{"id":545591,"date":"2010-04-28T02:01:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-28T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100426\/1619469180.shtml"},"modified":"2010-04-28T02:01:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-28T06:01:00","slug":"random-house-realizing-that-its-old-contracts-dont-cover-ebooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/545591","title":{"rendered":"Random House Realizing That Its Old Contracts Don’t Cover Ebooks"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years back, publisher Random House lost<\/a> a series of legal battles against an ebook publisher, over the question of whether or not Random House’s basic contracts covered ebooks as well. The courts ruled that they did not. While Random House’s more recent contracts do explicitly add in ebooks, it was still surprising to find the company trying to fight this battle<\/a> again, with regards to the heirs of author William Styron’s works. Random House was telling authors, including Styron’s heirs, that they could not publish ebooks with other publishers.<\/p>\n

However, knowing full well that Random House had lost that claim in the past, it looks like Styron’s heirs stood up for themselves, and Random House has backed down<\/a>, allowing them to publish some of his works as ebooks with another publisher. Random House is insisting that this is “an exception,” and that it does not apply to other authors. Of course, that’s unlikely to be true for authors who signed agreements with Random House prior to it including specific language to deal with ebooks — meaning that many may now look to publish electronic versions elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Permalink<\/a> | Comments<\/a> | Email This Story<\/a>
\n

\n

\n\"\"<\/a>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few years back, publisher Random House lost a series of legal battles against an ebook publisher, over the question of whether or not Random House’s basic contracts covered ebooks as well. The courts ruled that they did not. While Random House’s more recent contracts do explicitly add in ebooks, it was still surprising to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-545591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}