Legal Conference Panels and “If You Don’t Respect Your IP, No One Will”

by John Aquino on 07/03/12

 

I had been planning to speak at a legal conference on a panel on copyright issues later this summer, but I no longer am. I agreed to be part of a panel that evolved from a webinar to a panel at a Washington, D.C. conference to a conference in the Midwest. I was going to discuss some aspects of copyright law that I have highlighted in these blogs. As the prospect of traveling 2,000 miles got closer to becoming a reality, panelists started to withdraw and there was no longer a “there” there, so I withdrew as well.

Sessions at a professional conference can be a mixed bag. For some, you rehearse like you’re doing out of town tryouts for a Broadway show. I was part of an intellectual property panel for the American Society of Association Executives Law (ASAE) Symposium in 2008, and we had a really good group of dedicated people. We had conference calls and a lunch, and we sent each other our presentations and gave each other comments. When the day finally came, our panel was to go on at 10:00 a.m. after the executive director of the association gave his address at 9:00. Our group of four waited expectantly in our assigned room at 9:45, then 10:00, then 10:15. One of us went out to see what was happening. He came back and said, “The staff says the executive director is really on a roll.” People finally started coming in at 10:25, and an association staffer told us, “You’re going to have to compress your hour to a half hour so we can make lunch.” So for all our hard work and plans, it was a rushed affair.

For other panels I’ve attended, it was clear that the panelists just sort of showed up and were grudgingly willing to answer questions, or at least the exceptional questions. This requires the moderator to be really, really good, if not dazzling. I’ve seen moderators all but do handsprings to keep the momentum going for a recalcitrant if not bored panel.

I moderated one particular law conference panel, and the presenter was prepared, but for a conference several years before. He opened up his briefcase at the dais, and I could see he had manuscripts that were clipped together with discs for slides attached. He asked me what the topic was, and when I said copyright he reached in and pulled out a packet labeled “copyright.” He was the first speaker for an hour session with four panelists. After 20 minutes, I handed him a note that said, “Wrap up.” After 25 minutes, I handed him a note that read, “WRAP UP NOW.” After 28 minutes, I handed him a note that said, “I have a gun and I know how to use it. STOP.” After 30 minutes, he ended saying, “And so we must go forth, navigating the puzzles, tunnels, and mazes of U.S. copyright law.” He left the dais as people started to applaud, walked down the center aisle, left the ballroom, and we never saw him again. I think he caught a cab and went right to the airport. For him, it was just one of many gigs.

Finally, there are those speakers whom you never forget. When I was a young boy, my mother used to literally drag me to the literary lecture at Library of Congress in Washington. And I still remember these somewhat frail poets speaking about literature with a conviction that comes that even a 12-year-old boy could recognize. I’ve heard president and prime ministers speak, and some of the finest legal minds that ever existed. It’s been like seeing words turn into electricity.

Not that I’ve ever been part of anything that good. But, since I’m on it, I’m going to include some of that ASAE presentation that was crammed into just a few minutes.

I have experienced the worst thing that an author can—his work being sent to oblivion. So my message, if that is what it is, is that an author must make sure that the publications or associations you write for will respect your work. If they don’t, it could simply disappear forever.

I was the editor of a trade magazine for an association. The magazine had been a big money-maker when I came on board, so big that a number of other publications had come into the market to get a piece of the pie. The competition and price cutting was fierce. Our revenue stayed level in spite of it, we remained number one in the industry, and we won numerous national editorial awards. But the association wanted more revenue to fund its other projects and activities. I told the board that if they wanted more revenue we’d have to have more funds to market the magazine. The board would agreed, the marketing money would be in the budget, we’d increase our revenue projection accordingly, and then at the last moment the marketing money would be cut, but not the increase in revenue projection.

We fought on and on, and we were still number one, but it was clear the association really didn’t want to be in the magazine business. The owner of one of our competitors, the number three magazine in the industry, determined that the only way they could beat us was to buy us and made a very good offer. Even thought it meant unemployment—the deal was for our magazine to be merged with the publisher’s at its headquarters—I encouraged the association to take it, thinking that the big publisher would take care of the magazine. With my magazine acquisition experienced, I helped the association improve the deal.

The sale was made. And then two things happened. The big publisher acted as if our magazine was the number three magazine in the industry and not number one. It cut staff, reduced the number of editorial pages, and cut the paper weight. Within four months, the ad revenue had fallen 60 percent. The big publisher ultimately sold the magazine to another publisher and got out of the business of magazines that had editorial content, but not before it did the ultimate damage.

We had had all eight years worth of our content on the Internet and backed up on discs. We turned the discs over to the new publisher. Within a month, the big publisher replaced our Internet content for the previous eight years with the contents of its own magazine, and the content we had created ceased to exist on the Internet. It was like George Orwell’s 1984, and the articles we wrote and published had never been published. The big publisher had always wanted to beat us, and they really did.

I contacted the new publisher and offered to buy the discs myself if they didn’t want them, but they told me they had inadvertently been destroyed. Now the big publisher still owned the copyright, but without the electronic/digital content in this electronic/digital age, the hundreds of articles our magazine had created—some of which I had written, staff writers and outside writers (many of them association staff and executives) had written the rest—were effectively lost forever. Hardcopy exists in libraries, but putting the content back on the Internet would means scanning all eight years, which I can’t imagine anyone doing. (I even went to the Internet Archives Wayback Machine by which you can locate “lost” Internet material and was able to find a dozen or so articles, but that’s probably five percent of what was lost.)

I was told by the big publisher that it had told the association it was going to do this and the association said it no longer owned the magazine and that the big publisher could do whatever it wanted. As I've pointed out, the association lost a great deal of its history (articles by staff and members, conference reports, photo galleries) in the whole process.

And so virtually eight years of editorial content was destroyed and no longer exists.

Message to writers: make sure your publisher respects your work.

Message to associations: your intellectual property has value, respect it, because if you don’t, no one will.

That’s what I told the ASAE, in a briefer manner.

Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino