"Book Packaging"
This NYT article discusses the practice of "book packaging" — entities crafting proposals for publishers, and creating plotlines and characters before assigning them to a writer or group of writers. A book packager called "Alloy Entertainment" reportedly holds the copyright, together with Kaavya Viswanathan, to "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, " which has been in the news due to plagiarism allegations.
In the article, one editor compares the process of producing a "packaged" book to "working on a television show." This is interesting for copyright purposes, because the movie and television industries convinced Congress to develop the "work for hire" doctrine to consolidate copyright ownership in the hands of large companies, at the expense of human authors. At least Viswanathan gets to share her copyright! If she had written a screenplay as a work for hire instead, that wouldn't have been the case, as the copyright laws wouldn't even consider her an "author."
Update: Tom Tomorrow has some observations about book packaging here.
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