Post

Can authors sue their publishers for not following through on the contract?

My understanding is that this is usually in the contract language. If that's correct and a publisher committed to register and didn't, that would be breach of contract.

yes, but no author wants to try to sue a giant publisher for so many reasons. lol

Yes, although I'd imagine most authors with trad are agented, and I would think it's an agent's responsibility to hold the publishers accountable for a pretty big breach of contract. Either way, I was stunned to find this out.

Did you see that *Suz Brockmann* found out *Random House* hadn't bothered to register copyright on some of her bestsellers? If they can't be bothered to get it right for a major money-making author, there have to be a lot more people with ugly surprises in store.

With probably less than zero inside knowledge I assume that there is simply not a system for this in publishing houses and it's just ad hoc registration for every book as that would explain how so many books slipped through and the bizarre patterns

It's truly unfortunate to hear that so many publishers did not register copyright for their titles. We can definitely help!

What can the Guild do? I've got quite a few books in this position - including with publishers that are gone. Would love some advice on this!

We can offer legal assistance and guide authors through publishing-related issues. This includes unregistered copyrights of titles!

Why did their literary agents not mandate registering with the LoC their copyrights?

The implications (for those who do not understand why we're all suddenly freaking out) is that in the US, if you do not pay the fee to register your copyright, you do not have the same legal protections. @courtneymilan.com did a good thread about this but tl;dr: it impacts the AI lawsuit a lot.

This is surprising to me (as an author whose work was used illegally by anthropic, and also whose work is apparently not copyrighted). It flies in the face of “conventional wisdom” which says the mere act of publishing something copyrights it. Is there really legally no argument to be made here?

So I guess... if you were published by one of the big guys in the US, don't assume they registered the copyright for all of your books. Go look your books up and find out: publicrecords.copyright.gov

I was fully expecting my Amazon imprint's series to not be there, but they even registered the audiobooks.

Interestingly, two of my books with a big five house appear to be copyrighted as *audio* recordings but not also as fiction? I wonder how that interacts with *gestures to all this*

(because this is getting more attention I'm going to add: maybe there is some esoteric way that all of our books are registered but you just can't find them in the database--I don't know HOW, I was a dba & searched every possible way I could imagine them being misregistered--but it is POSSIBLE?)

Foreign books and foreign authors don't need to register in the United States to take action in the U.S. courts. “Congress removed foreign works from Section 411(a)’s dominion in order to comply with the Berne Convention bar on copyright formalities for such works.” Fourth Est., 586 U.S. at 306–07

there’s really no excuse for this kind of failure, too, because the process of registering a copyright is fairly simple compared to, say, a patent. I had to draft a copyright application for a class assignment and it’s pretty straightforward. Unacceptable bs from these publishers.

yeah I have registered my own on self-pub works!