The Work of Zombie Authors is Never Done
If you have ever needed an example of why our current system of copyrights needs radical improvement, this is it:
A Stanford University professor on Monday sued James Joyce's estate for refusing to give her permission to use copyrighted material about the "Ulysses" author and his daughter on her Web site.
In the lawsuit, Carol Shloss, an acting English professor and Joycean scholar, challenged the estate's assertion that she would be infringing on its ownership of Joyce's image by quoting his published works, manuscripts and private letters on her scholarly site.
Instead, Shloss accused Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, and estate trustee, Sean Sweeney, of destroying papers, improperly withholding access to copyrighted materials and intimidating academics to protect the Joyce family name. - Yahoo News (via BoingBoing)
And from the centenary of Bloomsday two years ago:
In the run-up to the centenary of Bloomsday on the fictitious day on which [James Joyce's] novel [Ulysses] is set, organisers of the ReJoyce festival are expecting thousands of fans from around the world to descend on the city by which Joyce felt so unloved and which he left for self-imposed exile in 1912.
However, last week a copyright dispute escalated when Irish MPs passed emergency legislation preventing an exhibition at the city's National Library from being sued.
Stephen Joyce, the author's grandson, said the James Joyce and Ulysses exhibition - which is displaying draft notebooks from the novel - might breach copyright legislation. Mr Joyce, who guards the family literary estate, has successfully targeted publishing houses, stage shows and internet sites in the past.
His warnings have already stopped plans by the festival to hold public readings of Ulysses and a proposal by the Abbey Theatre to stage Joyce's play, Exiles. - Telegraph.co.uk - 14th June 2004.
Stephen Joyce had not even been conceived when his grandfather, James Joyce, wrote Ulysses, the greatest Irish novel of the last century. So what exactly gives him the right to collect royalties and dictate the uses of his ancestors work? He had nothing to do with it's writing, if he possesses any talent beyond frustrating scholars with the capricious destruction of historically significant documents, it made no contribution to the novel. How can any one person claim absolute dominion over a work with such huge cultural significance, a work that has become inseparably integrated into the Irish identity? Being a post-modernist by nature I would even argue that, were James Joyce himself still alive today, his 'opinion' of the work would be no more and no less valid than anyone else's, and that he would have no more right to exclusive control over this part of our psyche than does his grandson.
Frankly, I find the very idea that a work this significant could still be under copyright in any part of the world after more than eighty years to be offensive, I don't have to trust the feeling in my very bones to know this is just wrong as it defies any logical reduction.
This is not the way to foster the arts, this has nothing to do with cultivating creativity and encouraging artistic expression, no extension of copyright is going to bring James Joyce back from the dead to write more novels. So tell me, where is the advantage to James Joyce, to us, to Ireland, to anyone in this world other than Stephen Joyce, in withholding any of his work from the public domain? What is the protection of copyright doing for anyone save those who have taken most and contributed least? We are putting the breaks on our culture so that a single estate can receive money for doing nothing. There is no great potential being protected by these laws, no good is coming of them, and none ever will.
Big business has been persuading governments around the world to repeatedly extend copyrights, every time we reach a stage where something form the last century might actually default to the public domain they writhe and yammer until lawmakers have pushed the tipping point back another few years. If they had their way you can be sure copyrights would be extended to eternity. The case of Stephen Joyce shows how the life-plus-ninety years copyright works on a human scale, and proves just what is wrong with it: money. The extension of copyrights has always been about making money, not about making art. Stephen Joyce will never write a novel or a short story or even a letter by James Joyce. Copyrights do not raise the dead, copyrights do not allow us to channel their spirits and copyrights do not make literary geniuses out of talentless, money-grubbing heirs.
At this point I really have very little sympathy for those industries and jobs and livelihoods that are kept artificially alive through this ludicrous system. Business models may break, corporations may topple, factories may close, people may find themselves out of work - if that is the price of change, if that's what it takes to save the art from the idiots, so be it.
It has to stop.
