Creativity Builds On The Past
Some clueless nerds are laughing it up because someone self-published their Star Wars fan-fiction on Amazon and is surprised she’s violating Copryright.
It always surprises me how many essentially intelligent, honest and well-meaning people can be so subservient to the established order. I understand that making your way in life involves accepting certain norms, but this is ridiculous.
Seriously. Why not be surprised? Star Wars is more than 25 years old. In the pre-Disney era, Copyright expired sooner than that. It’s a natural feeling that you should be allowed, at this point, to write a story inspired by the great stories of previous generations — even one which is explicitly an extension of that story — and publish it if you want.
Besides, putting aside the letter of the law, do you think George Lucas (or his parent company) has any kind of moral claim to the characters and places he created which have entertained so many? After the way he’s whored that epic bitch out? For that matter, why is Michael Jackson living out his days in Bahrain, subsisting of the royalties from Hey Jude? Why? Because we fucked this shit up, man! It’s not supposed to be like this.
Publishing your fanfic novel and selling it online is just plain stupid, and publishing your fanfic novel and selling it online when you’re theoretically a professional editor is just about as stupid as you can get without actually receiving head trauma from a tauntaun.
Maybe she’s from the school of “editors who help people right better,” not the “editors who specialize in the byzantine and unnatural world that is information policy.”
Look. If she sold it at a neighborhood bookshop it would have been fine and you would never have known. No harm no foul. In fact, I say no harm no foul with her shit available (to the world, egad!) on Amazon. Come on, what’s really going to happen? She’s gonna sell 50 or 100 copies, mostly paying for postage and printing.
Is this “stupid?” Is it even a problem? Should George Lucas really have the right to control Star Wars 29 years after it was published? Certainly he gets all rights to the actual thing he created, but to all derivative works as well? Does that make fucking sense?
The squares think so; I think because they’re trained to do that. They’re trained to believe that ideas are a kind of property, like a diamond or a bar of gold, even though this is not the truth. Maybe someday they’ll open their minds. I hope they do.
April 24th, 2006 at 5:45 am
Eh. The question of whether it’s moral to have copyrights that extend to a ridiculously long period is an entirely separate issue, and indeed you’ll find that most of the people who are pounding on this woman have opinions on copyright that are somewhat close to what yours appear to be. However, most of these people *also* realize that whatever their opinion on the morality of copyright lengths are (or what they may be doing, publicly or privately, to challenge or change those laws), if one is going to write “fanfic” in the current era, one must not do certain things to attract the attention of the lawyers. For example, publishing hard copies of the book and selling them on Amazon. Doing so draws attention to the basically harmless but still illegal practice of violating copyright law through writing fanfic. Fanfic writers dislike anyone who messes with their fun. It’s dropping the proverbial turd in the proverbial punchbowl.
An analagous situation would be the guy who grows pot in his yard so that a passersby can see it right there with the rosebushes. Perhaps this guy should be *able* to grow pot in his front yard; perhaps the law should change so he *can* grow pot in the front yard. Be that as it may, he’s an idiot for planting it there, even if it’s “just for friends and family,” and most pot growers in the neighborhood are not going to be appreciative of the cluelessness because now the area is under greater scrutiny from law enforcement.
In either case (the fan fiction or the pot) not doing things stupidly is not the same thing as being “squares”; it simply means one does not stupid things.
Also, let’s not make a moral crusader out of Ms. Jareo. She didn’t publish her fan novel to subvert the existing copyright norms; she published it because she didn’t really think she’d get caught. It’s explicit in her “interview” on the subject, where she says “Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it’s there.” Elsewhere in her interview she doesn’t offer *challenges* to copyright law, she offers *rationalizations* as to why existing copyright law shouldn’t apply to what she is doing, none of which hold up in the real world. As Ms. Jareo was not challenging copyright law, just arguing it shouldn’t apply to *her,* she has no more great moral standing than someone who maintains that red lights are for squares and then subsequently gets flattened by traffic.
Speaking as a professional writer and editor, I also think you seriously underestimate the competence issues involved here. Ms. Jareo purports to be professionally an editor *and* a publisher. In either guise she should know relevant copyright law, but even if one allows her to slide in the matter as an editor (because she’s “helping people write better,” which, having read her own work, I doubt) as a *publisher* it goes to the heart of her job. These issues are not at all byzantine; they are rather simple issues that speak to her ability to sell and market not only her own work but the work of others.
