Authors typically have a strong connection to their books, sometimes because they were labors of love and sometimes simply because of the hard labor it took to produce them. Even if the market for those books may have dried up, authors often believe that even their commercially inactive books contain important information, insights, and ideas that would be of interest and value to a wider audience if only the books were more widely available.

Authors may be deterred from seeking rights reversions for several reasons. They may, for instance, be so busy that they forget to ask or put off asking for rights reversions. They may not know how to be effective in accomplishing a reversion. They may believe they are ineligible for a reversion because they failed to negotiate a reversion clause in their contracts. Or the triggering event for a formal rights reversion may not yet have occurred.

But rights reversions may be easier to accomplish, even for those who don’t have rights reversion clauses, than is often recognized. What is needed is a straightforward guide to provide concrete advice to authors about seeking rights reversions. To fulfill this need, the Authors Alliance has just recently published “Understanding Rights Reversions: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available.” The guide is available at .

Authors Alliance, a nonprofit organization (of which I am a cofounder) that launched in mid-May of 2014, aims to represent the interests of authors whose primary interest is in sharing the knowledge in their works to promote the public good. The “Understanding Rights Reversion” guide is the first in a series of information resources that Authors Alliance plans to publish to help authors take advantage of the opportunities that the digital age presents to increase public access to their works.

“Understanding Rights Reversions” offers numerous hypotheticals to illustrate a variety of situations in which authors may want to seek rights reversions. It also tells stories of several authors who succeeded in getting some or all of their rights back so they could take charge of further dissemination of their works. Successful rights-reverting authors had several types of plans for the futures of their books.

Science fiction author Michael Copabianco, for instance, was able to revert rights in five of his books from his publisher, and was able to reach a deal with a new publisher to make some of them available.

Jeff Hecht, the author of five editions of a book about fiber optics, wanted to do a sixth edition of the book. His publisher did not want to put out a sixth edition. Hecht was able to negotiate for a partial rights reversion so that he could arrange for publication of the sixth edition with another publisher, but continue to receive royalties from his old publisher for further sales of the fifth edition.

Katie Hafner wanted her book, “A Romance on Two Legs,” to be available in paperback because she believed that readers of a certain age prefer this format to the e-book format that the publisher was providing. She asked her publisher for a rights reversion, but after explaining her reasons for wanting rights to the paperback version, the publisher became motivated to satisfy her request so that rights reversion became unnecessary.

The idea for creating a rights reversion guide grew out of the experience of Authors Alliance in helping three of its Advisory Board members satisfy their desires to make their books more available. Hafner was one. A second was Nobel Prize-winning author Harold Varmus who wanted to put a digital copy of his book, “The Art and Politics of Science,” online for free, although he was fine with his publisher continuing to sell print copies to those who were interested in having a physical instantiation. The third was Robert Darnton, Harvard’s prominent historian and University Librarian, who wanted two of his books from the 1960s to be available on an open access in a digital library such as HathiTrust.

“Understanding Rights Reversions” points out that authors need to do some homework about their books before asking for a rights reversion, such as finding and reading their publishing contracts and figuring out the record of sales. Authors also should have a plan for what they want to do if they achieve their rights reversion goals. This might include self-publishing, making a deal with a publisher for an enhanced e-book version, depositing the book in an open access repository, or finding a subscription service that reaches audiences of the sort the authors sought to target with their books.

The guide was prepared by Berkeley Law students Nicole Cabrera and Jordyn Ostroff, along with their supervising clinical attorney Brianna Schofield, working closely with Authors Alliance co-founders to prepare a guide that authors of all kinds of books could use to think through their strategies for seeking rights reversions and then making it happen.

The guide was based in large part on information obtained through extensive interviews with publishers, authors, and literary agents. Among the key bits of advice it offers to rights-reverting authors: Be reasonable; be flexible; and be persistent. And realize that publishers generally want to help authors achieve their goals for their books. Sometimes the best way to do that is by granting rights reversion requests.

Before the twenty-first century, there were relatively few options for authors to increase the availability of their books. Because of that, rights reversions were relatively rare, and books generally languished on publisher backlists. The advent of digital networked environments has, however, opened up a dizzying array of opportunities for authors to reach audiences, even if this does not happen through the conventional trade or university press outlets. “Understanding Rights Reversions” explains the when, how, and why of rights reversions, taking into account the mutuality of interests that can help authors and publishers craft agreements that will allow authors to make their books more available.

Rights reversion can be a win-win-win: for authors, for publishers, and for the audiences that are thirsty for the knowledge and insights that these books have to offer.

Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1996, she has held a joint appointment at Berkeley Law School and UC Berkeley's School of Information, and she is also a director of the internationally-renowned Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.

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Researchers affiliated with the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology--Rob Merges and Pam Samuelson of Berkeley Law School, Ted Sichelman of University of San Diego Law School, and Stu Graham of the Georgia Institute of Technology--have just published a report on the results of their survey of more than 1300 high tech startup companies on the uses these firms make of patents and how patents affect them.  "High Technology Entrepreneurs and the Patent System:  Results of the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey" can be found in 24 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1255 (2010).  It can also be found at .

One major finding of the report is that high technology entrepreneurs are patenting at higher rates than previous studies have estimated.  Firms are twice as likely to seek patents if they are venture-backed than if they are not.  Aggregating the results, first mover advantage is the most important basis for competitive advantage for high tech entrepreneurs in the software, biotech, medical devices, and computer hardware fields.  Separated out, though, biotech firms rate patents as most important, with first mover advantage being a close second. Software firms, by contrast, rate patents as the least important of the seven strategies for attaining competitive advantage about which the survey inquired.  For software firms, complementary assets, copyrights, trademarks, secrecy, and difficulty of reverse engineering were perceived more important than patents.

The most intriguing and surprising finding of this study is that entrepreneurs rate patents as providing only weak to moderate incentives to invest in innovation.  Yet, many firms are obtaining patents, in part because venture capitalists and other prospective funders think patents are important signals of the firms'  prospects for success.

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The Google Book Search (GBS) initiative once promised to test the bounds of fair use, as the company started scanning millions of in-copyright books from the collections of major research libraries. The initial goal of this scanning was to make indexes of the books’ contents and to provide short snippets of book contents in response to pertinent search queries. The Authors Guild and five trade publishers sued Google in the fall of 2005 charging that this scanning activity was copyright infringement. Google defended by claiming fair use. Rather than litigating this important issue, however, the parties devised a radical plan to restructure the market for digital books, which was announced on October 28, 2008, by means of a class action settlement of the lawsuits. Approval of this settlement would give Google – and Google alone – a license to commercialize all out-of-print books and to make up to 20 per cent of their contents available in response to search queries (unless rights holders expressly forbade this).

discusses the glowingly optimistic predictions about the future of books in cyberspace promulgated by proponents of the GBS settlement and contrasts them with six categories of serious reservations that have emerged about the settlement. These more pessimistic views of GBS are reflected in the hundreds objections and numerous amicus curiae briefs filed with the court responsible for determining whether to approve the settlement. GBS poses risks for publishers, academic authors and libraries, professional writers, and readers as well as for competition and innovation in several markets and for the cultural ecology of knowledge. Serious concerns have also been expressed about the GBS settlement as an abuse of the class action process because it usurps legislative prerogatives. The article considers what might happen to the future of books in cyberspace if the GBS deal is not approved and recommends that regardless of whether the GBS settlement is approved, a consortium of research libraries ought to develop a digital database of books from their collections that would enhance access to books without posing the many risks to the public interest that the GBS deal has created.

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Many commentators and policymakers have expressed serious concerns about the exclusionary potency of patents on communications protocols and interface designs for information and communications technologies (ICT).  Among the proposed policy responses to potential harms arising from the exercise of such interface patents are excluding interfaces from patent protection, immunizing use of patented interfaces when necessary to achieve interoperability, tailoring certain patent rules to foster greater interoperability, withholding injunctive relief for infringement of interface patents, and treating refusals to license interface patents as abuses of intellectual property rights or violations of competition or antitrust laws.

This Article is the first comprehensive assessment of the twenty-some proposed policy responses to the exclusionary potency of interface patents.  It makes four main points.  First, there is less need for
strong regulatory measures, such as barring patents on interface innovations or treating the exercise of interface patents to block interoperability as misuse of the patents, than some commentators seem to believe.  Second, insofar as interface patents do emerge as more serious impediments to interoperability than they have been to date, there are adequate policy responses in place in various countries that can be used to address them.  Third, some tailoring of patent rules and patent reforms may be advisable in order to promote greater interoperability among ICT systems.  Fourth, patents are often less of an impediment to interoperability than secrecy of interface information, which may be difficult or impossible to reverse engineer, ambiguity about precise details of the interface, and/or changes to interfaces that may accompany new versions or features of an ICT system.  This Article explains why it may be difficult to bring about more interoperability by mandating more substantial disclosures of interface information or regulating what kinds of changes firms can make to their interfaces.

Professor Pamela Samuelson's article "Are Patents on Interfaces Impeding Interoperability?" is available for download on SSRN .  It is forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review.

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