TY - JOUR AU - Ginsburg, Jane C. PY - 2018/10/02 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Foreign Authors’ Enforcement of U.S. Reversion Rights JF - The Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts JA - JLA VL - 41 IS - 3 SE - Articles DO - 10.7916/jla.v41i3.2022 UR - https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/lawandarts/article/view/2022 SP - 459-466 AB - <p>Thank you to all of the participants, and especially the first two panelists, for setting one part of the scene.&nbsp; I am going to talk about the United States’ termination right and some Berne and private international law consequences or implications of the termination right.</p><p>First, however, I’d like to advert to the two goals Rebecca Giblin referenced in her talk.&nbsp; One is remuneration, the other is dissemination.&nbsp; Author-protective laws in other countries also address dissemination.&nbsp; As Séverine Dusollier mentioned, a number of national laws include an obligation to exploit the work: &nbsp;if the publisher does not exploit the work, the rights revert to the author.&nbsp; In the United States, the contractual out-of-print clause serves that purpose, but the out-of-print clause is a matter of private ordering.&nbsp; It has to be activated by the author and publishers lately have contended that as a result of print-on-demand, the work never goes out of print.&nbsp; If the book is available in the catalog, and somebody at some point wants a copy, then the publisher can provide that copy.&nbsp; Out of print clauses in the digital environment therefore, some publishers would argue, make no sense.<a href="https://lawandarts.org/article/foreign-authors-enforcement-of-u-s-reversion-rights/#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1"></a>&nbsp; Mary Rasenberger accordingly mentioned some of the attempts of the Author’s Guild to push back against the disappearance of the out-of-print clause.</p><p>The rest of my remarks will concern remuneration, rather than dissemination.&nbsp; As both Martin Senftleben and Séverine Dusollier pointed out, there exists a disparity in bargaining power: &nbsp;authors generally are the weaker party.&nbsp; Two broad techniques seek to remedy this problem.&nbsp; Previous speakers have addressed one of them, intervention by national laws with respect to the amount that the author gets paid, and with respect to the scope of the grant.&nbsp; Thus, in some countries, as Séverine Dusollier mentioned, the law prohibits the author’s grant of modes of exploitation unknown at the time of the contract.<a href="https://lawandarts.org/article/foreign-authors-enforcement-of-u-s-reversion-rights/#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2"></a>&nbsp; These laws effectively reserve new technology rights to the author.&nbsp; Other national laws require additional remuneration for new modes of exploitation,&nbsp;<a href="https://lawandarts.org/article/foreign-authors-enforcement-of-u-s-reversion-rights/#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3"></a>or for “bestsellers” whose authors’ remuneration becomes excessively disproportionate to the grantees’.<a href="https://lawandarts.org/article/foreign-authors-enforcement-of-u-s-reversion-rights/#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4"></a></p> ER -