Copyright Bullies

Last week I talked about the importance of copyright in encouraging creativity, and I commended Penguin Random House for the wording it used on a copyright page. But not all publishers are that polite and insightful. In fact, some are downright copyright bullies.

As I mentioned last week, the copyright law’s fair use doctrine ensures that copyrighted works can be borrowed—within limits—to promote knowledge. “Fair use” is a complicated concept designed to ensure that information can be shared without impairing an author’s basic right to control the use of his or her material. Additionally, certain materials are in the public domain, which means there are no use restrictions whatsoever.

Publishers who try to deny you these uses are copyright bullies, and I have ranted about them before. With minor changes, this post is a reprint of one I originally wrote for the Indiana Writers’ Consortium on April 24, 2013 and reprinted on this blog on September 15, 2014.

Copyright Bullies

These days we hear a lot about children and teens who bully their classmates. We also hear about the copyright police—the ones who remind bloggers and middle school music pirates to honor copyrights. But we rarely hear about the copyright bullies.

Copyright bullies are those publishers who try to scare us out of using their materials for any purpose whatsoever (with the sometimes exception of book reviews). The law reserves certain rights to the public, but these copyright bullies and their lawyers don’t want us to know that.

Many books have this warning in the front: “No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without permission in writing from the publisher.”

Wrong. There are a number of what the law calls “fair uses,” and brief quotations in printed reviews is only one of them. To make a general and far too simplistic statement, a fair use is one that takes a short excerpt and uses it in a way that transforms or complements the copyrighted material rather than replacing it. You can find a detailed discussion of fair use in my book, Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal (KP/PK Publishing 2013), which is available from Amazon and other retailers.

Then there are those works that have been around so long that copyright laws no longer protect them. These works are in the public domain. People can use public domain materials any way they want, although they should attribute the source.

I found the most flagrant attempt at copyright bullying in a book that compiles several of Lewis Carroll’s works—all of which entered the public domain decades ago. In that book the warning states: “No part of this publication may be reproduced in any way or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or stored in an information retrieval system of any kind, without the prior permission in writing from [Publisher], except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.”

Huh? All the material in that book is in the public domain, which is where the publisher got it from in the first place. The reader is free to copy at will without worrying about copyright infringement.

We should all be careful not to violate copyrights, and some warning is necessary.

But don’t be intimidated by copyright bullies.

Copyright Champion

I recently looked for the copyright date in a book published by Viking, which is an imprint of Penguin Random House. Instead of the normal copyright warning, it made this statement:

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

I agree.

Some people argue that copyright inhibits creativity and knowledge by restricting what people can copy, but those people are wrong. First, I don’t understand how anyone can think that copying is creative. And boiled down to its basics, that’s all copyright restricts others from doing. So how can it inhibit creativity when the only activity it prohibits is the very antithesis of creativity?

Copyright is protected by the U.S. Constitution precisely because it encourages creativity. It isn’t a reward: it’s a bribe. It isn’t wages for an author’s or artist’s finished work: it’s motivation to start working in the first place. In other words, a writer doesn’t receive the copyright because he deserves it. He gets it as an incentive to keep writing.

Second, the law’s fair use doctrine ensures that copyrighted works can be borrowed to promote knowledge. “Fair use” is a complicated concept that is beyond the scope of this post, but I will cover it briefly next week.

Although I am a strong proponent of copyright protection, I do believe that the law can be improved. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to give authors the exclusive right to their works “for a limited time” but lets Congress decide what that time is. Right now, copyright lasts for the life of the author plus seventy years (or for 95 years for certain works where the legal “author” isn’t a known individual). I think that’s way too long. Copyright shouldn’t end with the life of the author since that penalizes writers and other artists who are 80 years old or dying of cancer, and they should be encouraged to write, too. But I could easily live with the life of the author plus twenty years and with 40 or 50 years for works without an individual author.

Copyrights foster creativity, and, like Penguin Random House, I support them.

But read next week’s blog post to discover how I feel about copyright bullies.  

There's Nothing New Under the Sun

My husband had a knee replaced on January 15, and my temporary role as nursemaid is cutting into my writing time. So this week I am reprinting a post I did for the Hoosier Ink blog on  June 27, 2012.

There’s Nothing New Under the Sun

 

The wind was picking up. Watching the approaching gale from her seat in the cockpit, Anne was grateful that Carousel had reached shelter before the storm hit. But as the sailboat’s bare mast bobbed and weaved with the others in the harbor, Anne prayed for the sailors who were still out on Lake Michigan.

 

Notice the opening sentence, which I borrowed from Chi Libris. Chi Libris is a group of well-known Christian novelists that include Angela Hunt and James Scott Bell. The group decided to publish a book of short stories with five shared elements: the same opening sentence, mistaken identity, pursuit at a noted landmark, an unusual form of transportation, and the same last line (“So that’s exactly what she did.”). The plots vary widely, however. In fact, the point of their collection, What the Wind Picked Up, is to show that the same basic idea can generate many diverse stories.

 

That’s one reason you can’t copyright ideas. The idea itself doesn’t make the story. It’s what you do with the idea that counts.

 

But there’s an even more important reason why you can’t copyright ideas. The founding fathers inluded copyright provisions in the Constitution to encourage creative works, not to inhibit them. As Ecclesiastes 1:9 says, “there is nothing new under the sun.” If ideas could be copyrighted, there would be nothing left to write about.

