How Germany Keeps Amazon at Bay and Literary Culture Alive

[joshcryer]

110. Have you seen that Harlequin class action that was filed?

A class action lawsuit was filed today against Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd., the world's leading publisher of romance fiction, as well as Harlequin Books S.A., a Swiss corporation, and Harlequin Enterprises B.V., a Dutch corporation, on behalf of authors who entered into contracts with the company.

This lawsuit results from Defendant Harlequin Enterprises Limited, the world’s leading publisher of romance fiction, depriving Plaintiffs and the other authors in the class, of e-book royalties due to them under publishing agreements entered into between 1990 and 2004. Harlequin required the authors to enter into those agreements with a Swiss entity that it created for tax purposes, and that it dominates and controls. However, Harlequin, before and after the signing of these agreements, performed all the publishing functions related to the agreements, including exercising, selling, licensing, or sublicensing the e-book rights granted by the authors. Instead of paying the authors a royalty of 50% of its net receipts as required by the agreements, an intercompany license was created by Harlequin with its Swiss entity resulting in authors receiving 3% to 4% of the e-books' cover price as their 50% share instead of 50% of Harlequin Enterprises' receipts.

What this means to the authors can be illustrated by an e-book with a hypothetical cover price of $8.00. The “net receipts” made by Harlequin Enterprises Limited from the exercise, sale or license of e-book rights would be at least $4.00, of which authors would be entitled to $2.00 based on their 50% royalty. Computing the “net receipts” based on the “license” between Harlequin's Swiss entity and Harlequin Enterprises, Plaintiffs’ 50% royalty amounts to only 24 to 32 cents.

http://www.harlequinlawsuit.com/

It's a kind of neo-Stalin-Luddism, imo. To actually argue for the status quo under the guise of protecting literary culture against technological innovation is just mind numbingly fucked up. As far as I'm concerned we should care first and foremost about the authors themselves if we're going to pretend to care about literary culture.

Ironically, I do think "cultural imperialism" as a concept exists, but I think it can't be stopped nor is it a bad thing. I consider it rather cultural diversification. The term "imperialism" has become so loaded it's become meaningless and it's certainly never used consistently by those who throw it around so much (ie, US economic imperialism = bad, Chinese economic imperialism = crickets).