Tag Archives: copyright

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Shakespeare: almost certainly a plagiarist

Lego ShakespeareRemember me raising the spectre of plagiarism last week with regard to J K Rowling? Well, here’s a neat counterpoint via TechDirt; the people at GrokLaw have sat down and tried to work out how many lawsuits Shakespeare’s King Lear would garner were it published under the same system of copyright law as exists in the US today:

How many lawsuits do you see? At least a half dozen? I even see some methods and concepts claims, if we view it with modern copyright owner eyes. Remember J.K. Rowling’s litigation over methods and concepts that Darl McBride and Chris Sontag cited? I suppose he could have raised a transformational fair use claim. But what if he accessed the prior works in digital format? Does fair use exist there? Or maybe they’d have been DRM’d. He’d maybe then never have read them.

Of course, what really would have happened is there never would have been a King Lear written. It would have been too legally risky. You can go to jail for copyright infringement, after all, even if you are noncommercial, if you distribute a DVD, and if we are imagining, let’s imagine Shakespeare did that. Shakespeare wasn’t even noncommercial. And there are criminal sanctions under regular Copyright Law, too.

If Shakespeare had plenty of money, he could have contacted all the copyright owners and paid them whatever they asked, but if he didn’t have enough money, the result would have been he would have been unable to afford to write King Lear. Do we want a world where Shakespeare can only write King Lear if he has money? If you think I exaggerate, remember what happened to internet radio? And if one song is worth $80,000, is the sky not the limit, if you are a copyright owner and hold all the legal cards and can get Congress to keep upping the ante to suit you?

As the last paragraph suggests, the full piece is a partial response to the Jammie Thomas/RIAA case, but it highlights the same risks I mentioned last week as regards plagiarism suits against authors. [image by ryanrocketship]

As a supplement to that, via The Valve comes an essay at Harpers by Jonathan Lethem, which I guess I must have missed last time round. It’s a lengthy, beautifully written and eloquent defence of plagiarism in a postmodern media world, in which he points out that almost every big media company who fights against perceived plagiarism actually owes their success to it. You should go and read it.

In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. “Animation is built on plagiarism!” declares the show’s hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. “You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?” If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones—more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths—The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don’t strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, or Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

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JK Rowling: probably not a plagiarist

Poor old JK Rowling; whatever you may think of the Harry Potter books (I think they make passable doorstops), there’s no denying that her success has brought her into the firing line of a lot of resentful (and less successful) creatives. As reported at TechDirt, Rowling is once again being accused of plaigiarising someone else’s work in order to create Hogwarts et al.

In these trigger-happy times of copyright law, cases like this are bound to come up – though it’s telling that you you have to make it pretty big before anyone will bother suing you. But the long-term implications and precedents are important to writers and other creatives – especially in science fiction and fantasy, which thrive on what has been described as their ongoing conversational nature. In a genre where building on (or dismantling and deconstructing) the ideas of your predecessors is an integral part of the game, a few successful suits of this type could open the gates to a flood of smaller cases; it seems there’s plenty of copyright lawyers who don’t care how spurious a case is provided there’s a chance of a decent fee. Here’s TechDirt‘s Mike Masnick:

The whole thing is pretty silly, of course. The publisher is vehemently denying any copying, and it seems unlikely that any copying did actually happen. However even if you did grant the premise and say that Rowling was “inspired” by some other book, so what? Did it really change the economics of the original book? If anything, this latest claim is just a clear money grab, designed to give new attention to a long-ignored book. No one could claim with a straight face that Rowling’s work took away any value from the other book.

Masnick also links back to an incident from last year that shows that not quite everything Orson Scott Card says is reactionary bigoted claptrap (though this example has some serious sexist undertones); commenting on the Harry Potter Lexicon case, Card pointed out that Rowling’s agressive defence of her own intellectual property hasn’t done her any favours, and that the world of literature is entirely based upon the adoption, adaptation and reuse of other people’s ideas. In defending herself against these latest accusations of plagiarism, she actually weakens the arguments she used to win the Lexicon case. Which all goes to show that copyright justice frequently boils down to a game of who can afford the better legal team… so, no news there, then.

Just to be abundantly clear, here, I’m not trying to claim that copyright law works in a way it doesn’t. The point I’m trying to make is that, as a reviewer, critic and wannabe writer of fiction, I’m well aware of the fact that there are only a few handfuls of basic story plots and character archetypes from which to start writing. The art of fiction is to flesh those essentials out into something new, but equally it’s possible to deconstruct and boil down any story into a simple synopsis that can make it sound remarkably similar to any number of other stories, without there having been any hint of deliberate copying involved in their creation. If we know that as readers and writers, how can we support a legal framework that can so easily exploit these phenomena in the name of financial gain?

Future Imperfect

The bludgeoning of Gepetto: how “free” culture killed creative careers

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The free content culture of the internet is democratising art and music, and is leading us to a digital playground where everyone can make some money out of their creations, right? Well, that’s not how it worked out in Sven Johnson’s Future Imperfect…

Future Imperfect - Sven Johnson

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Luc Reid suggests a type of ebook DRM that actually might not suck

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The eBook future looks pretty bright for consumers, with devices improving and dropping in price, and a wealth of material to read thereon. But writers are worried, with some justification – after all, if the Kindle does for publishing what the iPod has done for the record labels, no one’s going to get much money for writing short stories any more.

Writer Luc Reid has been scratching his head over the Digital Rights Management question in an attempt to satisfy his requirements as both a writer and a reader, starting from the premise that DRM is necessary to enable authors to be paid for their work:

In general, the biggest argument against DRM seems to be that it provides positive things for the seller but only negative things to the buyer. Here’s a DRM proposal that actually helps the buyer, while taking away some of the biggest nuisances. I’m sure I’m not the first one to come up with it. It’s account-based DRM.

What I mean by “account-based” is that when a person buys a book, that person gets a permanent license to read that book on any eReader device they own, from a smart phone to a dedicated eReader to, who knows, their wide-screen TV with a little black box attachment. Computers might or might not be included; that would be mainly a technical issue.

This “account-based” idea is different from what’s usually talked about when people talk about eReader DRM, which is “device-based.” That is, much of the thinking about DRM has been that when I buy a book, I get to read it on the particular device I bought it for and nowhere else.

It’s a well-thought out set of ideas, and Reid has worked hard at including the flaws and objections. Unfortunately, I suspect it’s predicated on too many ‘ifs’ for it to be viable. An industry-wide standard retail structure complete with hardware and software that supports the system may sound easy on paper, but the real world is a little more messy, and getting competing companies to work together is like herding cats.

That said, Reid’s piece is one of the most honest defences of DRM I’ve ever read; maybe the publishing houses should get a think-tank of smart writers and readers together to boil up new ideas instead of leaving it to the beancounters and engineers?

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Google’s BookSearch goes legit in $45m deal

spiral stacks of books and magazinesThe headline pretty much says it all, really, but in case you’d not heard it elsewhere it appears that the wranglings between Google and the publishing companies over the company’s Book Search project have finally been settled. Once the plan has been stamped off by a federal judge, the Big G will build an independent ‘Book Rights Registry’ to monitor copyright matters, and we’ll have some new ways of getting access to old or obscure books without leaving the comfort of our swivel chairs. [image by Thomas Hawk]

What’s interesting is that there was apparently a good chance of Google actually winning the case had it gone to court… and it’s not quite the bed of roses for the publishers as it might initially seem, as Google’s now nicely placed to play a very influential role in the future of publishing.