Apparently, it's not going to work, but I still have to.

a fundamental foundation of how we're calculating rights has been tossed out the window.

I suspected it the first day that I was testing the software. I have been trying to figure out how to fix it and well, it's not my job, but I still am engaged in trying to figure it out because well, that is my job.

Basically, the core of what we want this application is too challenging. It's not as simple as gather up, count, and then report back. Gather up, count, subtract from the first group, and then report back as a solution for figuring out if someone has the rights to publish a book in a certain format, in a certain language, in a certain territory, in a certain distribution channel.

http://www.themathpage.com/aprecalc/...mbinations.htm

Just those 4 topics, think all the languages in the world, all the countries in the world, with the different kinds of places to buy products from mass market retailers (Sam's Club, BJs), to Barnes and Noble to your kids classroom, are all different distribution channels, and finally the different formats, from hardcover to paperback, audiobook to ebook. All of these potential combinations all have potentially different royalties associated with them.

Now I'm not a fan of RIAA nor the big music industry, but now seeing how contracts are drafted and rights and royalties are tracked and paid out, it's freaking confusing and complex.

How does it get complex? Well, simply put you acquire rights to an intellectual property, and as part of those rights there are subrights, like translation rights, that is the ability to translate the book into another language. Now as you look at the populations of other languages, you start to think if the manufacturing and distribution costs make sense for you to do the work, or should you just sell your option to someone else and take a little bit of the profit and then share that back to the author or illustrator.

So if we acquire the rights to publish the TFP book from Halx since he owns the brand. Halx says, "Sure, you can have all rights to my brand, in all distribution channels, all languages, all territories, and all formats." This means we're unrestricted in how we can use this intellectual property.

Next, we'd have to secure the authors who wrote things, and they may say, "sure you can only sell my work in North America." Now in legalese, North America doesn't necessarily automatically include Mexico. Why? I don't know, that's another permutation to the complexity. Some people consider some countries as one thing, and others another. So far, we're up to 2 different contracts that shape where we can sell this product.

Let's get back to our example. So right now, as it is, we can sell this book in United States and Canada. We're not including Mexico in our example for the moment. Now the graphics we want to use, the illustrators agree that we can only distribute their work in the United States. This puts us at 3 contracts.

So now, if we print a book and include all these elements from these 3 contracts, we're only able to sell it in the United States because the most restrictive rights of the illustrators limits the rest of the contracts.

This is probably the most simple example. But once we start to add things, like amendments, because people tend to change and alter agreements, or add new products that tag on conditions to a different existing contract. This happens a lot with licensed properties like Scooby Doo, "Out of the 20 books you used to sell, you can only sell 5 of them and in this format, and only in this distritbution channel. We have this new character, Scrampy, and you can make all books about him only in these countries."

See lawyers and contracts people they are lazy, but they are also cheap. Worldwide rights cost a lot. But if you have them and don't use them, well you've wasted some cash. If you got them and you sell them, you've made the idea of knowing what you can do with the contract even harder.

So let's go back to the original example, but this time, everyone gives up worldwide rights, unrestricted to everything. Well, now I sell the Chinese language to another publisher to sell a Chinese version of the book. I sell all these other languages, and soon I'm chipping away at the entire pie of the rights that I acquired.

Think of it as a pizza. I acquire all the rights, as I sell them, that slice of the pie goes away and I can't really use it anymore. Or I shouldn't.

But here's the dirty little secret. Like backgammon, cheating is part of the game. So long as everyone gets paid no one really cares. You pay your royalties to the author is the author really going to say,"OMFG! you sold my book in a territory/channel you shouldn't have! I'm not taking this money!"

No they normally don't. Since I just mentioned the next confusing part, I may as well mention the sideline of royalties.

So as this pie gets sliced and diced, as rights are bought and sold, someone has to track the royalties. Royalties are great if you can get them. You do the work once, and you get paid and paid and paid and paid.

So right now I'm focusing on the first part, the rights management. The ability for a computer system to take a rights contract, put them into the pool of contracts, pull out information about the rights about that intellectual property in a simple, easy, self serve manner.

What happens? It falls apart on the sheer volume of permutations and infinite possibilities mixed in with healthy doses of exceptions to the rules. One ISBN was crunching 10 different contracts and it was taking 3 hours to figure out and it still didn't have an answer before it was stopped.

So what happens to the people element? People have a hard time reading and understanding the data, they do it the old fashioned way, they read the contracts. And even then it takes skill and knowledge to know the "right" answer. I've been reading them intensively for the past 2 almost 3 years and I've picked it up very quickly. But like all contracts, there's gotchas and holdbacks, to trip you up.

Ultimately, this is what is keeping me occupied for the past few months in the past, and will keep me occupied in the future. We're supposed to release it to the public before Thanksgiving. I don't see that happening in any shape or form.