----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]