When your new book isn’t yours
Newspaper columnists turn their columns into books all the time. But what happens if you quit the paper, and the paper turns your columns – which it owns, after all – into a book, without even telling you?
This is exactly what happened to John Rogan, a former columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer whose bestselling Marley and Me was based on some columns he wrote about his dead dog. He left the paper earlier this year, only to discover that the Inquirer had inked a deal with a publisher to bring out a collection of his columns to cash in on the success of his earlier book.
According to Slate, Rogan is having nothing to do with the book. His agent is even sending booksellers a letter (reprinted at the bottom of the Slate story) making clear that he will not do any promotion for it.
Record companies do this all the time, of course, and there is many a musician who has had to publicly disown the new “greatest hits” package put together by his former corporate masters, but it’s odd to see a publishing house be so openly nasty … at least since the demise of ReganBooks.
This is exactly the sort of thing that class action suits against the Thomson holdings (Heather Robertson) and The Montreal Gazette and CanWest Global (the Electronic Rights Defence Committe) are trying to avoid. Unless otherwise agreed, the copyright for work belongs with the creator: there have been Supreme Court decisions in both the US and Canada to this effect.
This does not keep media giants from trying to grab rights. They know that writers and writers’ group have much less deep pockets than they do, so their attitude is “let them sue.”
More power to Marley’s master.
Mary Soderstrom
President, Electronic Rights Defence Committee
http://marysoderstrom.blogspot.com