As we've discussed on this blog before, you can't copyright ideas, and you'd be mad to want to, but it's riling when someone appears to have taken your idea and flown with it, and doesn't even acknowledge you...
Maybe this isn't at all what has happened in the case of the anthology, Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, edited by Ellen Sussman, newly published in the US and receiving a lot of publicity, most recently in the New York Times. This book is strikingly similar in concept to last year's UK Bitch Lit anthology from the non-profit Crocus Books (in which one of my stories appears), but apparently bears no acknowledgement of the similarity. It's perfectly possible that when in 2004 Mary Sharratt, Bitch Lit co-editor with Maya Chowdhry, went to Ellen Sussman with a proposal for a US Bitch Lit version, Sussman had already had the same original idea. Though you can't blame Sharratt for wondering why, if so, she didn't she mention it.
Showing posts with label copyright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label copyright. Show all posts
Friday, August 31, 2007
Monday, August 20, 2007
Words for Free
Not so long ago, discussing the controversy over copyright and Google Booksearch, I described my feeling of pleasure when two out-of-print anthologies in which my work featured appeared on Google Booksearch, and my disappointment when they disappeared again (they have since been reinstated). As I stated then, although the actual contents of those books weren't available online I wouldn't have minded if they had been, since I didn't think it likely that many people would otherwise read the few copies available in libraries such as that of the University of Michigan.
Today Peter Finch, Chief Executive of the Welsh Academy, writes to Academy members (of which I'm one) about Welsh Journals Online, a proposal by the National Library of Wales to digitize the entire content of the majority of twentieth-century literary periodicals in Wales.
A member of a nation in which education and literature have always had pride of place, he acknowledges the excitingly democratic nature of library digitization projects:
However, he points out this project has been funded:
Today Peter Finch, Chief Executive of the Welsh Academy, writes to Academy members (of which I'm one) about Welsh Journals Online, a proposal by the National Library of Wales to digitize the entire content of the majority of twentieth-century literary periodicals in Wales.
A member of a nation in which education and literature have always had pride of place, he acknowledges the excitingly democratic nature of library digitization projects:
No need any longer to visit the National Library at Aberystwyth to don white gloves and look at the ancient pages of Brut y Tywysogion. Log on and there are all the pages - viewable entirely for free and with no problem parking your car in order to get to see them. A service for the public has been created that is entirely in keeping with the spirit that founded the public library serviceand as a gifted and serious writer himself, he understands my impulse above. Authors on Welsh Journals Online will not be paid and 'will be given the right to say no and not to participate but the reality is that most will want to be included. This will offer some of them an opportunity to see work from years past appear again to re-read and re-evaluate'.
However, he points out this project has been funded:
In a society rich enough to pay for civic flowerbeds to be weeded and town centres to be illuminated 24/7 then authors should get something for what they do. In the whole digitisation process staffers working on the project at the National Library of Wales will be paid. So too the funders and Welsh Assembly Government and JISC. The operators of the internet servers on which the final project is to be stored will also receive financial consideration, as will the owners of the telephone lines down which the information will travel and the manufacturers of the equipment with which users will access it. But the creators of the works being read, the raison d'etre for the whole enterprise, they'll get nothing.He has a big point there, I reckon. There is something pretty amazing about the ubiquitous idea that, as far as literature is concerned, if there is ever any money going, the last people it should go to are the primary providers. So we do it for the love of it? Should we stop paying doctors or teachers or plumbers if they heal or teach or plumb for the love of it? As Finch says, it's too late to do anything about this project - the money has already been allocated - but in the rush towards digitization this assumption must be challenged.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
A Breath of Fresh Air
Any one concerned about the draconian developments in modern copyright would do well to check out 'Free to Air' running at Manchester's Cornerhouse this month (106.5 FM and online), and which I write about on my other blog.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Google Book Search
In yesterday's Guardian John Lanchester tackles the issue of copyright and Google Book Search in a wide-ranging and thoughtful article which counterbalances the alarmed views of publisher Nigel Newton expressed in the same paper a year ago. Lanchester points out that there is no breach of copyright in GBS: if publishers do not join the book-scanning programme then only a tiny snippet of text of any of their books in print is available, yet the books are drawn to public attention and links provided to shops and libraries where they are available - which seems to me more like a service and free advertising than anything, as Kate Hyde points out on her blog. And if publishers do opt in, then only 20% of a book is available online, and you have to buy it or borrow it from a library to read the rest.
