Once again it’s time to play You Be the Agent.

Today’s question is, How much is one line of poetry worth? Not a lot, you say? Suppose you represented the Robert Frost estate and someone requested permission to use the line “And miles to go before I sleep” in an anthology. Still think it’s worth nothing?

That’s the kind of question that comes up daily in every literary agency. But with the introduction of digital technology, decisions that were once fairly cut and dried have become head-spinningly complex. Marc Aronson, in an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, stated the issue cogently: “In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission to use copyrighted material in new work. Either we change the way we deal with copyrights — or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.”

What does Aronson mean? “Given that permission costs are already out of control for old-fashioned print,” he writes, “it’s fair to expect that they will rise even higher with e-books. After all, digital books will be in print forever (we assume); they can be downloaded, copied, shared and maybe even translated. We’ve all heard about the multimedia potential of the iPad, but how much will writers be charged for film clips and audio? Rights holders will demand a hefty premium for use in digital books — if they make their materials available in that format at all.”

Aronson thinks it’s high time for a new permissions model grounded in the realities of the digital paradigm. “Instead of paying permission fees upfront based on estimated print runs, book creators would pay based on a periodic accounting of downloads.” Though accounting for sales under this system might at first seem daunting, the micropayment management such as Paypal is already commonplace.
Aronson is onto something. Expect to hear more about it.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

The Author’s Guild issued a sharp rebuke to publisher John Wiley & Sons for delivering a sort of Trojan Horse to authors.

The “horse” came in the form of a notice to authors who had contracts with newly acquired Bloomberg Press that the company was downwardly adjusting its royalty rates. Buried inside a saccharine (“We are pleased to inform you…”) salutation was a message that Wiley was conforming Bloomberg’s royalty to the rate stipulated in Wiley’s boilerplate – an “adjustment” that would pay the authors 24% and 43% less than they were getting.The authors were invited to sign an amendment.

The Guild’s outrage that authors were being snookered was expressed in unusually strong language. “The contract amendment, which provides no threshold level of sales for a work to be considered in print, essentially grants Wiley a perpetual right in an author’s book for a pittance. The 5% of net receipts royalty rate for print on demand editions is as lowest we have ever seen.” And “This is no way to do business. The letter is shocking from a publisher of Wiley’s stature.” “In our view, Wiley should tear up any signed letters it has received and start over, forthrightly explaining to its new authors the contractual changes it is seeking and how this may affect their income and their right to terminate their publishing contracts.”

We haven’t viewed Bloomberg contracts but assignment language in many publishing contracts guarantees that an acquiring company cannot change contractual terms without the express consent of the author. Signing the amendment would do just that, and the Guild wants to make sure authors know that it is a potential trap.

The full text of the Guild’s notice is below.
Richard Curtis
————-
Wiley’s Deceptive Letter to Bloomberg Press Authors: “We are pleased to inform you” that we will be slicing your royalties up to 50%

John Wiley & Sons acquired Bloomberg Press, the books division of Bloomberg, in March. At the end of April, it began sending a letter to hundreds of Bloomberg Press authors purporting to inform them “about a few differences in the accounting systems of Bloomberg and Wiley that it will be helpful for you to know about.”

While this sounds innocent enough, it isn’t. If signed by an author, the letter is actually a contract amendment that will materially and adversely affect the royalty rates of many Bloomberg Press authors.

Among other things, this contract amendment would:

1. Change royalty rates based on retail list price to rates based on net receipts. We’ve reviewed several Bloomberg Press contracts. All provide for royalty payments based on the retail list price (although we understand that there may be many based on net receipts). The Wiley letter misleadingly presents this to the author as good news: “We are pleased to inform you that we will be paying your royalties on the net amount received…” This change will, for many authors, effectively slice royalties by up to 50% for some book sales. Wiley’s letter fails to disclose that.

2. Empower Wiley to keep an author’s book in print with a lowball print on demand royalty of 5% of net receipts. (Bloomberg Press had no print on demand program.) The contract amendment, which provides no threshold level of sales for a work to be considered in print, essentially grants Wiley a perpetual right in an author’s book for a pittance. The 5% of net receipts royalty rate for print on demand editions is as low as we’ve seen.

We’ve asked an independent royalty auditor to review the affects of these contractual changes on royalty income. The royalty auditor found reductions of 24% to 43% using actual sales figures and applying Wiley’s amendments. (The precise affect of the amendments will vary by title, depending on particular categories of sales of the work.)

