort of deal. You're now on the driver's seat once you get the rights back if you can find a way to firm out those rights. So you look on the internet for termination of rights, trying to figure out how and when you can divorce your publisher, and you see things saying, well, in 35 years after publication, you need to pay attention because the lights are coming up. It's almost showtime. That is a gross oversimplification. I took every copyright and publishing course I could with Marshall Liefer. Incredible law professor. The only time he said, you know, a lot of lawyers end up in trouble because of malpractice was because of what the foot that I'm about to put in my mouth. The timing for terminating your rights, the time frames are extremely complicated. And when you look, you know, when does the copyright on this work expire? The U.S. law, those all expire on December 31st. You know, end of the year with termination of transfer. You're looking at deadlines. These are actual anniversaries. You look at the statute. It's a little murky. You look at the reports from Congress, the committees in Congress when they're working out. Very clear. All the examples are the anniversaries of the dates. So when you're dealing with this, you should be dealing with an attorney on it because it's complicated stuff. Remember, you have to look at the actual anniversary date. I have a question. You could clarify this for me. So are you saying in the contract unless you sign away this right to the transfer coming back to you that that's the norm that that would happen? No. If you sit back and say, somebody will send me a letter when it's time and you do nothing, you get nothing. These are rights. This is a possibility that you have to step up and ask for. Nothing automatic about it. So this would be like a right that you could assert? Yes. Even if it doesn't specifically say that in the contract? Exactly. And if it's a contract before 1978, it says you cannot regain your rights under any circumstances. You can. Unless it's a work made for hire. After 78, you sign off saying, I'm giving you everything possible. My understanding from the statute is, yes, it is possible to sign it away. So there's three different time periods involved since there are different times when copyright was extended and Congress wanted to do it. So first, or for works that were already under copyright in 1978, I will cut to the chase. Right now, if you're wanting to try to reassert something, the open window right now is for works published between October 29th of 1942 and October 29th of 1955. So it's for works that are heading into the last, you know, a window that includes the last 20 years of copyright protection. And it's a five-year window. You really have to watch it because, okay, it's the time period. I can get them back. You have to ask for them at least two years before. You can ask for them up to 10 years before they're available. And if you're outside that window, you've got it messed up. There are very detailed rules on how you have to notify the publisher. It's very tricky for a lawyer. So if it's something you want to do, think ahead, try to find somebody who will work with you affordably. So that's your first time period. The earliest works available for demanding return are looking late 42 through 1955. The second group, right now, for sending out letters notifying the publisher that you'll be demanding things back, is October 29th of 1956 and October 29th of 1969. So for a lot of you, that's not for a lot of you, for some of you, that's the first book you did. And the third period is for works that, you know, notifications from January 1st of 1978 through October 29th of 1990. Now, exactly when things kick in for you depend on a really messy sort of formula, depending on when you signed a contract, when the book was published, you know, the length of time between those two dates. At the moment, it's not worth going into the detail. My goal was for the light bulb to come on saying that book of mine that's been out of print forever, maybe I can get the rights back and get it placed with another publisher. So I'm ready for questions or I can duck them in like this. And thank you. Yes, for me. One thing that isn't very clear to me at all is when, what are the conditions under which you can ask for your rights back? As long as it was not a work made for hire and as long as you're asking within the right time frame. That's all? The publisher doesn't have to have done something or a book out of print? No. So it can be in print, out of print. It has to be under U.S. jurisdiction. So, you know, a U.S. publisher, but no, they don't have to have done anything. So a book I published last year, I could ask for my rights back now? Oh, not now. It's like if it was published last year, you probably need to ask, you know, the window for it will open up in 35 to 40 years and you'll need to ask, you know, two to 10 years before that window opens up. Okay, that's what I'm looking for. Yeah. Then this is separate from, remember this was talked about a bunch of the panel last year, the reversion of rights, which is a clause that it's good to have in your contract, which says that it basically, if the work is out of print and the publisher is no longer, you know, selling your book, then you have the copyright would return to you and, you know, if you could find somebody else who was interested then in your translation, you could try and find another publishing house to do it. Of course, then this got brought up too, then it becomes very complicated in our age of where there's e-books and, you know, the, like, Google and you could get books printed on demand, but, you know, that's another thing. So, and we've got just about four minutes for questions, so if I miss people, I don't love talking about this stuff, so be here all the way there. I just wanted to mention that you mentioned sources for information there, legal advice, and if you have anything, if you work with British publishers at all, it's really worthwhile to join the Society of Authors. They vet your contracts for free, you send them your contract, and they've even vetted full contracts that weren't British for me. There's some advice about certain clauses in a contract which is marvelous about it, and membership isn't very expensive. So it's the Society of Authors. That's like the Authors Guild here, but they have a lot more experience vetting translation contracts than the lawyers at the Authors Guild, because not that many translators have joined the Authors Guild even though we can. It's just, especially when it comes to, like what you're saying about subsidiary rights where it doesn't occur to a translator sometimes, and they'll simply look at your contract and say, this contract is acceptable. You might consider blah, blah, blah, and they would list, just making the things that wouldn't even occur to you. Yeah, that's a good point. A lot of these things are not even stuff that you, you might not be thinking about when you're getting your contract and your book published. You might not even think that these are issues that you should get mentioned in the contract one way or another because of things that could happen down the road or what happens with, you know, subsidiary rights aren't mentioned in the contract. I think probably publishers are maybe savvy enough to have it mentioned, but you know, then what happens, and the answer is like, you know, who the heck knows? Yeah, yeah, so, those windows apply to translation transfer, right? Correct, hey, well, you were saying that you have to ask two years after, but... No. Okay, a certain window opens up, and for some works it's 56 years after publication. Some works it's 35 years after publication. So if that window is going to open up 35 years after publication, you need to ask for the rights back two years, between 10 and two years before the date that you want the rights back. So if you want the rights... At the right time, when you ask, when you're going to get them? Yeah, yes, the right time of at minimum two years, you must give the publisher at least two years notice that way if the publisher is working on a deal for dramatic rights with someone else, they don't get blindsided because they signed a deal yesterday or they've got a deal negotiated, ready to sign, and you pulled the rug out from the room today. So they get at least two years notice, up to ten years notice. And so for the three windows, you're saying there's a certain amount of time that they will still stay open? Yeah, those windows stay open for five years. Is it ever five years? Yes. So... What about the one that ends in 1990? The one that ends in 1990, so the window opened in 1985, closed in 1990. So at any time, their windows open for that eight to ten-year period. So it's like, right now I can do my ten-year notice for something that's way out there or my two-year notice for something's pretty close. It's still open. You said... Yeah, talk to me in the hallway. Yeah. It's like... And I'd like to thank you all for your patience. I hope it's been helpful. And if there are murky points, catch me at the coffee table and you'll have to break loose. Thank you.