This sort of thing is always tough. Sometimes estates truly do the opposite of an author's intent, such as with Tolkien's Beowulf. I believe it's on record that he never wanted it published.
It's not so clear cut here; Steinbeck submitted it for publishing, got rejected, then seemingly spent years improving his art and produced his major works.
I certainly don't blame him for not wanting to throw a werewolf murder mystery out there after being recognized for what he must consider his "real" work. But it was commonplace to destroy unwanted manuscripts or simply to say, don't publish it, or destroy it when I die, etc, and he didn't. To me it seems like license to print, as long as the context is explained in a good introduction. Scholars of the American novel will go nuts for it.
The idea behind copyright itself is a give-and-take for society's benefit (it is good to give authors rights to their works to encourage publication, it is good to give the rights to the people at some point in exchange).
Tolkien's is an interesting case, for with the Silmarillion he obviously wanted to publish it (he considered it a much better work than the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings) but he also could never get it completed. His son took over and did his best to compile it. I suspect his Beowulf was similar - he did not feel it was up to his standards.
At some point after death, and with due consideration to the heirs and others, I think the historical value of these things outweighs the personal.
It certainly is a more complex issue than some commenters are making it out to be. I think these things need to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. I think both the intent of the author and the manner of presentation are important. With the Silmarillion and other Tolkien works they usually make it abundantly clear that it's not a finished work.
As a counterexample, there was the Xscape album from Michael Jackson where they took decades-old demos, had producers make them sound like modern songs, and put his face and name on the cover like it was just a new album. (also the songs mostly suck) That seems like it benefits no one besides Sony.
Honestly that and "Michael" would have been better off as the original demos. I found "Behind the Mask" particularly interesting since that's the original version of the song as most people know it. (Also it's a cracking song and Jackson's contributions enhance it.)
This makes me think of the Bukowski poems that were modified by his editor. It's now possible to read the originals compared to the edited versions and see the originals were vastly different and better.
It's not so much that Tolkien explicitly didn't want his Beowulf published, as that it's one of the many, many works that he started and was never satisfied with.
Note that that category includes the Silmarillion, which was cobbled together by his son Christopher. And Christopher rarely chose his father's latest efforts, preferring instead versions more compatible with the published Lord of the Rings.
Christopher was chosen by his father for the job of literary executor. It's arguable whether JRR Tolkien really wanted him to publish every scrap the way he did, but they do form an extraordinary documentation of the extraordinary process of Tolkien's imagination.
His Beowulf could be tinkered with forever because it's not really a translation. It's a hook on which to hang a lengthy series of scholarly footnotes, discussing almost every single word of the original.
If you want to read Beowulf in translation, pick any other version. (I adore Maria Dahvana Headley's hilarious, insightful new version.) If you want to read Beowulf in the original, and want an exhaustive discussion of how it works, pick Tolkien's book -- which also includes a helpful prose gloss.
It may be worth noting that William Faulkner wrote a
murder mystery and threw a fit when he didn't win the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine short story award. Steinbeck might not have felt that he was above genre fiction, but perhaps he thought the addition of a werewolf was a bridge too far.
> What a commentary. In France I am the father of a literary movement. In Europe I am considered the best modern American, and among the first of all writers. In America, I eke out a hack's motion picture wages by winning second prize in a manufactured mystery story contest
I read Faulkner's story and honestly the ending wasn't as satisfying as he might have thought. Wellman's story was probably better as a "murder mystery" even if the writing perhaps lacked some of Faulkner's polish. I thought some of Faulkner's other mysteries were better
Wellman was one of the greats of pulp fiction (especially the Weird subgenre, on which he was a lasting influence), so it's not terribly surprising that he could wrangle a mystery story more effectively than a literary writer.
There might be the confounding factor of being unlikely to buy a novel you don't know exists. If Rowling releases something under her own name, I'm sure to hear about it, which will surely boost sales.
> Steinbeck might not have felt that he was above genre fiction
At the time he would have written it, he was quite hungry. Living off of income from manual labor with some extra contributions from his father. Perhaps he thought a warewolf mystery could sell a few books at the time, but as you suggest, later on that would've been embarrassing.
One can control one's estate while alive. Once dead, the estate belongs to others, one's intent no longer incurs any obligation for others to adhere to.
If someone never wants their manuscripts published, they should destroy them while they are alive.
P.S. It took me a long time to get over the desire to please my father in what I did with his estate. You can't please dead people.
>"Once dead, the estate belongs to others, one's intent no longer incurs any obligation for others to adhere to."
Then why are wills permitted and enforced?
I'd agree that the only way to guarantee something is not published is to destroy it. One need look no further than the Barnes Foundation to see that executors can go astray; but that doesn't make it right.
Wills distribute the estate. Once it's distributed, the new owners can do what they want with it.