The Authors Guild strongly urges Bloomberg Press authors to not sign this letter without careful consideration. If you have received this letter, consult your agent or a publishing attorney or contact a lawyer in our legal department so you understand precisely how this amendment would affect your rights and royalties. Important: if you have already signed the letter and returned it to Wiley, contact our legal department immediately. Non-Guild members are welcome to contact us as well. All communications will, of course, be held in confidence.

This is no way to do business. The letter is shocking from a publisher of Wiley’s stature. In our view, Wiley should tear up any signed letters it has received and start over, forthrightly explaining to its new authors the contractual changes it is seeking and how this may affect their income and their right to terminate their publishing contracts.

The Authors Guild

If authors are being asked to do the publishers’ job of marketing and publicizing their own books, shouldn’t the publishers pay them for it, as they would pay a staff member or outside publicist?

M. J. Rose thinks so. In fact, she’s beating the drum to promote the idea. “In almost all cases, publishers are making it clear that they expect authors to supplement their marketing/PR effort in various ways and, in some cases, even soliciting the author’s help with both time and yes, money. As a result, today the author’s marketing/PR effort is often equal to or even greater than what the house is doing.”

Authors are subsidizing marketing and PR and but that’s not enough, says Rose, a well known and savvy publicist for authors (as well as for herself). She wants to change the way publishers compensate authors. Read about it in Publishers Must Change the Way Authors Get Paid

RC

Pardon me, but do you have any legal training? I’m thinking of suing someone. My lawyer thinks I’m a crackpot, so I need a second opinion.

Listen to this:

About twenty years ago when I was a volunteer 4th grade teacher I created an adventure aimed at teaching children about government. I instructed the kids to pretend to be on a cruise ship that is blown off course by a storm. They ended up shipwrecked on a tropic island, and in order to survive they had to develop a government.

Fifteen years later, Lost was launched on television and guess what? It’s about a passenger jet that crashes on a topical island. Obviously, to cover their trail they changed my cruise ship into an airplane. Other than that it’s my exact same idea. And look at the similarities! In my story the kids have to organize; On Lost they have to organize. In my story the kids have to eat disgusting things – same as on Lost. So, I’m thinking of suing the producers of Lost for copyright infringement. Do I have a slam-dunk case or what?

Actually, I hadn’t thought of suing until I read that an author named Jordan Scott has brought a lawsuit against bestselling Twilight author Stephenie Meyer alleging copyright infringement. According to Gil Kaufman of MTV. com, Meyer allegedly plagiarized something called The Nocturne written by Scott when was fifteen. She posted it one chapter a time on her website. Here’s what Kaufman writes about Scott’s claim: “Though Scott’s book is set in 15th-century France and details a love affair between a young sorcerer and a teenage girl and Meyer’s book chronicles a doomed teenage love triangle between a human, a vampire and a werewolf set in modern times, Williams said the plot lines and some developments — detailed in more than a dozen examples in the suit — match too closely to be a coincidence.”

It happens every recession.

Anyone who has lived through enough business cycles can predict that whenever there’s a downturn in the economy book publishers are going to attempt to cancel contracts on overdue books. You can also bet they’re going to step up pressure on authors of overdue books to repay advances issued when they signed contracts. Given the double plunge of the national economy and the trade book business, a story by Leon Neyfakh in the New York Observer, Note to Authors: Make Your Deadlines!, comes as no surprise. “Many literary agents are growing increasingly worried that publishers looking to trim their lists will start holding authors to deadlines and using lateness as an occasion to renegotiate advances and, in some cases, terminate contracts altogether,” writes Neyfakh.

Authors and agents will ignore Neyfakh’s cautionary article at their peril: it is absolutely true that late authors are vulnerable to cancellations and demands for refunds. Though arbitrary or vindictive terminations are rare, a breach of deadline removes an author’s most important legal defense against having a late book chopped arbitrarily. And though wholesale cancellations are equally rare, Neyfakh reminds us that the waters are still roiling from HarperCollins’s termination of as many as 100 contracts for tardy books back in 1997. Another reason why authors must either deliver their books on time or work out deadline extensions with their editors – and get them in writing.

If you haven’t taken these measures, don’t despair. There’s plenty you can do to defend yourself. This may be a good example of the saying that the best defense is a good offense. A little attitude might make publishers think twice before pulling the plug on the book you’ve worked on for years – for more years than you contract granted you.

