Q: Our book is out of print, but has been re-printed by someone else and is being sold by someone else, is this legal?
Our group published a 2 volume book in 1986, as fund raiser. We discovered today that someone, who has a cousin who owns a printing company, had their cousin reprint Vol 2 (the only one they had) and that person is now selling the book without our permission. We weren't even asked if they could have the book re-printed or if they could sell it. We found out when they posted on facebook telling everyone they were selling it on a thread we had started asking if anyone would be interested in purchasing the book if we had it-reprinted, (there was close to 100 person interested in it)
A:
Who owns the publishing rights?
If there was no written agreement assigning these rights and you co-authored the book with many people, each of those co-authors has the right to fully exploit the work. Absent an agreement to the contrary, each owner of a joint work is free to exploit the work without the consent of the other owners, but must account for the profits of that exploitation by splitting them equally among all of the joint owners. Equal ownership is presumed even where the authors' respective contributions are unequal.
In short, absent an agreement to the contrary, it is legal for a co-author of a joint work starts reselling the book, but they must share the profits with other co-authors.
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