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

[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.