That's rather the problem - asking every person who holds the rights can be genuinely difficult.
In your case, the original magazine was published years ago. Even if the publisher had kept your contact information - and didn't lose it when the got bought out by another company, and THAT company didn't lose it in the next level of buying out, etc. - the contact would no longer be accurate all those years later.
Even if they did somehow manage to contact you, it's possible that you wouldn't have responded to the letter asking for rights anymore than they responded to your letter asking for payment.
There could be this same problem for every article in every issue for the entire span of the magazine.
Hasbro could have noticed somewhere along the path to you initiating court procedures and have offered a quick payment of $120 to make you happy instead of the $2000 default judgement, but a corporation as large as Hasbro probably gets a lot of complaints, some of them nuisance complaints or crank calls.
It's quite possible that the $2,000 they had to pay was cheaper - maybe even dramatically cheaper - then the filing and/or legal footwork involved in accurately determining that it was necessary to pay you.
And when determining what you need to do in order to comply with a law is very burdensome or difficult, I would say that it's fair to call that a problem with the law. A good law should make it easy to obey the law - not easy in a moral sense where it's a low standard, or easy in the loophole sense that you won't get caught anyway, but easy in the accounting sense that accomplishing non-nefarious, law-abiding objectives should cost small amounts of money in overhead activities.
I'm guessing for a Hasbro lawyer just to look at the brief, let alone travel out to the court, would have exceeded the $2000, especially given the risk that the other party might actually win. They probably have a minimum threshold under which they just ignore complaints and lawsuits and see what happens.
> That's rather the problem - asking every person
> who holds the rights can be genuinely difficult.
I think that he means that he would have sold all rights when they originally published the article for $120 instead of $100 for first serial rights. He's not talking about this after-the-fact contacting of the rights-holders that you're talking about.
That gets back to the other part of ja27's argument "...they never imagined that they'd want to republish articles electronically...".
I'd be willing to bet that almost no print media is currently securing the rights to directly load content into the brain. They may regret that 50 years from now.
Actually, most rights clearance agreements have boilerplate language about the agreement covering "all mediums and distribution forms, existing or yet to be developed, throughout the universe, in perpetuity."
Basically, 'anything, everywhere, forever'. The language was probably developed by the insurance companies that handle claims for E&O (Errors & Omissions), and who know exactly how common these problems are. Chances are, that's where the $2k came from too; not Hasbro, but Hasbro's underwriter.
I wonder how someone like National Geographic does it, since they seem to have no problem publishing electronic versions. Maybe they've just automatically secured all rights? Or only used staff writers/photographers so they only publish things produced as "work for hire"?
Paying for rights that you don't intend to use until 20 years later sounds like a good way to ensure that your company doesn't last long enough to take advantage of those rights.
Well, depending on how good the article was and how long they retained the rights, it might make it difficult to publish one of their "Best Of" collections. I would imagine (haven't see a contract lately) that everyone is reserving all "electronic" means.
It wouldn't be hindsight for Dragon magazine. They were publishing "Best of" volumes throughout their run. It isn't like we are talking ancient history, the CD-ROM and collections of magazines were well within the time era of most of their issues.
When the ink on the constitution was barely dry, the first US copyright law gave authors a right to their work for 14-years, with an option of one 14-year renewal.
If that were still the copyright law, you'd have had no case unless you renewed your copyright in 1998. And even if you had, by 2012, the work would be public domain, republishable in collection/digital/etc. format by anyone.
So, yes, copyright law is relevant, and shorter terms would free up a lot of magazine material now in limbo because it's impractical to clear the rights.
I sold the first serial rights for $100.
I would have sold all rights for $120 or so.
...but they never asked.