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So, if I ran the world ...
I was reading a blog post this morning that utterly encapsulates why I think copyright law is completely broken and why, as a creator, it scares the crap out of me: sometimes the status quo strikes back.
Now, I haven't actually seen the Avatar series (though I really do want to fix that, because people tell me it's awesome!). But from all I've heard, the creators are incredibly invested in it, and the world-building is lush and gorgeous.
But, thanks to our fantastically broken copyright laws, the people who created and wrote it, who've poured their blood, sweat and tears into it, don't own it -- they have no say in what happens to it, they can't take the characters and make a sequel or spin-off, it isn't theirs.
From later in the post:
Other people infringing on my copyright doesn't scare me anywhere near as much as the idea of copyright law forbidding me to work on my own creations.
And you can blame creators for signing bad contracts, but you know what? The system might not have been set up to work this way, but the way it's developed, there are gatekeepers in control of most media outlets -- the studios, the big conglomerates, the record companies. They have good lawyers who are paid to keep up with all the ins and outs of copyright law. And they don't just want limited-term rights to your creation -- they want it all. If you aren't willing to sign away your rights to the gatekeepers, then you don't have a whole lot of options, and almost none of them lead to making a living at it. You can create a labor of love and put it on the Internet, and there are a lot of people doing exactly that -- which I think is awesome. But a lush, fully-animated production like Avatar: The Last Airbender can't be done in someone's basement, and it certainly wouldn't have gained a fraction of the audience that it has if it'd been a series of animated, homemade shorts on Youtube.
I always feel vaguely paranoid and conspiracy-theory-ish when I start thinking about this stuff. But while I definitely appreciate what copyright law is supposed to do -- give creators a limited-term monopoly over their own creation so that they can make money off it and have an incentive to make more of it -- I think the end result is about the most terrifying free-market worst-case-scenario that I can imagine: in a world where anything can be made into a commodity to be monetized, then other people can buy and sell the contents of my head. They can buy the right to tell me that the product of my own brain is no longer mine. It doesn't matter if they trick me into selling it, or take advantage of my naivete or my financial desperation (see: Superman); it doesn't matter if I thought it would be a good idea at age 20 but changed my mind by age 40. It's still gone, it's theirs, it's not mine. They can tell me what I can write about, and have me fined into bankruptcy or put in jail if I don't obey, even if it was mine in the first place. As a writer, that scares the shit out of me, and I don't know why more creative people don't seem to feel likewise.
The idea of not having copyright at all scares me too. But honestly, if it came down to a black-and-white choice between no copyright and the system we have right now, I sometimes wonder just how much worse off we'd be with none at all. I certainly don't think creativity would wither and die without the ability to create a monopoly. Maybe it would be harder to make a living at it. But it's pretty damn hard right now, at least without making devils' bargains.
Actually, I think the book publishing industry has about the closest thing I can imagine to a reasonable compromise between authors' rights and publishers' need to make a profit: all rights kept by the author, usually, with the publishers contracting for a limited and revokable term of publishing monopoly. It doesn't change the fact, though, that copyright is still fully transferable under the law, that they could buy all rights, but most don't. If they buy all rights, they can't compete in an industry that has grown under an authors-rights model rather than a publishers-rights model -- the authors will go somewhere that they can get a better deal. Which is great, but only works if that's the industry model ... and record companies, movie companies, seem to have gone a different route, where they won't touch your screenplay or your record 'til you sign over all rights to them. So you can get a good deal, in some industries, but only at the sufferance of the gatekeepers. Lovely.
And you can self-publish, of course, but you better read those TOS's carefully if you put your work out there through a third party (like an ISP or a POD service), and you gotta double-check the contract if an anthology wants to buy up some of your self-published work, or if you decide to create and publish something with other writers. And you better keep your eyes open in case some big media conglomerate decides to take your idea and create something just one left-turn removed and call it their own. And I hate living with that always-looking-over-my-shoulder mentality; I hate knowing that a careless mistake could cost me something that's vital to me.