> Barnes Foundation
"to be honored in perpetuity after his death"
Such things should not be legally binding. What can justify a person controlling their estate a year after death, a century, a millennium? It's absurd.
Wills are for the living, not the dead. It is a coordination mechanism to reduce conflict between heirs. It obviously doesn't function perfectly, but otherwise every death would result in legal battles, or, as has been the case for most of recorded history, physical violence.
An artist doesn’t owe the world anything. If he didn’t want to be associated with it, then leave it alone. Have some respect for the way a person chooses to present themselves to the world.
The greediness of the contemporary public is really off-putting. It reminds me of how we dig up mummies and place them in museums; completely disregarding the actual human beings that lived and their cultural-religious beliefs, all so that we can stare at them in a museum for 30 seconds.
Yeah, he is past the point of having feelings to hurt.
You know whose feelings are probably hurt right now, though? Like, picture yourself as a budding werewolf novelist, the sort of person who went to the University of Kansas and got a Bachelor's of Fine Arts in English Literature with a minor in Werewolf Studies, and you've just finished your first werewolf novel, and you're really proud of it, and you have a stack of rejection letters saying that the market isn't really interested in this sort of thing right now. And now, all of a sudden, you see everybody losing their mind over John Steinbeck's werewolf novel. He didn't even want to write it! He didn't want it published! But the world is clamoring for it, and your novel sits in a file drawer. I'm sure there's someone out there like that right now.
Correct. I would understand if archaeologists two thousand years from dug me up and used me in a display about burial rituals. I don't think there's any expectation of privacy from that kind of thing.
That’s mostly because you live in a society which doesn’t value burials or the afterlife and which worships information, which must be acquired at any cost.
No ancient Egyptian Pharaoh would be happy with being dug up and placed in a glass box in a museum. They didn’t build the pyramids because they were bored or wanted people to visit them as tourist attractions. To the very real human beings of ancient Egypt, becoming an anthropological exhibit would be deeply troubling, a massively negative outcome.
The Pharoh might be incensed we let his slaves go free, educated women, didn't worship Ra, etc. We don't respect any of ancient Egypt's beliefs except we should respect their reverence for the dead? Doesn't make sense to me.
Is it really that difficult to just leave the Pharaohs in the pyramids and not in a glass box at the museum? Doesn’t really seem too much to me. They built the pyramids, after all.
Having historical artifacts in museums that millions of people can visit is a valuable social good which embiggens curiosity, exacerbates mental well being, and strikes fear into the very heart of boredom.
Why should people who lived thousands of years ago have an indefinite claim to a piece of land and the materials upon it? Why should we leave the pharaoh in the pyramid?
Yeah, it is that difficult. Huge numbers of people want to see the mummies and will pay for the privilege. The people with legal claims to the mummies make significant money.
Denying the owners profits and the curious the chance to indulge their curiosity for the benefit of people a thousand years dead is a derangement of moral priorities. We should care more about the living than the long dead. We can learn from and about them.
Point of fact, they did not build the pyramids. Their slaves did the work. Maybe let's split the difference -- what proportion of the slaves would want to see the pharaoh's corpses defiled?
At some point moral values clash. The Egyptian Pharaohs kept slaves, fought wars of aggression, and had their living retainers sacrificed so they could continue to serve after death. We haven't kept sacrificing people, because we agree that it's just outright wrong.
He and I think it's also just outright wrong to hide archaeological details from future generations for the sake of the long dead. It sounds like you disagree with us, but the argument that we should respect their wishes just because they wished them is not a strong one, given that we reject some wishes on a case by case basis as morally repugnant.
What is it about this wish in particular that should be respected more than other wishes?
Now how long time is that? Second? Minute? 5 minutes? Hour? Day? Month? Year? Decade? 50 years? Century? Makes one think. Also is there levels of these moral claims?
I reserve all rights to the atoms that make up my body ad infinitum, which means my estate will be able to claim copyright on your descendents for selling work that contains said atoms!
> That’s mostly because you live in a society which doesn’t value burials or the afterlife and which worships information, which must be acquired at any cost.
Even if I was, I'd be dead when it actually came about. The implication of time-travelling morality is an interesting but problematic one. There's no one actually suffering from the act of desecration, since suffering requires one to be alive.
Surely you can’t simultaneously support cultural relativism (misplaced as it may be for an American author being discussed by mostly Americans) and also speak for an entire group of people who existed thousands of years ago. The only thing we have empirical proof of is that the deceased don’t complain about the treatment of their remains or estates.
Well now, a cultural relativist would definitely disagree with your lat statement. Most cultures would say there's ample evidence in the other direction and that it's bad luck to build on ancient burial grounds.
Just declare bankruptcy and realize the future is full of psychos. This is why you should want to be cremated and have all semblance of your existence erased, because you have no idea what insanity they'll come up with for their own amusement. Also, don't upload your brain.
I don't, and I don't. Why do I need respect if I'm dead?
I mean, people are going to go through my stuff. They'll find sex toys, for example. Maybe my family will be able to be comfortable if they are able to profit from my stuff, or someone in the future find my stuff and get some satisfaction.
Well, luckily the people who died fighting in World War 2 cared about their society’s descendants, otherwise why bother fighting and dying? If your future society doesn’t care about you, why risk anything for them?
To care for the state of future generations is worthwhile, because it is to give hope and happiness to them while they are living. I want all of humanity to live in as ideal a world as possible, and it’s worth fighting in the present so that future humanity has a better world. And society should care for those who have sacrificed for it, while they are alive.
Once I am dead though, there is no me here to respect any more. Death is complete separation from this world. The vast majority of people who have ever died are completely lost to memory, whether they wanted that fate or not. And for those we do still remember, they’re long past having the ability to care at all what happens to what they left behind. Whether through nothingness or an afterlife, they are no longer here.
All the norms around burial culture are contrivances made up by humans and have little basis in the natural world. That the dead even deserve respect is similarly made-up.
One's involuntary submission to the whims of the living is part of the process of death. If one does anything even remotely notable you can be assured that society will want something to do with it. There's no point in chastising the entire world because of it.
> All the norms around burial culture are contrivances made up by humans and have little basis in the natural world. That the dead even deserve respect is similarly made-up.
Not sure elephants, among other species, would agree.
There are some such values, but I recognize their fragility in the face of actual human behavior.
And indeed, I think a lot of aspects of culture are dumb and that society would be better off without. It would be better if the world returned to the basics instead of endlessly wrapping itself around an axle of contrivances.
Well, burials only matter if others care about it. Other values, such as "do not harm others", etc., matter even if others don't care about them, because they concern actual suffering of living people.
If you follow Parfit, you choose that the latter kind is the only kind to care about, and so caring about burials for the sake of the one buried would be nonsensical to you.
As a huge Steinbeck fan, I do not want to read this book. I don't want to think of him as someone who wrote a warewolf novel - and he probably didn't want to think of himself that way either. At the time he would have written it he was very desperate for money so he would have written it in the hope that he might make a bit of money to keep going.
Whether you read the book or not, whether the public gets the chance to read the book or not, he is someone who wrote a werewolf novel. You can choose to ignore that fact if you want, but it makes no difference; it doesn't make him any worse of a writer. It doesn't make Cannery Row any less of a novel.
People do things when they're desperate for money that they're not proud of. They certainly don't want to be remembered for those things. The fact that he wrote it under a pseudonym indicates that he didn't want to be associated with it.
Writing under a pseudonym can be seen as brand management, so that the brand of one name does not leak to the brand of another. For example, Nora Roberts, the romance novelist, uses the pseudonym J.D. Robb when writing futuristic suspense novels. It may be as you said that he doesn't want to be associated with it, or it may be that he wants to keep the brands separate.
I’m not opposed to sharing an author’s unpublished works after death because their is value in allowing certain readers access.
But after reading Douglas Adam’s, I’m personally hesitant to read unpublished item from any other authors. After finishing The Salmon of Doubt I felt vaguely embarrassed, like I’d barged into his house and found him relaxing on the couch in his boxers. I’m a fan, not a scholar, and there were reasons he wasn’t ready to share the material yet.
> ...there were reasons he wasn’t ready to share the material yet.
Not saying that the parts of the story that have been published might not have needed some additional polish, too, but wouldn't the major reason simply be the fact that the whole thing wasn't yet finished as in "the story just stops mid-way"?
Are there any truly great posthumous novels other than maybe ones that were in essentially a final polish edit state? Hemingway's True at First Light wasn't bad but by Hemingway standards pretty so so.
Austen's Persuasion is easily my favorite of her novels, and I believe it's understood to have been not just a polish-edit away from ready for publication, but one or two content and punch-up passes, too (which reveals to me that I probably don't really like the stuff she added to her other books in that stage).
Whether it is released or not, he is still someone who wrote a werewolf novel and if it is released it's not something that would detract from his other works or legacy.
> if it is released it's not something that would detract from his other works or legacy
We don't know that. It could be a viral laughingstock that becomes the new primary association the public holds for the author (I doubt it, but never say never). If he didn't want it released, I'd say honor his wishes.
> The greediness of the contemporary public is really off-putting.
Well put.
This feels like some bizarre end game of "information wants to be free" where instead of railing against content owners expecting to be paid for content people are railing against the idea that content creators can have any control over their creations whatsoever.
But they can't. Once the work is out there, any control that the author is given is an affordance. Trying to fight it is why we live in a world of draconian DRM and licensing-not-ownership
To be clear: an artist's control of a work ends once it is in the hands of their audience.
