> I imagine that 100x Alan Dean Foster’s back royalties wouldn’t even be noticeable on Disney’s balance sheet.
Disney could be doing this at scale to many authors, this announcement by SFWA may bring a bunch of other complainants out of the woodwork.
The other aspect is that while what you say is certainly true of Disney as a whole, the amounts may be more meaningful for some subsidiary or division, (like, you know, their publishing arm) and the exec(s) that head it.
The only reason I can really think of them doing this is that they don’t actually believe they owe him the money.
It’s reasonably clear that he never held the copyright to the works and it’s not public what his actual contract was.