[Ulysses is not under copyright in the US so feel free to download the complete text from Project Gutenberg, and avoid supporting Mr Stephen Joyce in any way]
A Stanford University professor on Monday sued James Joyce's estate for refusing to give her permission to use copyrighted material about the "Ulysses" author and his daughter on her Web site.
In the lawsuit, Carol Shloss, an acting English professor and Joycean scholar, challenged the estate's assertion that she would be infringing on its ownership of Joyce's image by quoting his published works, manuscripts and private letters on her scholarly site.
Instead, Shloss accused Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, and estate trustee, Sean Sweeney, of destroying papers, improperly withholding access to copyrighted materials and intimidating academics to protect the Joyce family name. - Yahoo News (via BoingBoing)
And from the centenary of Bloomsday two years ago:
In the run-up to the centenary of Bloomsday on the fictitious day on which [James Joyce's] novel [Ulysses] is set, organisers of the ReJoyce festival are expecting thousands of fans from around the world to descend on the city by which Joyce felt so unloved and which he left for self-imposed exile in 1912.
However, last week a copyright dispute escalated when Irish MPs passed emergency legislation preventing an exhibition at the city's National Library from being sued.
Stephen Joyce, the author's grandson, said the James Joyce and Ulysses exhibition - which is displaying draft notebooks from the novel - might breach copyright legislation. Mr Joyce, who guards the family literary estate, has successfully targeted publishing houses, stage shows and internet sites in the past.
His warnings have already stopped plans by the festival to hold public readings of Ulysses and a proposal by the Abbey Theatre to stage Joyce's play, Exiles. - Telegraph.co.uk - 14th June 2004.
Stephen Joyce had not even been conceived when his grandfather, James Joyce, wrote Ulysses, the greatest Irish novel of the last century. So what exactly gives him the right to collect royalties and dictate the uses of his ancestors work? He had nothing to do with it's writing, if he possesses any talent beyond frustrating scholars with the capricious destruction of historically significant documents, it made no contribution to the novel. How can any one person claim absolute dominion over a work with such huge cultural significance, a work that has become inseparably integrated into the Irish identity? Being a post-modernist by nature I would even argue that, were James Joyce himself still alive today, his 'opinion' of the work would be no more and no less valid than anyone else's, and that he would have no more right to exclusive control over this part of our psyche than does his grandson.
Frankly, I find the very idea that a work this significant could still be under copyright in any part of the world after more than eighty years to be offensive, I don't have to trust the feeling in my very bones to know this is just wrong as it defies any logical reduction.
This is not the way to foster the arts, this has nothing to do with cultivating creativity and encouraging artistic expression, no extension of copyright is going to bring James Joyce back from the dead to write more novels. So tell me, where is the advantage to James Joyce, to us, to Ireland, to anyone in this world other than Stephen Joyce, in withholding any of his work from the public domain? What is the protection of copyright doing for anyone save those who have taken most and contributed least? We are putting the breaks on our culture so that a single estate can receive money for doing nothing. There is no great potential being protected by these laws, no good is coming of them, and none ever will.
Big business has been persuading governments around the world to repeatedly extend copyrights, every time we reach a stage where something form the last century might actually default to the public domain they writhe and yammer until lawmakers have pushed the tipping point back another few years. If they had their way you can be sure copyrights would be extended to eternity. The case of Stephen Joyce shows how the life-plus-ninety years copyright works on a human scale, and proves just what is wrong with it: money. The extension of copyrights has always been about making money, not about making art. Stephen Joyce will never write a novel or a short story or even a letter by James Joyce. Copyrights do not raise the dead, copyrights do not allow us to channel their spirits and copyrights do not make literary geniuses out of talentless, money-grubbing heirs.
At this point I really have very little sympathy for those industries and jobs and livelihoods that are kept artificially alive through this ludicrous system. Business models may break, corporations may topple, factories may close, people may find themselves out of work - if that is the price of change, if that's what it takes to save the art from the idiots, so be it.
It has to stop.
[Ulysses is not under copyright in the US so feel free to download the complete text from Project Gutenberg, and avoid supporting Mr Stephen Joyce in any way]