View From the Phlipside - Media Contracts

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, Radio, the Movies and more.  I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View From the Phlipside.

Ah the wonderful world of contracts.  It’s easy to forget sometimes that all this media we enjoy - communications, entertainment, video, audio, cell phone, internet, books and more would not exist as we know them if there weren’t contracts signed somewhere.  Every time you agree to a User’s agreement you are making a contract.  If I’m honest I will admit that I never even bother to read them.  For the average person clicking on an End User Licensing Agreement that usually not a big deal.  But contracts still ARE a big deal and two of them hit the news in the past month.

First we have the case of a local man, western New Yorker Paul Ceglia of Wellsville, claims to have a contract that would give him 84% ownership of Facebook.  That would probably be a pretty cool thing to possess.  There are questions surrounding this story, like why he waited 7 years to try and enforce the contract.  Did he not know that the whole Facebook thing had taken off?  I find a couple things curious.  First Facebook’s reaction is that the claim is ridiculous followed by the statement that the statute of limitations has run out at the six year mark.  If it’s really ridiculous why worry about the statute of limitations?  Makes me wonder, it does.  The other is how Ceglia can claim ownership of Facebook when his contract appears to pre-date the invention of the website by almost a year.

The other contract is one between William Paul Young, the author of the best selling Christian novel “The Shack”, his original partners at Windblown Media and the unfortunate mainstream publisher Hachette Book Group.  The original contract was one of those simple, just between friends in case this thing actually ever sells kind of a deal.  12 million copies later suddenly we’re talking real money and as per usual it’s making people crazy.  The only folks I feel sorry for in this are the publishers at Hachette Books.  All they want to do is pay someone the royalty money in peace.

Every attorney out there is shaking their head sadly at all this.  As much as we like to bash the lawyers they know that these problems could have been solved right from the git go.  Instead people pretend that contracts are no big deal.  84% of Facebook?  12 million copies sold?  I think I’ll start reading those agreements a little more closely from now on.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010