Now, personally, I think George Lucas lost the *moral* right to the Star Wars universe when he dropped the steaming pile of crap known as “Episode I: The Phantom Menace” on his slavering fanboys; in a moral universe that movie would have been wiped from the Earth, everyone would agree to pretend it never happened, and then some competent writers and filmmakers would have started over, purely as a public service. Sadly we do not live in that particular moral universe; in this world Lucas *does* retain legal control of the work. More’s the pity.
Now, if a publisher, editor and writer want to release a Star Wars book (or any other work derivative of a copyright-protected work) specifically to challenge copyright law and then wants to take that fight to Congress and to the Supreme Court, I say: Mazel Tov. That’s a conversation worth having, and most of the people you’ve rather non-sensically branded as squares would be ready to have it. However, Ms. Jareo is not that publisher, editor or writer; she’s just some clueless person who doesn’t think a silly thing like law should bother her. To paraphrase Lucas: This is not the champion you’re looking for.
April 24th, 2006 at 6:26 am
Huzzah for trackbacks. And thanks, John, for a thoughtful response to what was (in hindsight) a pretty snotnosed post. I’ll respond in kind a bit later when time permits.
April 24th, 2006 at 6:38 am
Well, what would the Web be without snotnosed posts? No worries, I do many of those types of posts myself. But you did touch on something others have brought up, and it’s worth addressing. Look forward to your response.
April 24th, 2006 at 7:00 am
Man, I followed John’s link here and expected to read a firestorm. Not this “enlightened conversation,” complete with a mea culpa. Talk about being disappointed by the internet…
The only thing I would add is this. Josh said: “Certainly [Lucas] gets all rights to the actual thing he created, but to all derivative works as well?”
[Un?]Fortunately, existing copyright law in the United States does give him that right. 17 USC §106(2) says “Subject to [other stuff not relevant here], the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize . . . derivative works based upon the copyrighted work.”
He may not deserve them any longer, but these rights are still granted to him by U.S. law.
You have some good points there, I just didn’t want to see you tripped up by the law.
K
April 24th, 2006 at 9:10 am
What’s interesting here is that what she’s done is appropriate some names and concepts from the book which would be legal if she called what she created a parody (and it’s almost bad enough to qualify).
April 24th, 2006 at 9:20 am
I think modern copyright laws are stupid and broken, and need to be changed. That doesn’t make her any less clueless. She wasn’t arguing that the laws were wrong, or claiming to be initiating civil disobedience to get them changed.
April 24th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Should George Lucas really have the right to control Star Wars 29 years after it was published? Certainly he gets all rights to the actual thing he created, but to all derivative works as well? Does that make fucking sense?
This may be off-topic and getting into that squirrelly “copyright length” debate this issue has been referenced but overall avoided as irrelevant to the case, I’m wondering what the actual definition of “derivative works” is for the legalities of copyright. Does derivative mean anything produced in the universe created by the original work (and thus would include Episodes 5, 6 and 1-3)? If so, then I fully support a copyright law that allows for Lucas to control SW for 29 years after its production and until the end of his life at least. Otherwise, it becomes a race to see if the creator of the universe can beat everyone else to the punch. Do we want a copyright law that doesn’t even let the author have time to play in their own universe? And, all debates about the quality of the following hypothetical movie aside, what if Lucas has always wanted to revisit the work he created and tell it from another perspective, say what was happening on Tatooine and Alderan? If Another Hope is a legally copyrighted work belonging solely to Ms. Jareo, then she could sue him for producing a movie using his own creation. Does that make sense? Should authors have a deadline for their universe, after which they are no longer guaranteed the rights to publish the work because someone else may have written a similar idea using the characters and such that the author created in the first place? Is there a solid debate regarding this point in copyright length debates?
April 25th, 2006 at 6:28 am
What makes this all confusing to me is: To what extent does Lucas “own” the concept of his far (far) away galaxy? If I were to write a story set in an undisclosed location that was a typical aliens and blasters space opera, but somewhere in the middle one of the characters does a force push or wields a sword made of light, have I crossed the line? Where is that line? How many wookies can I add to the story before I’m in trouble?
April 25th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
To Kellie,
One could easily argue that George Lucas will always own “the authoratative” Star Wars regardless of law, or however many stories are written in the world. As the creator he has the highground for what is ‘official’ in the universe.
But the real-world analogue to that is seen in comic books. More in Japan than America even with Manga, but how many Spider-mans are there? How many Supermen? Batman, Batman Dark Night, etc, etc. One might say that a hundred different takes on the same character/universe just creates a more robust universe.
Was the original Batman live action TV series hurt by the totally different movie, or the again different tv show - which I think is now Batman 2020, but I don’t watch enough TV to be certain.
