One of Noah’s Wonder Woman posts elicited this comment from Cole Moore Odell:
…it shouldn’t be controversial that some characters simply don’t work, or they don’t work past the idiosyncratic spark of their original creators. There’s nothing wrong with limited shelf life. Yet this simple reality is warped by trademark holders who have unlimited interest in making money off of limited concepts, and by readers who refuse to let ideas go, even in the face of continued creative failure. … the same can be said for most superheroes. Most popular culture, really.
Reading the WW essays, I got the sense of an original vision both odd and personal; later attempts at the character, not so much. But it has enough cachet that people want to keep trying their own version. It could just be positioning (“the first female superhero”). Readers who won’t let go, I think, shouldn’t be faulted. They see untapped potential. (The Cubs could win the World Series; it’s not the fans’ fault for buying tickets.)
And the corporation’s a facilitator, never an author, no matter what the law says. The law’s the most interesting thing here, I think. Totally arbitrary and usually absurd, Odell’s right that it warps reality.
Without going into a laundry list of Boggsian aburdity, I’ll point to the English scrum over Lost Girls. Moore & Gebbie used Peter Pan characters still under copyright in the UK & EU. The hospital that owned the rights objected, so M&G waited to publish there until the copyright expired. An amicable solution, but still:
Why on earth does a hospital own Peter Pan?
(Yes, I know there are reasons. I could have my reasons to leave my fortune to a dog.)
So, my big question: at what point can a work be said to have reasonably escaped its author and been taken over by the culture? It makes less sense to say one person hospital owns & controls Peter Pan than it does to say Peter Pan’s just out there somewhere. I think this question especially important to comics works, which rely more on “characters and situations,” as at least one comics copyright has it, than on any particular story. Certainly, the superhero genre’s founded on the character more than the situation.
(Uninteresting side note: yes, lots of money is involved. So? Granite mining is a cutthroat industry.)
Finally, this is silly:
–Image (C) Tom Bell, sourced at Wikipedia, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license
Screw you, Sonny Bono’s ghost. Say I want to make creative use of the culture I’m in, works speaking in the language I grew up with. For a lot of people, pop’s the only language they have. And that language is owned & operated by companies. So I’m left with parody, the collective unconscious of the 1860s, or the lawless Mississippi kids who didn’t know they couldn’t remake Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Better than the original in every way, you can only see it through pirate versions as a legit release is a legal tangle.)
In film criticism, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson started the practice of using film stills without asking permission because studios routinely asked crazy fees for reprint rights. Now everyone reprints stills without permission, so a murky legal precedent’s set even if no case has been tried.
So, shouldn’t organized fan-unrest be able to destroy copyright? “24-Hour WW Fanfic Comic Day.” Or cosplay sit-ins, I don’t know. It might be worth it just to have thousands of people dressed as Amazons, going about their business. Maybe Moulton’s ghost would be pleased, if not as much for “24-Hour Hogtie Day.”
Do you really want to destroy copyright? As opposed to making sure there’s a reasonable cutoff period? If I ever get my novel published, I want a chance to make some money off it.
Yeah, you either believe in the concept of intellectual property and a concomitant “copyright” or you don’t. Why can’t you “use” Wonder Woman? Well, you can, you just can’t attempt to sell or distribute whatever it is you’ve used it for [i]because it’s not yours[/i].
If pop is the only language spoken, the speakers should have plenty to work with in creating their own works.
Tom, I want to pay you so I can read your novel. I also prefer getting paid to write. But in 50 years, when your novel’s tattooed onto the Western mind and my review of “Comic Book Tattoo” has replaced the lyrics of the Star Spangled Banner, can’t we just call it even and stop asking to get paid for, or to control, our work?
I don’t think copyright should be destroyed wholly (though much of the Internet disagrees with me), just revamped. There’s a point when a work transcends it, so to speak. I’m not sure where that point is.
I think all the old superheroes have passed that point.
I also think the (US) laws are profoundly absurd: for people, life of the author +70 years.
For corporations, 120 years from creation/95 from publication.
Uland, law’s arbitrary and open to interpretation, which is why we have courts and appeals. The first US version of copyright lasted 14 years, with an author’s option to extend another 14.
The real reason I can’t use WW is because Disney has always paid Congress a lot of money for legislation whenever “Steamboat Willie” is about to fall out of copyright.
You emphasized “because it’s not yours” in your comment; but all these pop culture “properties,” as they’re called, aren’t theirs, either. First they’re the creators, and ultimately they’re the culture’s.
It’s just a question of how long the culture has to wait before the law admits the real owner.
Also: this whole “life of author +70 years” is nuts because most families can’t hold back the fangs long enough to divvy up five acres and a stray cat.
I agree that 70 + is way too long; 28 seems a bit chintzy though. I think 50 years from publication would be a nice round number.
I wrote a long essay about this a while back for TCJ. It’s reprinted here.
in my time around the copyfight internet, i've concluded that my ideal timeframe is life or (not and) forty years, whichever comes last.
so if a fella keels over a second after he's sent in a bestselling novel & conceived a baby, the kid will still be taken care of most of his life, enough to find his or her own damn way to provide for grandchildren.
Ok, Bill, I’ll put you down for “decent cutoff period.”
Oddly, my brother believes that copyright should be even longer. His reasoning is that, back when the copyright laws were framed, people weren’t used to the idea of creative works lasting for centuries. I pointed out to him that the Bible and the works of Aristotle, etc., were quite well known at the time.
I would gladly participate in wonder woman fan fic day.