Electronic edition: Rights?
Posted by:
karlpov (IP Logged)
Date: 18 November, 2011 01:16AM
A near-complete collection of Clark Ashton Smith’s short stories (133 of them) is available electronically from Barnes & Noble (epub) and Amazon (Kindle format) for just under two bucks, under the somewhat misleading title The Ultimate Weird Tales Collection. It must be admitted that this is a lot easier to carry and a lot cheaper than the Night Shade Books edition.
Some caveats, though, aside from that title. There is no accompanying information about CAS or his work, just the stories by themselves. And they are arranged neither chronologically nor by series (Hyperborea, Averoigne, Zothique, etc.), but alphabetically. Not just alphabetically but alphabetically including articles (a, an, the), an at best semiliterate practice which puts up front a bit of piffle called “A Copy of Burns†which would not merit reprinting except for CAS’s name being on it.
There is a curious copyright notice: “All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.†The publisher calls itself Trilogus Media Group. No copyright owner is named.
Considering the price on this, I find it difficult to believe that any copyright owner is getting a cent. Almost certainly all this stuff is public domain, or it would cost more than $2. I don’t know to what degree electronic formatting, as applied to a public domain text, can be copyrighted. Anyone else have ideas on this?