Ok, I know collectors pay a lot for their favorite celeb writings like letters and messages that Elvis personally wrote to people and museums and scholars would love to have anything historical be it love letters to a grocery list written by Caesar Napoleon, etc but is it common for someone to sell their love letters while both parties are alive?
What prompted this is patti boyd, one of the people at the center of: “Swinging London” in the 60s and 70s had an auction where she was parting ways with some famous belongings like dresses she wore in photo shoots paintings that became album covers . pretty normal stuff
What struck me as well tacky was that she was auctioning off love letters from her famous exes like Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and possibly others…I would think the thing to do would be to leave them in a box with a relative and say … OK sell these when we’re not alive anymore …
And say if Eric found out they were up for sale could he have legally stopped them?
I don’t see how it would be illegal to sell them, assuming she owned them, and I don’t think Eric could do anything about it without drawing attention to them. Perhaps she asked Eric and Olivia (George’s wife) if it would be okay. Do we know that she didn’t?
If it turns out she didn’t ask them I’d say it’s in poor taste, but if you need the money now, you need the money now. After Patti is dead, what good is the money then?
Fun fact; the copyright in the letters likely belongs to the people who wrote them; ownership of the documents to the person who received them. So Patti Smith can sell the letters she received, but the buyers of the letters don’t acquire the right to copy, publish, etc the contents (unless they negotiate separately to acquire that right from the authors of the letters).
Yes, I have a friend who discovered some old letters her mother had received, before her marriage, from someone who was well-known in his field. She is doing a project for publication about her mother (not anticipating wide circulation, her mother is not particularly notable except for a couple of people she knew, it will be an art book not a best-seller) but she has to get permission to publish from the man’s surviving wife, who now owns the copyright. So it’s not just when the sending party is alive, apparently, the copyright passes along with their estate.
It is vaguely amusing to think about how this will be a self-solving problem going forward into the future. It’s not like there’s going to be much of a market for a screen shot of someone sending an eggplant emoji.
No, because the letters were knowingly and willingly sent to her, and they are now her property. I never put anything in writing that, as far as I’m concerned, the entire world can see. LOL
