Comment Re:Sour grapes (Score 1) 381
The law should be written so that commercial distributors need to sign a contract with the author and the author can't block it by making absurd demands. The law should be intentionally vague so that judges have enough space for punishing the side that's being unreasonable. If the distributor is trying to avoid paying anything, the judge should include every last cent that can be linked to the work in question in the base revenue from which the author will get a share and set the author's percentage high. On the other hand if the author is trying to block the contract, the judge should set a very low percentage and exclude any money from the base revenue where the link with the work in question isn't absolutely clear. In case of orphan works, if the distributor puts into escrow the usual percentage he pays to other authors, judges should uphold that as "good enough" when the author later shows up and asks for more (but that doesn't mean the author can't negotiate a higher percentage of future revenues or some other formula for calculating payments in his contract).
BTW, payright is equally clear in what is and isn't covered - commercial use is covered, anything else is not. The only thing that isn't clear is how much it will cost the distributor if he doesn't sign a contract first. On the bright side, the judge can't make you pay millions when you didn't make a single cent.