Drama Aesthetics and Criticism text - request for help

[Don]

Dear Moira:

This kind of thing happens regularly and no one knows how to properly deal with it.  The publishers don't take it very seriously because there is not enough money involved for the amount of work they have to do for each request. The authors rarely receive anything anyway nor do the editors.  Having edited some 60 volumes of material over the years,  I regularly receive annual cheques of $12 and $15. 

But you are asking for ideas on how to deal with it.  Here's my suggestion.

If your bookstore won't make a course kit for you, make it yourself and get it printed yourself.  Don't use an entire book.  Don't use more than is absolutely needed.  Once you have that, send a letter requesting permission to the publishers. you have then done what you have to do.  If the permission is not forthcoming or if the publisher says they don't have rights and don't know who does, you have tried to get permission. You can prove it in a court of law.  You can, in fact, keep writing such notes until someone responds concretely.

The fact is, a lot of the stuff in dukore is out of copyright anyway.

For 30 copies of an excerpt from Lessing or something, I doubt anyone will take you to court.

Of course, if you ask a publisher's lawyer, they will tell you that you must follow a more legalistic path.  Anyway, for what it is worth, that's what I would do.

Good luck.

Don

> On Aug 8, 2014, at 9:47 AM, Stephen Johnson <stephen.johnson at UTORONTO.CA> wrote:
> 
> From Moira Day <moira.day at usask.ca>
> Subject: Re: Drama Aesthetics and Criticism text - request for help
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I've just had a problem come up with less than a month to go before the term begins, and any help or advice people could give me would be welcome.
> 
> For years I used Bernard Dukore's *From the Greeks to Grotowski* text to teach my 400 level course in Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Even when the book went out of print, I was for any years able to get permission from the press to print the relevant excerpts from the text. This year, - I just found out today - for the first time, none of the presses originally affiliated with the book, claim to have the copyright for it or its extracts anymore, or know who has it. (And our copyright centre checked this out with 5 different presses before turning to the author.) The author has said he doesn't know who would have it now either, but if he could see which excerpts were involved he can probably tell us where we need to write to get individual permission to use them. But with less than a month before the class start, this would probably take too long to do.
> 
> If anyone else has encountered a similar situation and has had experience solving it quickly, please let me know. The advantage of the original text was that it was very comprehensive, going from the classical through to the contemporary period, it gave abstracts of the actual texts rather than just summaries, and many of the abstracts were short but very helpful. The older selections between the Greeks and the 19th century were particularly useful in teaching a survey course. I don't know if there would be a similar text still in print that would be a good substitute for this one - or how difficult it would be to track down the original readings in a different medium. Our copyright person suggesting checking electronic sources - but at least on a first glance, there don't seem to be e-books of the original text available either.
> 
> As mentioned, any help or advice would be much appreciated.
> 
> Thanks, and have a good summer.
> 
> Moira Day
> Dept. of Drama
> University of Saskatchewan
> Canada
> 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://artsservices.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/candrama/attachments/20140808/53846ef6/attachment.html>