I think it creates a hostile creative climate, too, where readers and fellow writers, publishers and collaborators are viewed as potential thieves and copyright infringers -- potential competition, potential enemies. Which is not to say that such things don't happen or that there aren't unethical thieves running around out there. But ... I guess that having spent a number of years moving in and out of fanfic-writing fandom, I'm struck by the ease of interaction with other fanfic writers, compared to the somewhat bristly and guarded way that "pro" writers deal with each other. Hey, I'm like that with my original creations too -- I play my cards extremely close to the vest when I'm working on something. But it's interesting to compare it to the way that fanfic writers and RPGers bounce ideas off each other, and play with each other's concepts and riff on each other's work. As soon as money enters into it, and creative ownership ... things get weird. Awkward. The fences go up between the gardens. The awareness of hierarchy becomes acute (you're published, I'm not; you have a NYT best-seller, I don't; you're signed with a major publisher, I'm just a self-publisher - etc).
Certainly this is not to say that fandom and fanficcers can't be weird and competitive and guarded, or that you can't get that shared joy of creation with other non-fannish writers. But there's a different feeling to it, overall -- it's hard to put my finger on it, but I think ownership and money are a lot of the difference. You have to be really comfortable with a fellow original-fic writer to talk about your ideas with her; you have to think long and hard before putting snippets of works-in-progress out there on the Internet (if you can even bring yourself to do it at all). I think that we writers are socialized to view copyright as Every Writer's Best Friend, but it's more complicated than that; copyright is a knife that cuts both ways, and as copyright law currently stands, it's very very easy for that knife to be used to hurt us, or for us to use it to hurt each other. I don't like that.
Basically, DiMartino and Konietzko don't own the series. They don't own the characters, they don't own the storyline, they don't own the character designs, they don't own jack. It was work for hire, and the proof is in the fact that Nickelodeon has the copyright (and the trademark) all over the place.
Furthermore, on the Tokyopop version, it at least lists DiMartino and Konietzko as creators. None of the rest even mention them at all -- and now we're onto the comicified version of the movie, which has whots-his-face's name plastered there at the top... and again, no mention of DiMartino and Konietzko.
Now, I haven't actually seen the Avatar series (though I really do want to fix that, because people tell me it's awesome!). But from all I've heard, the creators are incredibly invested in it, and the world-building is lush and gorgeous.
But, thanks to our fantastically broken copyright laws, the people who created and wrote it, who've poured their blood, sweat and tears into it, don't own it -- they have no say in what happens to it, they can't take the characters and make a sequel or spin-off, it isn't theirs.
From later in the post:
"The Simpsons(TM), created by Matt Groening, are the copyrighted and trademarked property of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Used with permission. All rights reserved."
That's got to suck. Your own creation, and you have to ask permission to use it.
Other people infringing on my copyright doesn't scare me anywhere near as much as the idea of copyright law forbidding me to work on my own creations.
And you can blame creators for signing bad contracts, but you know what? The system might not have been set up to work this way, but the way it's developed, there are gatekeepers in control of most media outlets -- the studios, the big conglomerates, the record companies. They have good lawyers who are paid to keep up with all the ins and outs of copyright law. And they don't just want limited-term rights to your creation -- they want it all. If you aren't willing to sign away your rights to the gatekeepers, then you don't have a whole lot of options, and almost none of them lead to making a living at it. You can create a labor of love and put it on the Internet, and there are a lot of people doing exactly that -- which I think is awesome. But a lush, fully-animated production like Avatar: The Last Airbender can't be done in someone's basement, and it certainly wouldn't have gained a fraction of the audience that it has if it'd been a series of animated, homemade shorts on Youtube.
