Tag Archives: essay

Alice’s Adventures in the Public Domain

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I’m going to see the new Alice in Wonderland movie tonight, like everybody else, and it looks pretty cool. I like the visual style and the humor seems right u p my alley. But it got me thinking – about copyright. Yeah, you know, like you do.

As an artist, I totally believe artists should make money off their art, and should be credited for what they create. Absolutely! But it also makes me sad that so much of my actual culture is unavailable for me to use, to reimagine or “remix”.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were published almost 150 years ago, in 1865. There have been hundreds of plays, movies, fan sequels, music, and more riffed off of this material. Pretend for a moment that none of that ever existed, because the law said that Charles Dodgson’s estate should continue to control that work forever. Effectively, the theory goes that not only should the artist make money off their creation, but so should their children. And their children. And all of his descendents forever – or, in lieu of relatives, a “trust” or “estate”, effectively a corporation created solely for the purpose of controlling and profiting from the work. Wouldn’t that stink? No Disney movie (well, actually, Disney might have licensed the movie rights anyway… but that’s a different issue), no plays, no millions of editions with different illustrations by adventurous authors.

It sounds a little farfetched, right? But that’s actually the law we have in the US now, only slightly exaggerated for effect. Check this out: The Duration of Copyright.

A relevant summary: “Works created in or after 1978 are extended copyright protection for a term defined in 17 U.S.C. § 302. With the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, these works are granted copyright protection for a term ending 70 years after the death of the author. If the work was a work for hire (e.g., those created by a corporation) then copyright persists for 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever is shorter.”

Compare and contrast with the original language of the US Constitution: The Congress shall have Power [. . .] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Nothing you like will ever be in the public domain in your lifetime. Dodgson died in 1898. If Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland had been published under the current copyright restrictions, it would not have been in the public domain until 1968, more than a hundred years after it was published. He didn’t even have any descendents to benefit from this

(On a related note, sometime you should check out the correlation between the increasing length of copyright terms and the expiration of the copyright status of the Mickey Mouse cartoons – it’s almost magical.)

Yeah, I want to make money on my paintings, jewelry, books, and anything else I put my hand to. But I don’t expect my (future) fame and glory to support my entire family and all my descendents til the end of time. Especially not at the expense of all the other artists out there who might be able to make something even cooler out of what I did.

The shared pool of art and experience available to a community for assimilation, reuse, and reimagining used to be called “culture.” Now all that’s left is the “public domain” – the songs your grandparents listened to. Everything else is licensed.

My views on this have been unashamedly influenced by Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig and their much more eloquent defenses of the public domain. I highly recommend you seek out their work for more information.

Pattern Recognition

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It’s been a while since William Gibson‘s Pattern Recognition came out, and I still haven’t managed to read it. I enjoyed Neuromancer very much, but haven’t been impressed by some of his other work.

Nevertheless, this interview in the Blackbird Archive is fantastic. Most of it, you’ll notice, is an extended meditation on what constitutes Science Fiction. This is important. I know I can’t give a real answer as to why it is- many more eloquent than me have tried. But I get so tired of the dismissive, “oh, I don’t read scifi.”

There is an extraordinary body of work that satisfies all the requirements of science fiction but is not marketed as such. The Time Traveler’s Wife is about a time traveler, for example, but it’s still in the Contemporary Lit section so everyone reads it. Likewise Gregory MacGuire‘s fairytale re-imaginings like Wicked would be perfectly at home in the scifi section - you wouldn’t even have to change the covers. Hundreds of CIA and crime thrillers deal with future weapons and genetic engineering and spy technology - but they have lots of guns, so that’s okay.

But more than the tropes listed above, science fiction is a way of thinking.

As the review says;

The next matter to be settled is genre. William Gibson is a science fiction writer, so is this science fiction? The answer is yes and no. Unlike Vonnegut, who goes to some pains to say he’s not writing science fiction even when he is, Gibson never shies from the label, even though he’s perfectly aware it’s not so simple a tag as it once was. Pattern Recognition is set in the present with no aliens or secret technologies. The plot turns on nothing more exotic technologically than chat rooms and posted film clips in a very recognizable Internet. Recently, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptomonicon, as fat as Pattern Recognition is lean, was largely treated as a science fiction novel by reviewers, bookdealers, and readers, even nominated for sf awards, though the main action involves the breaking of the Enigma code of World War II and isn’t science fiction in the usual sense. China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, on another end of the spectrum, seems science fictional even though it takes place in a Dickensian steampunk world with no connection to ours.

Science fiction, in effect, has become a narrative strategy, a way of approaching story, in which not only characters must be invented, but the world and its ways as well, without resorting to magic or the supernatural, where the fantasy folks work. A realist wrestling with the woes of the middle class can leave the world out of it by and large except for an occasional swipe at the shallowness of suburbia. A science fiction writer must invent the world where the story takes place, often from the ground up, a process usually called world-building. In other words, in a science fiction novel, the world itself is a distinctive and crucial character in the plot, without whom the story could not take place, whether it’s the world of Dune or Neuromancer or 1984. The world is the story as much as the story is in the world. Part of Gibson’s point (and Stephenson’s too for that matter) is that we live in a time of such accelerated change and layered realities, that we’re all in that boat, like it or not. A novel set in the “real world” now has to answer the question, “Which one?”

Via Science Fictional. That post also has a link to this interview with William Gibson, equally interesting.