The NY Times has just published a story on the renewed controversy concerning publication rights in electronic versions of books originally published in the days before digital book readers. Copyright students will recall the lawsuit from 2002 pitting dead-tree-book publishers like Random House against digital publishers like RosettaBooks. They will also recall that these cases tend to be resolved according to contractual interpretation (i.e., did the original licensing agreement include new media or not?) rather than copyright doctrine. I guess with the exploding success of Kindle, &c. the publishers have decided that the issue is worth re-litigating.
Are there important social, cultural, or economic implications of these suits or is does it just come down to who gets paid for already-created works? Should one party be made to bear the risk of not specifically including or excluding new technologies from licensing? Could the law assign the rights to unforeseeable media to one party or the other to reduce transaction costs?
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