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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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