I always feel vaguely paranoid and conspiracy-theory-ish when I start thinking about this stuff. But while I definitely appreciate what copyright law is supposed to do -- give creators a limited-term monopoly over their own creation so that they can make money off it and have an incentive to make more of it -- I think the end result is about the most terrifying free-market worst-case-scenario that I can imagine: in a world where anything can be made into a commodity to be monetized, then other people can buy and sell the contents of my head. They can buy the right to tell me that the product of my own brain is no longer mine. It doesn't matter if they trick me into selling it, or take advantage of my naivete or my financial desperation (see: Superman); it doesn't matter if I thought it would be a good idea at age 20 but changed my mind by age 40. It's still gone, it's theirs, it's not mine. They can tell me what I can write about, and have me fined into bankruptcy or put in jail if I don't obey, even if it was mine in the first place. As a writer, that scares the shit out of me, and I don't know why more creative people don't seem to feel likewise.
The idea of not having copyright at all scares me too. But honestly, if it came down to a black-and-white choice between no copyright and the system we have right now, I sometimes wonder just how much worse off we'd be with none at all. I certainly don't think creativity would wither and die without the ability to create a monopoly. Maybe it would be harder to make a living at it. But it's pretty damn hard right now, at least without making devils' bargains.
Actually, I think the book publishing industry has about the closest thing I can imagine to a reasonable compromise between authors' rights and publishers' need to make a profit: all rights kept by the author, usually, with the publishers contracting for a limited and revokable term of publishing monopoly. It doesn't change the fact, though, that copyright is still fully transferable under the law, that they could buy all rights, but most don't. If they buy all rights, they can't compete in an industry that has grown under an authors-rights model rather than a publishers-rights model -- the authors will go somewhere that they can get a better deal. Which is great, but only works if that's the industry model ... and record companies, movie companies, seem to have gone a different route, where they won't touch your screenplay or your record 'til you sign over all rights to them. So you can get a good deal, in some industries, but only at the sufferance of the gatekeepers. Lovely.
And you can self-publish, of course, but you better read those TOS's carefully if you put your work out there through a third party (like an ISP or a POD service), and you gotta double-check the contract if an anthology wants to buy up some of your self-published work, or if you decide to create and publish something with other writers. And you better keep your eyes open in case some big media conglomerate decides to take your idea and create something just one left-turn removed and call it their own. And I hate living with that always-looking-over-my-shoulder mentality; I hate knowing that a careless mistake could cost me something that's vital to me.
I think it creates a hostile creative climate, too, where readers and fellow writers, publishers and collaborators are viewed as potential thieves and copyright infringers -- potential competition, potential enemies. Which is not to say that such things don't happen or that there aren't unethical thieves running around out there. But ... I guess that having spent a number of years moving in and out of fanfic-writing fandom, I'm struck by the ease of interaction with other fanfic writers, compared to the somewhat bristly and guarded way that "pro" writers deal with each other. Hey, I'm like that with my original creations too -- I play my cards extremely close to the vest when I'm working on something. But it's interesting to compare it to the way that fanfic writers and RPGers bounce ideas off each other, and play with each other's concepts and riff on each other's work. As soon as money enters into it, and creative ownership ... things get weird. Awkward. The fences go up between the gardens. The awareness of hierarchy becomes acute (you're published, I'm not; you have a NYT best-seller, I don't; you're signed with a major publisher, I'm just a self-publisher - etc).
Certainly this is not to say that fandom and fanficcers can't be weird and competitive and guarded, or that you can't get that shared joy of creation with other non-fannish writers. But there's a different feeling to it, overall -- it's hard to put my finger on it, but I think ownership and money are a lot of the difference. You have to be really comfortable with a fellow original-fic writer to talk about your ideas with her; you have to think long and hard before putting snippets of works-in-progress out there on the Internet (if you can even bring yourself to do it at all). I think that we writers are socialized to view copyright as Every Writer's Best Friend, but it's more complicated than that; copyright is a knife that cuts both ways, and as copyright law currently stands, it's very very easy for that knife to be used to hurt us, or for us to use it to hurt each other. I don't like that.