The real area of contention, says Lanchester, is those books which are still in copyright but out of print, and which 'Google wants to make available online.' His implication seems to be that Google wants to make them available online in their entirety: 'It seems to me this would mean, in some crucial sense, Google was actually the publisher of the book.'
When I recently discovered on Google Book Search two out-of-print short-story anthologies in which my work had appeared (courtesy of the participating Library of the University of Michigan) I was delighted - work which had been seemed to slip off the face of the earth was suddenly current again! - and when they disappeared off GBS a week or so later (as a result of the ongoing dispute?) I was disappointed. How many people will come across those publications if they are not reinstated on Google? In fact the books appeared in the usual Google formula: only a tiny snippet of the contents page of one was readable, and nothing of the other. Personally, though, I wouldn't have cared a fig if they had appeared whole. Actually, I'd have been happier: one of those stories of mine is not available to read anywhere else, the publishers are never going to reprint those books, and I can find only one used copy of one book and four of the other for sale on the web. Neither the publishers nor we contributors are going to make any more money out of those books, and I for one would rather those stories were still being read.
The real area of contention, says Lanchester, is those books which are still in copyright but out of print, and which 'Google wants to make available online.' His implication seems to be that Google wants to make them available online in their entirety: 'It seems to me this would mean, in some crucial sense, Google was actually the publisher of the book.'
When I recently discovered on Google Book Search two out-of-print short-story anthologies in which my work had appeared (courtesy of the participating Library of the University of Michigan) I was delighted - work which had been seemed to slip off the face of the earth was suddenly current again! - and when they disappeared off GBS a week or so later (as a result of the ongoing dispute?) I was disappointed. How many people will come across those publications if they are not reinstated on Google? In fact the books appeared in the usual Google formula: only a tiny snippet of the contents page of one was readable, and nothing of the other. Personally, though, I wouldn't have cared a fig if they had appeared whole. Actually, I'd have been happier: one of those stories of mine is not available to read anywhere else, the publishers are never going to reprint those books, and I can find only one used copy of one book and four of the other for sale on the web. Neither the publishers nor we contributors are going to make any more money out of those books, and I for one would rather those stories were still being read.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Ideas as commodities
This business of nicked ideas keeps buzzing round my head and won't be swatted away.
It's absolutely true that - as Jessica, Alan Kellogg and Susan Hill point out, and as the recent Dan Brown trial showed - there's no copyright on ideas, nor should there be. And that many great writers are great on the strength of borrowed ideas, and, as Alan says, Shakespeare is the biggest nicker of them all. Modern copyright only applies to text (in the broadest sense, including all the art forms), which is why, as Jessica, says, so many new writers rush around putting sealed envelopes in their bank safe deposits.
It all seems so simple. It's not. When does an idea become text? As Susan and Alan say, once it gets fleshed out with characters etc and becomes imbued with an author's voice. But according to the law, this has to be written down, and more fool you if you spend an evening in the bar with a famour writer telling him your plot. And what about what people can do with a text? That treatment you wrote, the storyline of which was cleverly enough distorted that lawyers might argue for days: the young boy turned into a young girl, the three separate but linking story strands brilliantly teased to make three separate episodes of a drama series (and thus losing the subtleties)? You might think that this makes the original treatment unrecognisable, and that therefore it doesn't matter, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the TV company wouldn't think so. A storyline about x? Sorry, it's been done... TV companies do not take the line that it's not the idea that matters but what you do with it, the way you write it. They are not interested in writing but in ideas as commodities.