I din’t see it as a race at all. Unless one of the derivitive works is honestly the exact path the ‘real’ work was going to take…but one would think that a reasonable timeframe could usher that out - such as 7-10 years after the initial creation. If an author hasn’t taken the world on its intended path by then, why can’t someone else?
The issue at hand is that author’s (managers and copyrightholders really) see the money generated off a derivitive work as being potential income they could have had, had they created the derivitive, and believe they have some claim to the derivitive’s profits based on the original work. That is a false notion. The derivitive work just plain wouldn’t exist without the derivitive’s author. The profit wouldn’t exist, therefore the derivitive’s author isn’t ‘taking’ anything that existed in the first place.
A loose argument could be found that if J. Q. Consumer only has $10 to support his batman habit for the month and he spends that on a derivitive instead of the original then that is $10 the original won’t make due to the existence of the derivitive. Again, flawed. That just means that the derivitive is doing a better job….go capitalism. That same $10 might be to support J. Q.’s dungeons and dragons habit instead, if he’s not all that into the ‘original’ Batman.
*sigh*
April 27th, 2006 at 9:04 am
Sam, I suppose I could understand some of your argument if the SW universe was dead. But A New Hope was the first installment of a series, the last of which was just released not even a year ago. So any derivative work in the SW universe, no matter if it addresses the events of A New Hope or Revenge of the Sith, would have to wait for a certain amount of time post Revenge of the Sith, right? That seems to make more sense to me, and would limit the race bit. And it would be a race, even if the derivative work was distinct from the creator’s next project: because the derivative work is in the same universe, the author of said work would be offering direct competition with the original creator’s next project in that universe, not just the original creation.
The intent of copyright law was to encourage authors to create by providing a monopoly to the author for a time (similar to patent law, I believe). As an aspiring writer who has ideas for multiple projects within a universe, I’m a bit worried. The thinking that makes Ms. Jareo’s A New Hope OK would encourage me to wait until I had written all of my ideas in one universe before publishing them, and then I would have to flood the market with my work. That’s against the spirit of copyright law and not good publishing sense. Your argument may make sense for capitalism and fandom, but it doesn’t make sense to authors trying to create new worlds/series.
April 27th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
Hi Kellie,
Thanks for the thoughtfule response. I can appreciate what you are saying, but the analogy with the comic world, I think, still stands. That is a case where derivitive work, if anything, increases the popularity and success of the author of the original.
My point is authors shouldn’t fear the derivitive work, because it can’t really hurt you, as long as it comes after a reasonable length of time. By this I mean 7-10 years. Right now, its life of author + 99 years, if things haven’t changed since I last read up on it. Furthermore, copyright no longer needs to be applied for, as patents do, where it used to need to be. By the single act of writing, you are entitled to the creative rights to a work for your life, and your inheritors are entitled too it for 99 years after, unless they apply for an extension, in which case it could be longer.
Under that law, people could easily still own Shakespeare today, and demand royalties for its printing and use. There currently is no more work going into the public domain to enrich our culture - its all proprietary. Thats wrong in my opinion.
I can understand wanting a limited monopoly to your work, and even in my above post I said 7-10 years, and I still think that is accurate. As an author you have a 7-10 year monopoly on a universe, before people can start publishing their fan fiction.
I would even take it a step further and say that authors should have a monetary right to their work for life - just not so much after they die. Meaning that I don’t think that work should go into the public domain in as short a time as 7-10 years and you can keep gaining royalties off of your work for the rest of your life. But after 7 - 10 years other people can build off of it.
Again, similar to patent law, after 7 - 10 years, you can still sell and make money off of your widget, but other people can do their imitations or derivitives too.
And just to re-visit, derivitives in creative work aren’t a threat really. Competition comes in the form of different - non-infringing works. People buying Daniel Steel instead of Victor Hugo - two totally different markets. But if someone is into sci-fi they are going to buy Arthur C. Clarke and> Isaac Asimov. Even more so if you are into Star Wars to the point of reading fan fiction - then you definitely paid ticket price to see The Phantom Menace, and bought phantom menace the book, and the collectors Light Saber, and then bought the Fan fiction.
I mean, do we really think this woman’s fan fiction is attracting an audience, completely naive to the Star War’s universe, and furthermore, that audience, after reading her fan fiction has decided that she is the penultimate SW author, and it would be silly to spend any money on this Lucas guy?
Thats an extreme example, but if an authors work has been on the market for 7-10 years and hasn’t earned enough popularity to outweigh any fan fiction written about… people probably won’t write fan fiction about it.