The first thing you need to do remind yourself is that lateness is the medium in which the publishing process is bathed, and publishers are as guilty as authors are. “We breathe late manuscripts and eat late checks and drink late contracts,” I observed on one of those occasions that publishers rattled their sabers about coming after delinquent authors.

However dearly publishers would like to turn authors into automatons, the fact is that they are artists, and artists just don’t live in the same time zone as the suits who expect their publishing companies to generate the predictable cash flow generated by the pantyhose or shoe store divisions of their global conglomerates. It also behooves publishers to remember that professional authors are proud and conscientious people who would rather take a little extra time to get the work right than to turn in crap on deadline. Nor should it be forgotten that authors are as much motivated by self-interest as publishers are: writers don’t get paid until they deliver their manuscripts. So, publishers can rattle sabers all they want: their book will be turned in when it’s turned in, and if that means a day or week or even a month or longer past deadline, they’ll simply have to grin and bear it.

Whatever the suits might expect, most editors understand that late books are more the rule than the exception, and these men and women are patient, tolerant, resigned and (most of the time) good natured about it. They realize that writers are creative people possessed of a somewhat atrophied internal clock. Writers also have lives to live, and stuff happens to them – the same stuff that happens to editors, except that editors collect their paychecks every week when stuff happens, and authors don’t.

For most editors most of the time, a late book isn’t the end of the world. Editors are resourceful; a book that falls out of the spring list will, with some muttering and scrambling, be replaced by another. Sure, there’ll be some awkward patches in their catalogs – “Postponed”, “Delayed”, etc., and some budget considerations will have to be reconfigured – but, short of a late James Patterson or Stephenie Meyer on whose shoulders a year’s profit projections rest, few postponements make a dent in a publisher’s bottom line.

Lateness, then, is an understandable and forgivable quality in authors. In publishers, however, it is less excusable. The internal clocks of publishing companies are precisely calibrated – until it comes to paying money to authors. For most trade book houses, the time between the handshake and the arrival of a contract takes several months, as does the time from execution of that contract to the arrival of the advance due on signing. During which time the author is expected to be working in good faith on the manuscript.

Because the editorial departments of publishing companies are usually separated from the accounting departments (they are often located in different states), editors are seldom aware that their author is hurting for money, at least not until some plaintive cry (or homicidal rant or suicide threat) from that author sends them into a frenzy of phone calls and emails to accelerate the check and “walk it through” the corporate precincts. That the author may have been forced to take on other work to boil the pot until the the publisher finally got around to paying up does not always register on editors and their superior officers.

Though delays in processing contracts and payments are the products of normally slow-moving corporate machinery, those delays are sometimes the result of deliberate policies designed to hold onto money as long as possible. And that is simply deplorable, especially these days when the interest to be earned on withheld funds is neglible. I have never known an author to be deliberately late with a book, but I have known many a publisher to be deliberately, or at least suspiciously, late with a check. I have a standing bet with publishers that an author can write a book faster than the publisher can issue a check. Not surprisingly, nobody has taken me up on it.

And so, when publishers start talking about penalizing authors for late manuscripts, I start talking about charging publishers interest for late checks, or withholding the manuscript one week for every week the check is delayed.

Publishing attorneys are scarcely fountainheads of empathy for the hardships of writers and sympathy for the excuses offered by dilatory authors. So, if you don’t think you’re going to make your deadline, negotiate a comfortable contractual extension. And if you’re worried that your publisher is going to pull the plug on your book, it’s a good idea to keep a record of when checks became due and when they were actually received. That way, you have some recourse to fight back or at least plead that your publisher had some responsibility for your delayed book.

Publishers have a great many weapons at their disposal to recoup money paid to authors who fail to deliver their books on time. Contractual language gives them a kind of lien on the sale of the book to another publisher, and it is therefore hard for an author to get away scot-free even if he or she should manage to find another home for the book. Publishers harass authors with demand letters even though everyone knows the authors have long ago spent the money and don’t have it to repay. And, though no responsible agent will ever condone it, there is some anecdotal support for the likelihood that if an author strings a publisher out long enough, the demand letters will eventually cease and the matter will fall to the bottom of the publisher’s to-do box. For, if the truth be known, publishers realize that it is simply bad public relations to sue an author.

Still, the times being what they are, publishers are much more disposed to give delinquent authors a hard time, and in this regard Neyfakh makes a revealing slip. “Like so many other practices associated with the ‘gentleman’s business’ that the book business used to be”, he writes, “eating advances in the service of good humor has become a luxury most publishers do not indulge in as readily as they once did.”

