ABSTRACT
Copyright law underpins publishing activities and can be viewed, if somewhat rudimentarily, as possessing two fundamental pillars: pecuniary rights and, contrastingly, the moral rights of the author. Throughout the English-speaking territories, these pillars have been debated, modified and developed from as early as the late 1400s when the invention of the printing press transformed publishing into a thriving business (Zapata López 2002, 3). At the time, the advantages of mass production revealed commercial opportunities that publishers and writers would have been foolish not to exploit. However, these opportunities also became a tug-of-war between publishers, authors and booksellers. From these rivalries, a very convincing argument emerged that pitched a romantic ideology of author as a genius, who possessed distinct perpetual rights over their intellectual property.
This chapter contextualises contemporary commentary on the publishing landscape within its historical underpinnings and introduces black box theory as a way of exploring the ‘post negotiation space’ in the contemporary field. In order to do this, relational contract theory is explored and the contract is viewed as a cultural artefact. Bourdieu’s literary field and Fried’s ‘promise’ theory also highlight a fundamental conflict in the publishing contract.