Phrased differently. Fan fiction, being from hard core fans, can’t compete with the original too much, if the original had a 7-10 year head start, and was popular enough to devlop a solid fan base anyway.
This conversation isn’t about competition, its about people wanting to make more than there fair share of money - and most times that isn’t the author, but a corporation who bought the author’s rights. When author’s retain their rights on wildly popular creations, 7 - 10 years is ample for them to make a really decent profit, especially if they keep producing.
April 28th, 2006 at 8:11 am
Sam, I really don’t see your point that this about people “wanting to make more than their fair share of money”. So far, this conversation is about one woman’s less than brilliant stumble in the world of current copyright law. My own admittedly off-topic comment was about Josh’s remark that A New Hope was 29 years old and shouldn’t someone else have a go. I disagreed with that and indicated why (competition in a “living” universe being a theoretical factor).
I’m not sure your comic book analogy is valid at all, now that I think about it. Batman is the property of DC Comics, not an author. It’s similar to all those Dungeons and Dragons books. The authors do not own copyright to the D&D universe at all. In fact, they may not even own copyright to their novel, but received a flat fee to write the book and may get some royalties. Similarly, in order to write a Batman comic, you have to be contracted with DC Comics to do so (and probably have to have your story outline approved by them), or you will get sued because DC Comics owns the rights to Batman. These are more like media tie-in works rather than unauthorized derivative pieces.
The patent law analogy isn’t all that applicable either. Patents apply to Widget X for a number of years. (Is it just 7-10 depending on the patent? I really don’t know patent law.) Once the patent expires, then other companies (who will NOT have a patent) will want to make Widget X faster, better, cheaper and consumers will have a choice between Company A’s Widget X and Company B’s Widget X and so on. With novels, copyright is for Novel X written by Person A. If that copyright expired in 7-10 years, no one would be silly enough to republish Novel X under Person B’s name. Why buy Person B’s Novel X when you own the same thing by Person A? No, the work would be a different story all together (Novel Y) and would get it’s own copyright.
I quite agree that current copyright law of life + 70 (not 99, I’m fairly sure) is quite a bit extreme. The old copyright law of 28 years after creation is fine with me. But I think your 7-10 years is way too limited a time, not because of any authorial laziness or whathaveyou but because of the reality of the publishing world. It just doesn’t move that fast. And when does that clock start? Does it start after the last installment of a series? Or the first? Why should it start only after the first if the story continues in the next?
Derivative works ARE a threat to authors still working in that universe (e.g. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s publisher refused to publish a novel because a fan had written something that had an overlap of setting or somesuch and threatened to sue if MZB didn’t share authorship or rights or something: http://www.fanworks.org/writersresource/?tool=fanpolicy&action=define&authorid=53), and even if legal action isn’t threatened, publishers have been known to not release one author’s paperback edition of one novel in the same month or two that their newest hardcover release is out because they don’t want the author to compete with herself in her own universe. If publishers have two authors writing, say, vampire fiction, they’ll stagger the release of those authors’ books by at least a couple of months so the publisher won’t be competing with itself–and that’s not even in the same universe.
When I talk about copyright law, I’m not interestedn getting more than my fair share of money. I’m interested in protecting my rights to a storyline so I can write it until I’m done with it.
April 29th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Seems we have a tleast identified where we disagree. I’m guessing we could go back a forth on this a while and not really find common ground on this issue.
It also seems like we can agree on life + 70 being . Instead of trying to defend my various points above, which would just heighten that level of a debate, I’d rather hear your opinions on what you think would be a fair system if you think life + 70 is extravagant.
What do you think is fair to an author? Hope I’m not infuriating you too badly… hard to have good debate over the internet without coming across sounding angry, and I’m hoping your not.
May 1st, 2006 at 10:20 am
The old copyright law (26 or 28 years) is fine with me, depending on whether allowances are made for extensive works in a single world/universe. As an author whose muse is teeming with epic storylines, I want to make sure I’m allowed the time to have first dibs on my own universes. 26 years should be fine, but 7-10 is definitely not enough unless such a law would allow for an extension or two.
You’re not infuriating me at all, and it certainly wasn’t my intent to come off as angry in my above comments. I’m mostly perplexed, but then the entire concept of fanfiction (meaning specifically “derivative works within a universe for which the canonical works are not yet complete”) confuses me a bit. Part of what makes novels and movies and tv fun for me is to see where the creator(s) takes the world and characters next.