It was not called the gentleman’s business, Mr. Neyfakh. It was called the gentleman’s profession, and in this incorrect choice of words is all the difference between what publishing was and what publishing has become. But if it truly is a business, publishers need to be more businesslike and pay authors promptly. They might be pleasantly surprised to see the delinquency rate for manuscripts plummet.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Observer.

Despite the fact that most trade book publishers are paying authors a 25% net royalty (25% of what the publisher actually receives after retailer discount), Random House UK is offering considerably less than that – indeed, considerably less than what its own US sister-house is paying. In October 2008 Random House US set its e-book royalty at 25% net and four months later Simon & Schuster followed suit.

Some agents are so ticked off at Random UK that they’ve stopped offering books to them. “I find it completely ludicrous that one branch of an international publisher is trying to say that 17.5% or 20% is the norm, when every other publisher in the UK has gone public on 25%,” Carole Blake of Blake Friedmann is quoted as saying. Another says, “Random House is the only publisher not offering 25% as its best standard rate but not all agents are getting 25% from all publishers.” “Industry sources said that a figure of 25% was becoming standard, though some admitted that it could be ‘variable’,” writes Benedicte Page in the article.

(As a matter of full disclosure, E-Reads pays a 50% net royalty to all authors.)

It’s probably a good idea right now to make something clear to authors, agents, and other members of the book community: it is against the law for publishers to collude in the setting of royalty rates, at least in the United States. Though 25% of net receipts may be settling down as the the standard e-book royalty, it would be in restraint of trade for publishers to sit down in a room and agree on that rate. Though we often, in negotiations, agree on a “standard” royalty for an adult hardcover – 10% of the list price on the first 5,000 copies sold, 12.5% on the next 5,000, and 10% on all sales thereafter – there is no written code fixing the royalties at those rates. If there were, it would be considered price-fixing. Same goes for e-book royalties.

Random House UK defends its position by asserting that “The e-book market is still a very young market which will continue to evolve and our royalty rate is just part of an overall very attractive author package.”

We can’t comment one way or the other on how attractive the rest of Random UK’s author package is, but we can certainly support its right to pay 2/3rds of what the rest of the industry calls standard; we will certainly support them if they decide to pay twice what the rest of the industry calls standard. What we don’t support is agents and authors rolling over and accepting a “standard” royalty. Any time a publisher tells you “That’s the going rate,” ask where is that written? I guarantee you won’t find it written in the minutes of the American Association of Publishers or any other book industry trade organization.

More importantly, it should not even be an unwritten law.

At any rate, you can read about the fracas here.

Richard Curtis

This week, thanks to the retraction of 1984 from Kindle customers and the uproar/apology that ensued, there are a lot of people raising the flag of consumer rights for ebooks. It seems the corporate expectations for control are revealing themselves to be out-of-step with the popular expectations of ownership. But maybe we get the service we deserve. How complicit are we in enabling the controls that irk us?

When we quoted Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, who said “The real issue here is Amazon’s use of DRM and proprietary software. They have unacceptable power over users,” we knew that he had touched on a sensitive nerve.

A discussion on the popular site Reddit.com today is a lightning rod for similar sentiment of consumer entitlement: “It’s simple: I want the media I buy to play on all the devices I own. I want the devices I own to play all the media I can buy. If your business intentionally makes device-specific media or media-specific devices I want you to fail.”

But I’m afraid I disagree with Peter Brown and his perspective of the broader implications. And while the Reddit discussion is engrossing, there’s not much being said about one little word.

Liability.

When Peter Brown says Amazon has “unacceptable power,” the truth is that we grant companies this power when customers accept the opaque and deliberately over-protective terms of use that we all too often gloss over to get to the good stuff as quickly as possible.

How many Kindle owners have read the terms that state:

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

Changes to Service. Amazon reserves the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Service at any time, and Amazon will not be liable to you should it exercise such right.

Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees. Amazon’s failure to insist upon or enforce your strict compliance with this Agreement will not constitute a waiver of any of its rights.

(Complete terms of use found here.)

It may seem Draconian, but essentially Amazon is stating that it has rights, too, to protect itself from companies or individuals using its service. Without those protections, Amazon and other companies would have little incentive to partner-up with new technologies that are ripe with the opportunity to exploit, harm, and cause serious problems without strict legalese behind them.

