A cool story. Thanks for sharing. It also speaks to something I cut out of my (fruitless) search for the proper contact for Eminem's music publishing. Which is that the "easy" route would have been to write directly to Eminem's record label -- which has a published address, but which may not actually control his publishing rights ... but who may still have been happy to have me write them a fat check for permissions that they didn't have the legal right to give me anyway. cheers gil On 09/03/2010 10:50 PM, Dan L. Burk wrote:
To be sure -- and this may be what Dan is getting at -- those several months of frustration were undoubtedly easier than being in the receiving end of a copyright infringement lawsuit. Even if “fair use” would have won out in such a case. I get that. Exactly.
And, sometimes you are surprised.
I got a polite note from an anthology editor a couple of years back, letting me know that he was including one of my articles in a collection on digital ethics that he was preparing.
I wrote back and told him that I was happy to give permission for him to reprint the article in the collection.
He replied that he had already gotten permission from the publisher of the journal where the article had first appeared, and had paid $500 for it. He was just dropping me a courtesy note to let me know about it.
I wrote back again and let him know that, since I do NOT assign my copyright to journals, I was the copyright holder, not the journal, and I was happy to give him permission for free. Also, that he should ask for his $500 back, since the journal publisher had no right to it.
He got his permission, my work became a bit more widely circulated, and he saved $500. DLB