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I have been trying to think of the principles that could inform a view of this. The
simplest one is that if someone voluntarily enters into a contract  that allows the
publisher to recruit someone else to produce a  new  edition,  and  if  the  publisher
adheres to the terms of the contract,   there  is  a  prima  facie  case  for  regarding
that  as acceptable.  That raises the issues associated with voluntariness that occurred
in scholastic discussions of justice.
 
Beyond  that, we are all working under the assumption that the name on the  cover  should
correspond to the 'true' or 'real' author. However, as  I  alluded  to  in my earlier
posting, and as David Colander makes clear when he refers to the reviewers of textbooks,
authorship can be an  ambiguous concept. One does not have to go into literary theory to
accept  that  there  are  countless  cases where people involved in an article have been
involved in a discussion about whose names should go on  the  article - in most cases it
is probably obvious, but in others it   depends  on  personality,  bargaining  power,
conventions,  etc. Footnotes  acknowledge  debts  that  in  some  cases  amount  to joint
authorship.  In  science  it  is  often the research team even when, I assume,  some  of
the "authors" were probably not involved in actually writing  the  article  at  all,  just
in  doing  the research that it represented.  I  can see no clear unambigous principle
that defines in all  cases  when  someone's  name should be on the cover and when that
person's  contribution should be acknowledged in some other way. David has  suggested
that  name on the cover goes with receiving royalties, but  that  takes  us  back  to  the
previous argument about voluntary contracting.
 
This problem is not confined to books. Encyclopedia entries are a good example,  where new
authors are brought in and start from the previous author's entry.
 
On  a related matter what is the legal significance of the phrase that increasingly
appears in books, "The moral right of the author has been asserted"  or  equivalent.  In
what  way  does  this  go beyond legal copyright?  Why  did this phrase start being used
relatively recently, or has it a longer history than I have noticed?
 
Roger Backhouse 
 
 
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