Anti-fanfic bingo, Line Three

[elfwreck]

Fanfic Bingo, Round Three: Five issues: Raping the characters, MZB, ickyslash, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and immorality. Worthy of five essays, or one big one that ties in threads of ethics and legalities and the conundrum of our court system

Comments

[ivy03]

Here from otw. Oh, I so agree. And it's not just fanfic that's damaged by the Mickey Mouse copyright laws, it's the creations themselves. Think of all the classics that are available because they're public domain so a dozen publishing houses have editions of them. Then think of all the books from the beginning of this century that will never be public domain if Mickey Mouse has its way and will never be classics and will never be read or remembered at all.

I sing in a choir and a few years ago we performed a song cycle by Fuchs that was settings of Robert Frost poems. Fuchs, being a grad student at the time he wrote these, did not get permission to use the poems (oops!). When we tried to perform it, we could not get permission from the Frost foundation to do so. They didn't even respond to us. Now this could be a simple matter of not checking their PO Box, but is this really a good system? To not be able to read a poem in public if somebody doesn't check their mailbox? As a result, we could perform all but two of the poems in the song cycle, since these were in the public domain. We could not read the other poems at the concert. We could not print them in the program. We couldn't even mention that there were poems left out, which if you know anything about song cycles, you know is a travesty.

[elfwreck]

The nasty part of me would want to put a bit in the program about "the remainder of this song cycle could not be performed, in accordance with the wishes of the Frost foundation." But that detracts from the feeling of the presentation, and adds icky gossip to what should be an uplifting performance.

The issue of copyright lasting too long is often overlooked in these dicussions--as if any length of time were reasonable, and people should just wait for that to be inspired by someone else's work.

Allowing 20 years, or even 40 years, for profit is a way to encourage public creativity by allowing some public controls. Allowing life+75 isn't about profit; it's about censorship.

[elfwreck]

I tend to think you had a contract, if only a verbal one... he gave permission, you did work based on that permission, then he revoked it: you could potentially sue in small claims court for the value of the work.

And this kind of mess is why we need copyright reform--whatever rights an author has, those need to be understood before other people base projects on them. And they need to be understood in a way that makes sense to a layman, because we now have a culture & tech abilities for a casual performer to produce hundreds of copies at will; the answer to these problems shouldn't be "well, you should've gotten a signed contract first, that detailed exactly what you could do with his works."

I don't like the growing movement towards more and more paperwork verification requirements in everyday life. (How long before a day-care worker needs a permission slip to sing Disney songs to the kiddies after lunch?)

[kattahj]

This is tangential, but I'm reminded of when Swedish comedy songwriter Povel Ramel had a couple of his songs rearranged by an orchestra conductor to resemble classical music. The Mozart, Haydn, and Alfvén pastiches are on the CD, but the Stravinsky caused problem with Stravinsky's family. As payback, Ramel wrote in the CD leaflet, no member of the Stravinsky family is allowed to record a single note of Ramel music!

How anyone could copyright against a pastiche is beyond me, but I guess it's the usual, "Heck, this is more trouble than it's worth, let's do what they want." (Likewise, writer/illustrator Pija Lindenbaum was forbidden by Mattel to call her picture book "Kenta and Barbie".)

I think the problem is that those who make the laws couldn't care less about culture. Even culture politicians are often retired from some other field and taking an "easy job", at least here in Sweden. (And yet Swedish copyright laws aren't quite as crazy as the American ones.)

[drgaellon]

kattahj said:
How anyone could copyright against a pastiche is beyond me

They can't. It's Fair Use as parody. The family had no legal leg to stand on.