The Settlement Administrator has given claimants another extension. This morning, the official site states:
For claims where all claimants do not agree on the appropriate allocation for a work, claimants may submit additional information supporting their proposed allocation. The Settlement Administrator asks that claimants submit this information expeditiously and within 60 days of receiving access to the consolidated claim information. Please note that the 30-day period referenced in FAQ 26 (and referenced in the notices sent between September 2 and 4) has been extended to 60 days to permit Class Members more time to gather documents and attempt to resolve any disagreements. For the avoidance of doubt, this initial time period (originally 30 days and now 60 days) does not create a deadline by which all disagreements between co-claimants must be resolved. The dispute resolution process may, for some, take even longer than 60 days. Any works for which disputes are not resolved before the first distribution of Settlement payments will not be included in the first distribution and will instead be included in a subsequent distribution.
(It's about one scroll down on the site front page, on a regular laptop/desktop-sized monitor.)
This is sort of good news, but reconfirms some yuuuuuuuuuuge blindspots. In no particular order:
- The various forms of "disagreements" information provide no contact information for those with whom negotiation may be necessary, and very minimally identifies the basis for other claims. This is particularly problematic when there's been a claim made by a business entity that wasn't initially involved and the percentage claimed is stated as "default" — an author's IP holding entity, an anthology editor's estate, a publisher that was bought out… but none of those forseeably happened, right?
- There's no indication whatsoever of what constitutes appropriate "documentation" to submit. Consider an author's estate that has no contact with the agency, or worse that the agency has gone out of business (or is in active adverse litigation…), and the heirs otherwise have no clue where to look in the piles and piles of banker's boxers of papers for the formal reversion paperwork from a publisher that just claimed "default" on everything without checking its own records. Presuming, that is, that the reversion paperwork was ever formally done; especially in the early days of the century, there were more than a few instances of major commercial publishers of refusing to even respond to reversion demands based on the work going out of print. (Remember the "availability through POD keeps the work in print, even after we've remaindered all of the existing stock" nonsense?)
- There's no consideration of the problems with intestacy. I'm afraid that authors do die, all too often intestate. And sometimes sole-proprietor publishers have the same problems.
- The less said about checking/disclosing the status of publishers (or, for that matter, those IP holding entities) to "do business" because they're not in good standing, the better.
- Perhaps some acknowledgement of the "D" and "B" words ("divorce" and "bankruptcy"), and how those further complicate both communications and negotiations, might have been appropriate; I'm only aware of a metric buttload of such instances. And that presumes "finality" of any internal court/claims process…
There is, of course, a lot more.
These are obvious circumstances that should have been anticipated even long before the "parties" reached their settlement, but they didn't ask questions of those who might actually know something about the circumstances of authors who aren't presently appearing in The New Yorker (or never, like, coauthored anything). It's too early in the new academic year (another lacuna!) to assign grades, but this first draft is not encouraging, except in that reality has intruded yet again on the schedule of events.