[Coco] [Color Computer] The ongoing Hot Coco saga

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 10:14 AM 7/22/05 -0700, Robert Emery wrote:
>As I see it, they do not know what they own copyrights to... If they don't
know
>that they own a copyright to something, how could they possibly hope to stop
>anyone from creating a public archive of it. I don't think any court could
side
>with an "unknown" agreement.

Unfortunately, this is a *huge* swamp, and I for sure wouldn't want to swim
in it. A similar kind of rights issue held up the release of classic opera
recordings for decades while potential rights owners (performers, in this
case) or their heirs were contacted and agreements signed -- and these were
performances from the 1930s and 40s.

Authors had very generic contracts in the early microcomputer publication
days, and in my case (as with publications such as 80 Micro, Alternate
Source, etc.) there were no contracts at all beyond a letter of transmittal
along with my monthly columns. As I tended to be aware of intellectual
property issues from already being a composer, I maintained all my
copyrights with the standard UCC notice and, when boilerplates came my way,
crossed out all the "offending" material before returning the contract. I
was never disputed because who cared? Back then, anyway.

By the 1990s, my contracts with other publications were more specific (I
still maintained my copyright and assigned only first publication rights).
Alas, by 2000 they were even more specific, specifying copyright transfer
in present and all future media (with phrases like "to be invented") and
eventually began requiring us to sell them the entire piece as a "work for
hire", terminating all our rights to our words. There was a protracted
authors' protest over this nationwide, but was buried in post-9/11 politics
and the wholesale firing of freelance writers. (Lou Dobbs never covered
that, you can bet.)

Dennis