university press rights assignment

["James J. O'Donnell" <jod@georgetown.edu>]

I have a letter before me from an American University press (not 
one that has published any book I have authored) that asks its 
authors to supplement their existing contracts signed before 1996 
by signing an addendum.  They need some such addendum in order to 
be sure they do have the rights to digital distribution necessary 
if they want to make deals to distribute e-versions through 
Amazon, B&N, Google, and the like.

Here's the text:

"The Author grants and assigns exclusively to the Press for the 
full term of the copyright . . . inclusion in electronic storage 
and retrieval systems; production, publication, and exhibition in 
computer software; and any other rights not specifically 
enumerated in any media and technology now known or hereafter 
invented."

Now the old-fashioned book contracts that many of us have signed 
over the years had a nice out-clause:  if the publisher lets the 
book go out of print and it stays out of print for more than six 
months, then the author has the right to claim back all assigned 
rights just by asking.  I in fact did this with a book I 
published with Oxford University Press in 1992, and the full 
(originally three-volume) work is now available on my website 
free of charge for scholars to use.  (OUP later did turn up 
wanting to reprint it, and discovered they had to ask *my* 
permission, which I was happy to give.)

But this addendum essentially signs away the farm forever (ok, 
life plus 75 years, but I regard a date falling somewhere at or 
with luck after the turn of the *next* century as forever from 
now for me) -- all electronic rights in any medium now known or 
to be invented between now and c. 2100 AD, in perpetuity, 
exclusively to a Press whose own corporate and physical survival 
to that date is *scarcely* guaranteed.

This seems to me to give a *lot* more to publishers than they've 
had.  I'd like to hear suggestions as to what a reasonable such 
addendum might be like -- give publishers enough to let them make 
a business plan for e-versions while retaining useful rights for 
authors.  Progress in that direction is occurring in other areas 
such as journal articles:  how now to get the best arrangement 
here?

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown University