Thinking...thinking...

[ksmith]

I read this, and I ponder. Especially this statement by tnh in makinglight:

It is right that what's new and unique in a writer's work be recognized as peculiarly their own. That's fine. But copyright is not a statement of inalienable natural right. It's a social convention, intended to reward (and thus encourage) writers and publishers to produce more books. To pervert it into a claim of perpetual ownership, especially when that claim is being forwarded by large entertainment conglomerates, is the moral equivalent of driving a fence around the commons.

I will admit that I do not currently make a bulk of my income from my copyrights. I would be interested in hearing how someone who does feels about some of these discussions.

Do I, or my heirs/assignees, have the right to own the rights in perpetuity of a work of entertainment that I have written? If we were talking about a company, a family fortune, or other property, the answer would be, with some limits, yes. I/they would own these rights/things/companies until we ran them into the ground/spent it all/outlived our commercial usefulness/whatever. It seems to me that the willingness on the part of some to restrict these rights is in inverse proportion to the income they derive from these or similar rights. I could be missing something here, of course. But I get edgy when I see the copyright as social convention argument, as though only good manners is standing between Jani Kilian and public domain.

I will admit that my kneejerk reaction to the issue is "It's my fuckin' book. My fuckin' characters. I wrote it as no one else would. It is a work of entertainment, an option, like the chocolate cookie or the tiramisu. No one needs it to live. No one's freedoms will be infringed if it is not available to be read. It is not a new method of sorting information, or a vaccine. It is a luxury of life, not a necessity. Not a right.

Comments

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I make the bulk of my income from my copyrights. I want and expect my copyrights to support me in my hopefully full and extended old age.

After that? I really don't have a problem with my work going forever out of print. Like you, I'm writing to entertain, and it stands to reason that my sort of thing won't be very entertaining in seventy years or so.

I point to the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which have been kept in print by a very aggressive estate. I loved ERB's work when I was a kid, but, honestly, his books are laughable now, and ought to be let to fade away. If this means that his heirs and assigns will have to go out and get real jobs -- or write their own stuff -- then so be it.

Call me an attitude case.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

My feelings, for what they're worth. Part devil's advocacy, part being an attitude case because it's Saturday afternoon and I should be writing.

It's my understanding that copyrights can be treated as assets during the life of the creator. If a writer gets divorced, or goes bankrupt, copyrights are treated as property to be divided, or as assets included in net worth. Then, at some point after the death of the creator, those assets, which may still be worth something, are taken away because of the implied copyright agreement, which is, as jlassen said, 'we didn't steal your shit while you're alive, so it's ours now.'

And part of me isn't comfortable with this. If it were another type of asset, stock certs or a painting or something of a more traditionally concrete nature, my heirs, or whom/whatever I willed my estate, would have it for as long as they wished. Yes, they might sell those rights to a corporation, or they might not. And future readers may lose out, or they may not. I know it's messy, but messy has been ironed out before, and part of me just gets my back up when I think that total strangers have a greater right to possess something I've worked to create than someone I feel merits it.

And imho, the attitude that heirs/assignees should get real jobs is part of the reason why writers will always be the ones having it done to, and not the ones doing. Because we don't take the long view necessary to build a power base and change attitudes.

And I don't mean to sound shirty, but when I read that on one hand, copyrights really aren't going to be worth anything someday anyway while on the other hand, corporate entities are battling to keep the rights they have...some of which used to belong to artists with heirs...I can't help but feel that the artists in the middle are going to get screwed again and folks on both sides of the battle are going to tell us to bend over and get used to it.

And I have no answers. I do feel that if it ever reaches the point where once something is written, it's Out There, I may stop writing fiction.

I tend to think that a little commodification of the operation might help writers more than hurt them. Especially since we are reaching the point where it's every person for their economic self anyway.

[jlassen.livejournal.com]

I am a publisher, and I derive most of my income from copyright and IP law. And I am opposed to perpetual copyright. Copyright was a law/social convention that has NEVER traditionally lasted longer then the lifetime of the creator.

Copyright is a covenant between creators and consumers... Essentially, the public agrees to not pirate your shit during your lifetime, so as to encourage you to make more shit that they will enjoy. But in exchange for this limitation on their freedoms to do whatever the fuck they want, the public expects your work to fall into the public domain after you have died. Everybody wins. Public gets new works by popular creators, and creator gets paid to create, and eventually, in exchange for its restraint in not pirating your shit to begin with, the public owns the creations.

This covenant was never really designed to take immortals into considerations, and that is exactly who is driving the extension of copyright laws... immortal corporations, who see no reason why the public should get anything out of the covenant between creator and consumer. Immortals want it all, and want it forever.

This is what I think PNH was getting hat... Copyright is NOT an some kind of natural right. Its an agreed upon set of rules which allows everyone to benefit. The second you take away the public's carrot, and prevent material from becoming part of the public commons/public domain, you no longer have an equitable bargain, and instead have a set of rules that benefits those with the most money.

This isn't just about corporate created things like Mickey Mouse... what if Bertelsmann, or some other company made it policy to pay off an author, and/or estate, so as to buy the copyright of most/all books upon the author’s death. Now the copyright holder is immortal. Now all books will forever stay copyrighted and never enter the public domain.

Imagine if every local theater group had to pay a tax to penguin putnam, every time they put on Shakespeare in the park. Shakespeare has become part of a shared culture heritage, as have millions of creative works from he last 500 years... If you let immortals keep copyright forever, that heritage becomes comodified, or lost, or marginalized in the pursuit of maximizing a corporations assets. No one benefits from a scenario of perpetual copyright, except the person with the biggest checkbook.