This is what's at the root of the problem: the commodification of ideas and art. That offending clause I mentioned previously is based on the notion that TV companies can buy ideas off you, and not only ideas but ownership of what you've written, and they often do, sometimes replacing the writer halfway through the development process - another thing the standard contract allows for (and which my contract allowed for). The concept of copyright drops by the wayside in this scenario. In fact, it's the big boys who benefit from copyright law (how successful would I have been, rushing round and waving my little safe deposit box in the face of that big powerful organisation with Miss Ice-Cool TV Executive folding her arms at the door?). Which is why traditional copyright is now being challenged by the Creative Commons initiative, based as I understand it on the notion of making artists' work more freely available for acknowledged borrowing, and on a democratic melting pot of creativity in which one artist's work can enrich and generate that of another - but in which the operative words are acknowledged and democratic.
It's absolutely true that - as Jessica, Alan Kellogg and Susan Hill point out, and as the recent Dan Brown trial showed - there's no copyright on ideas, nor should there be. And that many great writers are great on the strength of borrowed ideas, and, as Alan says, Shakespeare is the biggest nicker of them all. Modern copyright only applies to text (in the broadest sense, including all the art forms), which is why, as Jessica, says, so many new writers rush around putting sealed envelopes in their bank safe deposits.
It all seems so simple. It's not. When does an idea become text? As Susan and Alan say, once it gets fleshed out with characters etc and becomes imbued with an author's voice. But according to the law, this has to be written down, and more fool you if you spend an evening in the bar with a famour writer telling him your plot. And what about what people can do with a text? That treatment you wrote, the storyline of which was cleverly enough distorted that lawyers might argue for days: the young boy turned into a young girl, the three separate but linking story strands brilliantly teased to make three separate episodes of a drama series (and thus losing the subtleties)? You might think that this makes the original treatment unrecognisable, and that therefore it doesn't matter, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the TV company wouldn't think so. A storyline about x? Sorry, it's been done... TV companies do not take the line that it's not the idea that matters but what you do with it, the way you write it. They are not interested in writing but in ideas as commodities.
This is what's at the root of the problem: the commodification of ideas and art. That offending clause I mentioned previously is based on the notion that TV companies can buy ideas off you, and not only ideas but ownership of what you've written, and they often do, sometimes replacing the writer halfway through the development process - another thing the standard contract allows for (and which my contract allowed for). The concept of copyright drops by the wayside in this scenario. In fact, it's the big boys who benefit from copyright law (how successful would I have been, rushing round and waving my little safe deposit box in the face of that big powerful organisation with Miss Ice-Cool TV Executive folding her arms at the door?). Which is why traditional copyright is now being challenged by the Creative Commons initiative, based as I understand it on the notion of making artists' work more freely available for acknowledged borrowing, and on a democratic melting pot of creativity in which one artist's work can enrich and generate that of another - but in which the operative words are acknowledged and democratic.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Those slippery ideas...
Jessica Ruston at the enjoyable blog The Book Bar feels that writers are often over-concerned about protecting their ideas: there are bound to be zeitgeist ideas out there, and if another writer is first to write the one you had in mind, well you just pick yourself up and turn to another one...
Hm, says The Bitch, gnashing her teeth at the memory of what happened to her.
The Bitch thought the same as Jessica the time a freelance producer went down to London with a few of her ideas, all of which were duly rejected, only for one of them to appear as a well-received drama series a year later. You hear of it happening all the time, after all.
But she got a bit more cynical when, not so long ago, she went in for one of these New Writing Schemes run by a major television company and funded by the local arts body. She should have smelled a rat right at the start, of course - why would a major TV company need puny arts board funding to run such a scheme, which consisted of a single day of workshops with fees, presumably, to three well-known TV writers, a fee of £500 each to the fifteen or so participants to write a detailed treatment, and a big plate of sandwiches? Could it possibly just be to give the whole thing a veneer of worthy respectability? The project was supposed to be an investment for the company, after all: the stated aim was to look for new writers.