May 3rd, 2006 at 7:34 am
It is interesting, I have a good friend his has almost completed a fan fiction 7th Harry Potter book. His is an involved story, but the basics are that he wanted to write for aliving, around two decades ago, and never really gave up the dream, but circumstances of in his life took him elsewhere. The fan fiction is an exercise in writng for him to “get back into the saddle”
He specifically chose an extant universe to practise in becasue A) he loved the universe, and B) It was fully formed…. How do you practice writing epic work without spending the years developing your own universe?
One could say he should devlop his own, which he is, but would you rather make all your mistakes on your masterpiece, or your Harry Potter fan fiction that you are using as a writing tool to learn development of large novels. And while he has cut out a large portion of the research involved, he’s still doing a Ton and a half for his practice. I don’t particulary care how Voldemort would relate to the Axis in WWII but he’s got that timeline down, amongst a whole lot more I would never think would relate to Harry Potter.
He publishes on his live journal, and gets feedback from his writer friends (myself included) and has gotten noticably better since he started the project. Perhaps Rowling should track him down… but if she did she would have a job, what with 25,000 other stories published on http://www.harrypotterfanfiction.com/ - now I don’t really see those 25,000 as distracting me from buying the 7th book. Rowling is the creator, not these other authors.
One could argue that is harmless if you don’t sell it… which doesn’t hold too much water. If someone is giving out free books in front of the bookstore, it ain’t really good for business.
So, I’m sure everyone writes fan-fiction for their own reasons, and my riend’s reasons are just one possibility.
This is also interesting to me, “art of what makes novels and movies and tv fun for me is to see where the creator(s) takes the world and characters next.”
I can’t speak too much to novels, but in TV the copyright holder is almost never the true creator behind the works. And the end product is almost never what the creator intended. There are rare exceptions, but for the most part the creator sells his or her work to the network, or at least the network gets huge input into the storyline if its only a seasonal licensing agreement. Its one of the things that always struck me as so sad about TV, its almost impossible to get your vision produced there as you want it.
May 3rd, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Good for your friend, as anything that gets people writing isn’t a bad thing in my mind. Bringing it back to my original tangential point, if he were legally allowed to publish said piece because the original Harry Potter was copyrighted in 1998 and therefore 8 years ago, then I would have a problem with it (as, no doubt, would JK Rowling and her attorneys, and, even more to my point, her publisher). Do you think he should be allowed to copyright and publish his “version” of the 7th book since it falls withing the 7-10 years post-creation window you’ve suggested?
Your point about TV show “creators” is a good one, and perhaps creators wasn’t the best word. I should say, the canon of shows/novels/movies is what interests me and makes reading and viewing fun, not the apocrypha or even the idea of non-canonical works.
For a lot more on this issue, I’ll direct you to a whopper of a thread on Tor editors Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog Making Light. They have an excellent discussion going about the relevance, legality, harm, quality, etc. of fanfiction. They also have a better grasp than I do of the Marion Zimmer Bradley case I mentioned above.
May 3rd, 2006 at 11:07 pm
I think we are going for longest thread on Josh’s blog - thats great!
No, I don’t think he should be allowed to make money off of it, but more because it has only been, what, 2 years since Half Blood Prince. I guess I should clarify my 7-10 take, and I’ll even agree with the long side of that - 10.
I would think that a good copyright law would extend from the time of the latest work in the universe. This mostly to protect people like yourself from needing to write it all and publish all at once (or at least be ready to). I just hink that if you haven’t published anyhthing in a world for 10 years - well hey, let some other people have a crack at it.
Of course I would shutter to read some of the rubbish that might come from an author publishing a book in a world just to retain a copyright for another 10 years…. regardless of what they published.
And also, define your version of publishing. I believe if we were to get technical, my friend is publishing his piece on his public livejournal. Technically that makes him liable for $25,000 + per infringement, and since he is doing chapter installments, that is substantial. He doesn’t need to be making money off it to be held accountable…. I don’t know how that fan fiction website has dodged the bullet.
I’ll check the links when I am more lucid - its 3am and I just got home from work… but they look very interesting. but just for even trade, I recently found this through boing-boing, which, though unrelated, is a good thing for writers to know about the publishing world.
May 4th, 2006 at 7:47 am
The piece you linked is part of Tor editor Anna Genoese’s fabulous campaign to demistify the publishing industry. Really good stuff there; I highly recommend it for your friend if he’d like to get back into his own writing and get it published.
And the reason fanfiction stays up on the net is because most authors look the other way and don’t acknowledge it and don’t read it. But if fanfiction ever goes beyond its generally accepted boundaries (such as Jareo’s SW fanfic–if she had just posted it to a fanfic site, it never would’ve become an issue; Lucas is very tolerant of fanfic), it’s gonna get squished.