There is no reason why, after 100 years, Star Wars, and the music of the Beatles, and the books that I publish tomorrow shouldn't be part of a common cultural heritage that EVERYONE can enjoy, exploit, and incorporate into their own creative works. Shakespeare, for example, would have been sued out of existence for infringement upon existing works, if perpetual copyright had been in place while he was writing.

Just my $.02

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

There is no reason why, after 100 years, Star Wars, and the music of the Beatles, and the books that I publish tomorrow shouldn't be part of a common cultural heritage that EVERYONE can enjoy, exploit, and incorporate into their own creative works. Shakespeare, for example, would have been sued out of existence for infringement upon existing works, if perpetual copyright had been in place while he was writing.

How would this work as opposed to a suit for plagiarism?

I ask because I see SF/F books currently on the market with many similar elements, but I don't see authors suing one another for copyright infringement. I honestly don't understand, and if there are some links out there that lead to understandable explanations, I'd appreciate them.

[jlassen.livejournal.com]

Plagerism is when you take a work, and copy it word for word, or nearly word for word, and claim it as your own. If I published a stephen King novel, and put a different authors name on it, that would be plagerism.

Copyright has nothing to do with plagerism. Copyright is when *I* print/distribute/sell a stephen king novel, even though I have not purchased the right to do so from king.

The other thing copyright law allows for is "derrivative works". Any story set in the world of X is a derrivative work of X's creator. Any story featuring characters created by an author is a derivative work.

Any translation to a new form (novel to tv, comic, video game, movie etc) is also covered as a derivative work.

You don't see SF writers suing each other because its small potatotoes... book publishing is small potatoes, and you don't see it as much... but in movies, you see it all the time. When the profits on a given book are big enough, you see it, like in The Da Vinchi Code.

nag lawsuits suggesting that an IDEA was stolen, or came from some other copyrighted work... that the finsihed product that is making a lot of money is a "derrivative work" of somebody elses copyrighted idea... This happens all the time. Since all crative works are a dialog with what has gone before, keeping EVERYTHING under copyright forever invites an increase in this phenomanon...

The THREAT of litigation is almost as bad as an actual successful lawsuit. So take every idea, and every story, and give it to an immortal corporation the rights to that idea/concept, in perpetuity, and you are setting up a new tax on the comercialization of the creative proccess. Anybody who wants to sell a new work will have to buy derivative works liscences from a corporate liscencing beuro, in order to escape the threat of lawsuits. (Think of hip hop, and sampling and how samples are liscenced now, except apply it to EVERYTHING.)

Worse, a perpetual extension of copyrights ensures that uncomercial works will dissapper forever, if there is no clear estate to liscence the works from. If William Hope Hodgson wasn't in the public domain, I couldn't publish him, because THERE IS NO ESTATE to purchase the rights from!! For obsucre work from much of the "post disney" era, this is a legitimate concern. Because there is a whole generation of writers who's work will not be reprinted and packaged up for the next generation, because Disney has to keep its mascott under copyright.


Sorry. This last bit is completley seperate, but is another downside to this whole perpetual copyright thing.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

I'm very grateful that perpetual copyright doesn't exist. I'd never have read Jane Austen if it did. Instead, I was able to pick up all her books from Project Gutenberg around this time last year and *devour* them. Since Miss Austen is long dead, any money I would have spent on her books (none, as I was flat broke at the time) would not have benefited her. And when I buy a book, I prefer that the maximum money go to the author, who ought to get *some* benefit from my enjoyment of their work. I'm also comfortable with it going to the author's husband/wife, since in my view marriage is a partnership. But the kids, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and other assorted relatives did not do the work, so I can't quite feel as happy handing them the royalties.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

But the kids, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and other assorted relatives did not do the work, so I can't quite feel as happy handing them the royalties.

Even if the writer might have wanted it that way?

[jlassen.livejournal.com]

The public ceedes the write to copy and reproduce a copyrighted work, in order to encourage a creator to continue making new works (by allowing the creator to get money in exchange for his/her creations.)

Once the writer is dead, there is no new creation.

Once that option of more works from an author is removed from the equation, there is little incentive for me to keep giving his descendents money... there is no chance of new works... unless you count derrivative works. And oddly enogh, derrivative works become MORE likely and possible, once the work passes into public domain.

An interesting side effect... once a work becomes public domain, Fan-fic becomes legal, and thus really good writers can make MONEY from writing what is essentially "fan-fic", if they so desire. William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land" is an example of this -- there are many contemporary fantastic writers out there who have written stories set in the world of The Night Land.

The infinate variations of derrivative works from "dracula" or "frankenstein" are another example. Yet another exmaple is Alan Moore's graphic novel, The Leauge of Extraordianry gentleman. Now THAT is a piece of Hip-hop creations... sampling and mixing together all kinds of different works creating an exciting new work.

Anyway, not trying to jump down any ones throat, or preach. Just following a train of thought.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, even then. I don't go out and buy Todd McCaffrey's books just because his mom has him as her designated heir to Pern. I may someday be bored and try one of his from the library, but I'm not in any real rush. When I discovered that the "new" Darkover novels being published under MZB's names were not primarily her work, I stopped buying them. I don't make a great fuss over buying Heinlein books for my Dad's collection new. Tho if I can, I try to buy new there.

The author has the right to designate heirs, and I've got the right to spend my money as I wish. That means if your stuff was out in hardcover, I'd buy the hardcover in preference to the paperback, but Miss Austen is in an electronic edition. If I can't choose a public domain edition and the author is dead, then it's likely the book will languish behind the books of authors who are alive and will get some good from my money. I can get *more* from them see :).

(don't take this as any kind of moral stance please, this is how I prioritize things with my book buying money. I can't afford every book in the world that I might want, so I pick and choose)