If anything, people might rush out and read GWTW even more.
I mean, yes, it’s outdated, and yes, a bit biased. That said, it’s a fantastic novel in my opinion.
Yeah, especially if you enjoy reading an apology of slavery.
William Safire agreed with you in his latest NY Times op-ed column. He pointed out that copyrights now go 70 years after death of the author, and says that’s much too long.
If TWDG turns out to be a dud, it may hurt sales of the original franchise.
The purpose of copyright is to protect the owner’s right to control and profit from her intellectual property. It’s nice to think that a great work should be free for all to enjoy, blah, blah, blah, but the fact is, the writer worked very hard to create it, and it belongs to her. It shouldn’t be given away just because she’s dead now and we all love the story.* Satire notwithstanding, other writers’ works should not infringe on the copyright owner’s right to control her property.
*Admittedly, I’m a little unsure about time limits on copyrights. They seem illogical to me vis a vis my above argument, but if there was no limit, we’d probably have millions of people suing for the copyright to the Bible.
I wouldn’t call it an appology for slavery, so much as a book showing the MENTALITY of that time period.
Yeah, I guess I’m a racist then. sigh
I am gonna argue with you a bit, Ike. IN practice I agree that “telling the other side of the story” can be a cheap ploy for attention, in the same way as historians that go out of thier way to “destroy cherished icons”–it is bad scholorship and cheap sensationalism. But I am not going to throw out hte genre completly–I wouldn’t want to call up John Garnder and tell him that Grendel was a cheap publicity ploy.
Like any other genre, it can be done poorly–no doubt about it. From the Salon article linked above, it sounds like in this case it was done very poorly, with more attention to a trashing what is, let’s face it, an easy target, than to good writing, to believable charecters, to compelling drama. But the concept of taking what has gone before and reshaping it–hell, that is what all art is when you get down to it.
Oh, damn. I KNEW someone was going to come in eventually with the “What about Shakespeare?” argument.
Okay, it’s wrong to say “all stuff stolen by artists from other stuff is bad.”
And I can even admit “Shakespeare ripped off an old Irish or Italian folk tale in order to make a buck/meet a deadline, not to create timeless art.”
And Meyers’ SEVEN PER-CENT SOLUTION was pretty entertaining, after all.
It’s subjective. If a work smells to me of opportunism and seems to lack redeeming artistic features, like the subject of this thread or the SCARLETT sequel, I reserve my right to sneer. If it makes me giggle, like Carol Burnett walking onto the set in a dress made of curtains complete with rods, I’ll applaud.
Sure. But does quality parodic, inventive literature have a more vigorous moral right to exist than hackneyed trash? I certainly don’t think so. You probably don’t think so either, but statements like:
…make me unsure of your actual position. As long as the author is not directly plagiarising Mitchell (which she very well might have done), she can take the moral high ground whether her motives were purely opportunist or not. Protected speech is protected speech.
MR
Oh, me, too, though as an editor your sneer may carry more weight than mone. I will even go one further and say that from what I have read (of course, we can’t read the actual book) the court made the right decision-it dosen’t sound like The Wind Done Gone is far enough away from the original to count as anything but an unauthorized sequal. But the genre of “Switched POV” is one of the few facets of post-modern writing with the potential to actually be entertaining. It may have a higher trash/gem ratio than other genres just because people are so enamoured of the idea trashing cultural icons that they don’t pay attention to the writing, but hte trash/gem ration is pretty high for other genres as well.
Sure she can, but she looks silly up there, claiming it is protected when it may well not be: we can’t read the original so we really can’t say, unfortunantly. As I said above, I suspect that it is too close to GWTW to be protected, and I don’t think that not being alowed to right a heavy handed sequal to GWTW is cramping her artistic voice: If she had been a better writer who took the time to write a better book, she could have constructed it in such a way that it was far enough from the original to count as parody or as merely derivative. Or she could have worked from a novel that was no longer copyrighted.
The idea behind copyrights is that stuff will slide into the public domain after it has been around a generation or two and become part of our collective culture. I think that the problem is that in our nostalgia-infested culture the turnover from “novelty” to “Cultural icon” is down to about 18 months (remember the good ole days when we were worried about the Y2K bug and we thought 450mhz processors were fast? ho-ho-ho!), much shorter than the copyright. Hell if I know what the solution to this is.