Oh, The Bitch is undone! (Maybe).
Last night she went with The Partner to a reading by the Irish poet, playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry. Now Barry to The Bitch's mind is a quite brilliant writer, a writer after her own heart, one of those you read and get the quite spooky feeling that he's written what you might have written, or would have written if you could/in another life, or already once did in a previous life etc, etc. Turned out he's a brilliant reader as well, which so few novelists are, and The Bitch was bewitched, and, as he read from his latest novel A Long Long Way, laughing and in tears.
Then he turned to one of his plays and read a long tale-telling speech from near the end about a dog and a ewe, which he pronounced, exactly as the Bitch's Irish father did, 'Yo'. The Partner gave The Bitch a nudge, and she knew what he was thinking: about the tale her father always told of the time he was eight years old but not at school because his parents were so poor, and the schoolmaster happened by and asked him if he could spell ewe, and he could, so after all he went to school, paid for by the church... It's one of those little incidents from real life I've pleated into the made-up rest of a novel of I've just written.
Well, then I went to get my copies of Barry's books signed, and I told Barry what a brilliant writer I thought he was, not caring if he thought I was a suck, and he looked ridiculously pleased, and it was like some kind of literary love-in. And then The Partner, who was standing right beside The Bitch, said,'Tell him about your father's ewe.' For god's sake! (These people at signings, wanting to come up and identify, and tell you their life stories!) But Barry was looking curious now - or was that glazed? - and out of embarrassment, The Bitch told him.
A strange look had come over Barry's face. 'What church was that?' he wanted to know. 'What town was it?' The Bitch answered in embarrassment, feeling possibly patronised - for god's sake, it was meant to be just a throwaway anecdote! She began to leave (to make a hasty retreat) and Barry said, his face impassive: 'Don't be surprised if you come across that incident in the next thing I write.'
The Bitch jumped like a scalded cat. 'You can't! I've just put it in my novel!'
'We'll just have to see who gets there first.'
'But that's not fair! You've got a publisher, and I haven't yet!'
His face was bland, beatific. 'It never is fair.'
'Bastard!'
His grin was impassive, enigmatic.
I think he was joking (why the hell would he want my silly little anecdote?). But just in case: YOU READ IT HERE FIRST.
Showing posts with label stolen ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stolen ideas. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
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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