I think the digital reading experience provided by the Kindle and Amazon cannot be equated with older notions about ownership and traditional physical books. The digital service industry is built around licenses, permissions, and tacit agreements about copyright. What would the Kindle be without its 3G cell phone service (a special license), or the internet cloud functionality of Whispernet, which is a service with terms of use agreements?

When we buy a book in a system comprised of those complex arrangements, what we’re really doing is licensing the book for our use so long as those terms are offered. This isn’t how we traditionally think about shopping for goods. But in the last 30 years, our society is increasingly becoming familiar with this arrangement, whether it’s music or movies or software. It’s renting disguised as ownership. We have a hard time acknowledging that this is in fact happening under our noses while we stick to antiquated ideas of entitlement.

It may not seem fair, especially to those who like to reverse engineer and repurpose everything they purchase, but it is a perfectly valid business objective. However, where the business objective comes undone is in enforcement. DRM and unexpected retractions aren’t the only enforcement companies use. It can get much more heavy-handed.

As Stephen Fry recently lamented about copyright law, the prosecutions used to criminalize young users are obviously both overzealous and unfair in most cases. A single teenager stealing music doesn’t deserve a worse financial penalty than most white-collar criminals with deliberate intent to profit.

The truth is that the intent of most people breaking their terms of use is not to profit, but to enjoy an experience or connection with artists.

But that’s not always the case. It may be the most popular reason, but there are always sneaky deviations. And so enters the legalese of terms of use, which try to foreshadow any and all possible infringements and damages. By inducing you to quickly accept their terms, they try to stave off worse case scenarios that could bankrupt a company with litigation. And there’s the rub: we want the toys and media these companies develop but we must risk that accepting their terms might not be in our best interests. Every time we agree to unread terms of use (and we do, don’t we?), we may be complicit in feeding that beast that can bite us. And what about the free media that has no such terms – are we all willing to take a risk that we trust free media to cause us no harm, with no recourse if it does? It’s a murky problem in these dark days of DRM.

- Michael Gaudet

Sourcebooks publisher Dominique Raccah (pictured below), who pitched herself into the eye of a storm when she decided to delay the e-book edition a major book, has articulated her reasons for the decision. In a statement published on Booksquare, blogger Kassia Crozser’s website, she takes pains to express her strategic thinking about holding back the e-edition of Bran Hambric by Kaleb Nation when Sourcebooks publishes it in September. (Above right, the youthful author signs advance reading copies at BEA,)

Her conclusion?

“I agree with Kassia that it’s dangerous to expect consumers to play by the rules of last year’s business model. I’ve taken action in this one situation and I certainly wonder if there are other options that are neither mine nor the $9.99 option. And I also agree that we need to experiment, and I see our industry beginning to do that. But this pricing and release-date situation doesn’t feel like an experiment. This actually seems more like a dictate that could have enormous ramifications, perhaps not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but certainly long-term on the future of authors and books. And I think all I’m saying is, let’s think about this. It’s too important. As a publisher, we have to be strategic, book by book (and it’s important to remember that we’re talking about 1 book; Sourcebooks has 850 ebooks available). These are big decisions for our authors and ourselves. So in situations where the e-format release could hurt the author’s launch, what if we were to wait?”

For a cross-section of debate, be sure to read the comments below Raccah’s statement.

Richard Curtis

Years ago I found myself sitting at a banquet table with Isaac Asimov and decided to take advantage of his proximity to ask him something I’d wondered about for years. Asimov had authored upwards of 400 books, and was represented by literary agents on many of them. Yet he never settled down with any particular one. I wanted to know why.

“The problem with agents,” he explained, “is that they get too much money.”

Naturally, as an agent whose clients have never complained to me about getting too much money, I felt his statement merited some amplification. The garrulous Asimov was happy to oblige: “Publishers that lose money on a big unearned advance don’t invite the author back. The editor gets into trouble for overspending and sometimes even gets fired. Bookstores order half as many copies for the next book as they did for the first one. Everybody loses…except the agent. So, I just handle my own deals, accept modest advances and get rich on royalties. Everyone looks good and everyone makes out fine. Am I right or wrong?”

To help you judge whether he was right or wrong, read author John Greene’s comparison of an author’s earnings on a big-advance contract versus a deal for which he gets one-tenth of the advance, but twice the royalty.

