Chump Change

[james_davis_nicoll]

John Scalzi explains why aspiring authors should not sell stories to Dragon Magazine.

Comments

Re: Contracts, [legal] 'competence', and consciousness

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

In all honesty, I can't say I really disagree with what you are saying, here.

I think the problem is, the exact, precise centre of gravity of the topic of conversation here, has been bouncing around a bit with each added comment.

I think the point I was trying to make was simply, "all kinds of people, especially people who are young, or who are [very] new to a given sort of transaction that is governed by Rules of Law -- large numbers of such people like that are often truly terribly, even painful-to-watch-ly (pretend that's a word) naive."

Your reply is [if I am understanding you properly!], that Hasbro and its corporate avatars and suchlike are positioning themselves to charge what the market will bear (in terms of their counter-offer terms, for the 3-6 cents a word they offer), and who can fault them for that?

And I guess you're right. It's economics. It's how markets decide what a thing is worth. And so on. So, how could it be a "rip off"? Sure.

I see your point. so when you write:

Is the publisher offering incredibly poor terms, relatively, in their contracts? Yes.
Are they behaving unethically by doing so? I have a hard time believing that.

... a meaningful and helpful counterpoint probably revolves around figuring out how we could agree on a shared meaning (if that is possible) for "behaving unethically".

For example, it is possible (I do not know if this is so, I'm being hypothetical), that the deliberate, discuss-it-around-a-corporate boardroom-and-vote-in-favour-aye-carried corporate strategy here is one of deliberately targetting the "naive" authors I mention above, because some corporate-internal study of the industry shows that 0.0027% of the things arriving at a slush pile from naive, guileless new authors end up making $50M or more in film rights within 25 years, or something. Hence a deliberate corporate effort: "target the naive". If so: -- unethical [IMHO].

But then, I suppose lions and hyenas culling the weak and defenceless from the zebra herd by that same sort of reasoning, would also be "unethical" (insofar as that is not a category mistake, on the grounds that "ethics" aren't expected of animals).

But, if the pricing/rights policy under discussion here is accidental (the result of the mindless cutting and pasting of past contractual boiler-plate, for example, as some comments here and on the other site seem to imply), or was just an arbitrary "try and grab as much IP as you can for as low a price as you can" strategy, with no thought at all having been given to the legal sophistication of the counter-party prospective contributing authors: -- then, I suppose, not-unethical [again, IMHO].

As I imply above, -- at this point, the conversation ceases to be about contractual terms, and turns to being more about how one defines "ethical".

[You will notice we are drifting perilously close to the event horizon of the Marxist "Labour Theory of Value" debate. Were we to fall fully within its fatal gravitational tides, time would dilate for us, but eventually we would both be shredded into our constituent atoms, to be spat out the arse-end of a worm-hole, somewhere, many parsecs and aeons from here ... -- a fate best avoided, I would humbly suggest...]