This article by Arata Sugimoto in the Japan Times reports on sales of hand-written manuscripts of famous authors in second-hand book shops in Japan. Apparently, some fans of famous writers are willing to pay milions of yen for the original handwriting of something they have already in their bookshelves as a printed book.
The article asks who has the rights on these manuscripts.
The answer is simply that whoever has the physical property of the manuscript in question can sell it. If the writer has transferred property of the manuscript to the publisher, then it is the publisher who can make the millions from selling used paper sheets.
However, there might be a copyright angle.
That is, one might ask if a right like that given to artists in the Resale Directive to participate in later price increases of their original work should be extended to manuscripts.
I think one could well make a case for that position. There is no clear reason why there should be stronger protection for a special subset of works like art. The reason the resale right does not cover manuscripts in the first place is probably only that traditionally books are not marketed in the form of their original manuscript.
But the value associated with the fact that the original manuscript exists only once and has been written by a famous author herself is in no significant way different from the value inherent to the same fact with a famous artist.
On the other hand, while this might be true as a point of view when discussing the need for legislation, the law in place now does not seem to recognize a resale right for authors' manuscripts.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at May 11, 2006 06:10 PM