 

Here’s one idea that is frequently found in literature. Two young people fall in love but are kept apart by their feuding families, and the consequences are tragic.

 

You could call Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet a case of mistaken identity in 16^th Century Verona, Italy. The two protagonists fell in love before discovering who they had fallen in love with.

 

Move the setting to New York City in the 1950s, and you have West Side Story.

 

Then there is the apparently true story of the Hatfields and the McCoys in the Appalachian Mountains during the late 1800s. Their feud escalated after Johnse Hatfield began courting Roseanne McCoy, and Johnse’s family had to rescue him from the angry McCoy men. Did Johnse escape on a horse or use some other form of transportation that we would consider unusual today?

 

Or travel back to even earlier times. Legend tells of two Native American lovers from rival tribes. When their chiefs forbade their marriage, the lovers swore that if they couldn’t live together they would die together. Fleeing from their families, they embraced each other and jumped off the landmark now known as Lover’s Leap in Illinois’ Starved Rock State Park.

 

All of these stories use the same basic plot idea, and one (West Side Story) is still under copyright.

 

Now think of all the contemporary authors who have used that same plot idea. If you could copyright an idea, those stories wouldn’t exist.

 

Let’s look at another example.

 

Miss Read (pen name for Dora Saint) has written multiple books about everyday village life in England. While these books tend to have a main character, they center around an ensemble cast of ordinary, and mostly likeable, village residents.

 

Does that remind you of a series by a popular American authoress?

 

When I read Jan Karon’s first Mitford book, I immediately thought of Miss Read and her Fairacre/Thrush Green books. It isn’t that the writing style is similar—it isn’t—or that the authors tell the same stories—they don’t. But their books have a common theme.

 

I don’t know if Jan Karon read Miss Read’s books before writing her own. For the sake of my point, however, let’s assume she did. And let’s also assume Jan Karon knew she could use the same idea without violating copyright law.

 

So that’s exactly what she did.

Copyright Bullies

I just returned from a research trip and haven’t had time to write a new blog post, so I am reprinting one I wrote for the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog on April 24, 1913.* I made a couple of minor edits to reflect the current status of my book, but otherwise the post is unchanged.

Copyright Bullies

These days we hear a lot about children and teens who bully their classmates. We also hear about the copyright police—the ones who remind bloggers and middle school music pirates to honor copyrights. But we rarely hear about the copyright bullies.

Copyright bullies are those publishers who try to scare us out of using their materials for any purpose whatsoever (with the sometimes exception of book reviews). The law reserves certain rights to the public, but these copyright bullies and their lawyers don’t want us to know that. 

Many books have this warning in the front: “No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without permission in writing from the publisher.” 

Wrong. There are a number of what the law calls “fair uses,” and brief quotations in printed reviews is only one of them. To make a general and far too simplistic statement, a fair use is one that takes a short excerpt and uses it in a way that transforms or complements the copyrighted material rather than replacing it. You can find a detailed discussion of fair use in my book, Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal (KP/PK Publishing 2013), which is available from Amazon and other retailers. 

Then there are those works that have been around so long that copyright laws no longer protect them. This is called being in the public domain. People can use public domain materials any way they want, although they should attribute the source. 

I found the most flagrant attempt at copyright bullying in a book that compiles several of Lewis Carroll’s works—all of which entered the public domain decades ago. In that book the warning states: “No part of this publication may be reproduced in any way or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or stored in an information retrieval system of any kind, without the prior permission in writing from [Publisher], except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.” 

Huh? All the material is in the public domain, which is where the publisher got it from in the first place. The reader is free to copy at will without worrying about copyright infringement. 

We should all be careful not to violate copyrights, and some warning is necessary.  

But don’t be intimidated by copyright bullies. 

__________ 

* http://indiana-writers-consortium.blogspot.com/2013/04/copyright-bullies.html

Sharing Blog Posts

This is not a legal blog, nor is it aimed at writers (although I do have some writers among my audience). But recently I’ve had several inquiries about using material posted on other blogs, so I thought you might be interested in how the copyright laws apply. That way, if you want to pass on an interesting post, you’ll know what to do.

Blog posts are copyrighted. They don’t require any magic words or even the copyright symbol. Just assume that you need permission to copy them for distribution.

You can provide a link, however. Research papers include a bibliography so that others can find the sources and read them. A link is simply another way of providing source information.

There are three exceptions to the general rule that you need to get permission. While they are too complicated for a blog post, I have included brief summaries. For a more detailed discussion, see my book Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal (KP/PK Publishing 2013), available from Amazon.

• Titles, names, short phrases, slogans, ideas, and facts cannot be copyrighted.

• “Fair” uses. The copyright laws protect fair uses, but what uses are fair? Unfortunately, there is no bright-line test. Still, the courts usually find that parody, reviews, news reporting, and research are fair uses as long as the user doesn’t borrow more than is necessary to make his or her point. Reprinting an entire blog post is rarely a fair use.

• Material in the public domain is not protected by copyright. Works that were published before 1923 are in the public domain. Some later works are, too, but there the rules get trickier. If a blog quotes something you know is in the public domain (e.g., a sonnet by William Shakespeare), you can use the quoted material any way you wish.

If you want to share a blog post and don’t know whether your use falls within an exception, get permission or just provide the link. It’s as simple as that.