Ha. Well, I did smell a rat when I saw the contract. There was the clause which is apparently standard nowadays, based on Jessica's idea of a big Floating Tank of Ideas, stating that there was no come-back if my idea wasn't taken on but was later used by the company. But we were being asked to write detailed treatments, and were hardly being paid professional rates to do so... Was this really a cynical ideas-trawling exercise, and this time they were getting them on the cheap?
Well, true to form, The Bitch kicked up and tried to negotiate the contract, but she'd met her true match in the disgustingly young but steely woman running the show, who told her in no uncertain terms that the contract wasn't negotiable (did that woman own a dictionary?), that The Bitch had behaved pretty badly and joined the scheme in bad faith, and The Bitch was forthwith kicked off the scheme - without her £500.
Too late, like a fool she had already written her detailed treatment. And the real rat turned out to be not the company but a writer (as Jessica indicates): six months later the famous writer who read her treatment replicated in his drama series not only her storyline and theme but even the camera shots with which, in the workshop, he had been so taken. Well, maybe he did it subconsciously, and what's a Bitch to do, but take it as a compliment...
But you still wonder about the TV company. The writers on this scheme had all been chosen via stiff competition, all were of a professional standard and offered good ideas, and a series of six dramas was promised as an outcome. In the event, no series materialised. Only one of those ideas was produced under the name of a writer in that workshop, as a lone drama which went out about midnight when no one would be watching... perhaps to fulfill the conditions of the arts board grant?
Hm, says The Bitch, gnashing her teeth at the memory of what happened to her.
The Bitch thought the same as Jessica the time a freelance producer went down to London with a few of her ideas, all of which were duly rejected, only for one of them to appear as a well-received drama series a year later. You hear of it happening all the time, after all.
But she got a bit more cynical when, not so long ago, she went in for one of these New Writing Schemes run by a major television company and funded by the local arts body. She should have smelled a rat right at the start, of course - why would a major TV company need puny arts board funding to run such a scheme, which consisted of a single day of workshops with fees, presumably, to three well-known TV writers, a fee of £500 each to the fifteen or so participants to write a detailed treatment, and a big plate of sandwiches? Could it possibly just be to give the whole thing a veneer of worthy respectability? The project was supposed to be an investment for the company, after all: the stated aim was to look for new writers.
Ha. Well, I did smell a rat when I saw the contract. There was the clause which is apparently standard nowadays, based on Jessica's idea of a big Floating Tank of Ideas, stating that there was no come-back if my idea wasn't taken on but was later used by the company. But we were being asked to write detailed treatments, and were hardly being paid professional rates to do so... Was this really a cynical ideas-trawling exercise, and this time they were getting them on the cheap?
Well, true to form, The Bitch kicked up and tried to negotiate the contract, but she'd met her true match in the disgustingly young but steely woman running the show, who told her in no uncertain terms that the contract wasn't negotiable (did that woman own a dictionary?), that The Bitch had behaved pretty badly and joined the scheme in bad faith, and The Bitch was forthwith kicked off the scheme - without her £500.
Too late, like a fool she had already written her detailed treatment. And the real rat turned out to be not the company but a writer (as Jessica indicates): six months later the famous writer who read her treatment replicated in his drama series not only her storyline and theme but even the camera shots with which, in the workshop, he had been so taken. Well, maybe he did it subconsciously, and what's a Bitch to do, but take it as a compliment...
But you still wonder about the TV company. The writers on this scheme had all been chosen via stiff competition, all were of a professional standard and offered good ideas, and a series of six dramas was promised as an outcome. In the event, no series materialised. Only one of those ideas was produced under the name of a writer in that workshop, as a lone drama which went out about midnight when no one would be watching... perhaps to fulfill the conditions of the arts board grant?
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