I wonder what Asimov would have thought of the double royalty offered by Vanguard Press, Roger Cooper’s Perseus Books imprint. Billed as “A Unique Collaboration Between Publisher and Author,” Vanguard doesn’t just offer half or even one-tenth of the advance paid by traditional publishers; it offers no advance at all. Cooper, whose imprint boasts such authors as David Morrell, Kat Martin, Mary Balogh, Eileen Goudge and Greg Bear (full disclosure: Bear is a Curtis Agency client and E-Reads author), reasons that the savings on front money can be invested in publicity and promotion. That means that each book must pay as it goes, and from its track record, Vanguard’s books are doing just that. Another virtue of Vanguard’s business model is that it pays royalties on a monthly basis, whereas most publishers issue statements only semi-annually.

Another approach is the one instituted by Robert Miller in his recently launched HarperStudio imprint. Perhaps inspired by the reported deal between Stephen King and Scribner, Miller offers a profit-sharing deal to authors. Publication expenses are defined, then pooled. The author receives nothing from the book’s sale unless and until the expenses are recouped. Thereafter author and publisher split the profits. Miller’s daring business model includes bookstore sales on a nonreturnable basis, a plan that at least one chain, Borders, has embraced. Had Asimov lived to see the day, he might have joined such illustrious HarperStudio authors as John Lithgow, Michael Eisner, Robert Greene, and Leonard Maltin (full disclosure again; Maltin is a Curtis Agency client)

Cooper’s and Miller’s business structures are not for every author, agent, or indeed for every publisher. But colleagues are watching their performance with great fascination, seeking not just a new way of doing business but a way to break the blockbuster mentality that has impoverished all but a few behemoth publishers, authors and agents. (Full disclosure: I’m not one of them.)

Richard Curtis

Next time you visit London, if you have an hour or two after visiting London Bridge, Westminster Palace and Big Ben, drop by a solicitor’s office and sue someone for libel. It will more than pay for the cost of your vacation.

When you do, you’ll be participating in the blood sport known as libel tourism, a legal ploy so appalling that victims have described it as a form of terrorism.

What’s it all about? “Unlike in the United States, where plaintiffs have to prove that the defendant’s statement is willfully false and defamatory,” writes Salil Tripathi in Wall Street Journal Europe, “the burden of proof is reversed in Britain. According to U.K. libel laws, the plaintiff has to show only that the statement harms his reputation — which is the case with almost any accusation, true or false. It is the defendant who must then prove that his allegations were not libelous.”

Because of this radical difference between the British (guilty until proven innocent) and American (innocent until proven guilty) approaches to libel, American authors and publishers and their lawyers have deliberately withheld UK publication rights to many books that might give offense to rich and/or powerful persons or entities that might bring a lawsuit in a British court. If you have any doubts that this is a sword hanging over the neck of every author and journalist, some examples will erase them. You can find them in Tripathi’s article or this one in the New York Times, Britain, a destination for “libel tourism” by Doreen Carvajal.

If you’re wondering why I’ve refrained from identifying the plaintiffs it’s because, frankly, I’m afraid of being sued. This blog is read worldwide and it’s all too likely that some litigious bastard who objects to being called – well, a litigious bastard – would take offense and haul me into a British court, tie me up for years and bankrupt me with legal bills (including the plaintiff’s) and damages.

So, you see, this cruel, stupid and toxic provision of English law has done its job on me, just as it will do on you should you venture over the line. And what does “venture over the line” mean? It means that if even a single copy of your US edition finds its way to English soil, you’re potentially liable.

Recently, two New York State officials proposed a bill that would render foreign libel judgments unenforceable “unless,” as it was reported, “the country in which they are made had free speech protections similar to the First Amendment.” And the New York Times ran an editorial supporting such a measure. “If authors believe they are too vulnerable,” the editorial concluded, “they may be discouraged from taking on difficult and important topics, like terrorism financing, or from writing about wealthy and litigious people. That would not only be bad for writers, it would be bad for everyone.”

The citizens of our nation have made terrible sacrifices, include the shedding of their blood, to defend our Constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech. That a foreign country, let alone the very one in which the foundations of democracy were forged, could have a license to reach into our homes and workplaces and deprive us of our most sacred right is intolerable and unconscionable. I wish I could say it is also unimaginable, but in fact this outrage is being perpetrated on our countrymen – on your fellow authors – as I write this. Every writer, agent and publisher organization must combat it. The British laws that foster this disgrace must be repealed. What is the Authors Guild, the American Publishers Association, the Association of Authors’ Representatives, the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN and other rights organizations doing about it?

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.