Societies with high human capital respect the dead and won't seize upon the first opportunity to rob their graves (rationalizing as "learning" or whatever doesn't cut it). There's plenty of other material that was willfully published to learn from.
I disagree. I have extremely high respect for human capital, and genuinely feel disgusted that especially western society isn't working hard to improve the human condition at it's most basic level, i.e. Automation first.
To me the long dead are meaningless, and the recently dead are mostly so. I have the utmost respect for the living, and those who are recently dead have people who care about their legacy. But the farther you go back you go, the less direct connection the dead have with the present, and the simple fact is that the dead are gone.
Pretty much the entirety of the modern world is built on the accumulation of ideas and knowledge acquired over thousands of years. Unless you are a hunter gatherer, you have a direct relationship to the long dead.
Oh I agree 100%, I'm fully of the belief that we stand on the shoulders of giants, and that Social contract theory has merit; we owe society for the world we are born into. But owing society isn't the same as owing respect to individuals. We can't be burdened by the wishes of those long dead, they no longer exist and as a society we have to move on.
Except that the mummy in the museum isn’t a person. It’s a collection of inanimate organic matter. There are no beliefs there to respect. They ended with the person’s life thousands of years ago.
I could see an argument made for modern remains as there are living people/descendants who have a strong connection with the burial beliefs and practices. But make no mistake, even in that case it is about the living and not the dead.
Sorry, but this is a modern anachronistic statement. To the people that lived, their remains were extremely important. They even built dozens of pyramids to house them, which again, have been reduced to a tourist attraction.
Those people are also gone and no longer have any beliefs or ideas that can be violated.
Nothing we do today affects those people or their beliefs in any way. Those people no longer exist and cannot be harmed or protected. Ideas about respect and proper behavior around their landmarks only affects people who are alive. It is only important to the extent that it is important to us. It is clearly important to you but not others. So why should it matter to others if it doesn’t?
Because it’s a simple matter of recognizing other human beings and respecting their cultural achievements and desires. Just because they don’t exist anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t humans worthy of our empathy.
I hate to use this example, but your argument would also basically say a genocided people is completely unimportant and unworthy of respect, as they no longer exist either.
Thanks for your response. I'm trying to understand your position here, and I'm really not getting it.
Aside from the obvious problem of their being living people who experienced the holocaust (so they still exist), this example seems to imply that I'm saying that there's no need for empathy and respect for the people who came before us. I don't think that anything I've said implies that. Instead what I'm saying is that the dead need no protection and can receive no pain or insult. Anything we do for "them" is really for "us", because they do not exist.
>Because it’s a simple matter of recognizing other human beings and respecting their cultural achievements and desires. Just because they don’t exist anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t humans worthy of our empathy.
You seem to be implying that not honoring the wishes of the dead is an empathic failure. How so? I can empathize with someone's wishes, understand where they are coming from, and even respect who they were. None of that implies that I owe their desires a place in the world now. And in fact as modern people we MUST make choices about what pieces of the past to revere, revise, or pave over. Otherwise the world becomes a mausoleum to the past.
The person you're disagreeing with agrees with this idea about morality: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person-affecting_view). You, on the other hand, (I think) believe something can be bad even if it is not actually bad for anyone.
Case in point: the people who've actually died in said genocide cannot have any feelings about what we do about them, so to consider those feelings would be nonsense (according to the person-affecting view).
Of course, if someone living (such as yourself) cares about this, then it would still make sense to care about it, since the feelings of an actually living person are concerned.
In my opinion, an author failing to destroy material is tacit permission to have it published after their death—especially if the main reason why they didn't publish it is embarrassment. A dead person cannot suffer embarrassment.
Of course a person can suffer embarrassment before they've died. This is exactly why we should publish whatever we like after death. If it became the norm for famous authors to have their manuscripts raided for interesting works, then such authors will do a better job of not having manuscripts survive their death, solving these silly disputes once and for all.
It may just not be all that good. The idea that it wasn't published because it was too lurid for the delicate sensibilities of the day sounds like wishful thinking to me.
When I read Neil Stephenson, I decided to go chronologically. The Big U is quite a bad book, but I enjoyed reading it, and appreciate the perspective I gained by seeing Stephenson grow as an author. Steinbeck fans will probably eat it up, even if it's objectively awful
Much the same thing for reading Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, since the first book is basically the first thing he wrote - you can really see the writing style grow over the course of the series.
Stephen King has a recent book, “Finders Keepers,” that dramatizes the lost and found works of a fictional western literature author.
Good page turner if you like that sort of thing. The characters are part of a minor connected set of stories, largely orbiting around a character Holly Gibney, which are also easy entertaining reading.
“As Steinbeck wrote Murder at Full Moon under a pseudonym and did not choose to publish the work during his lifetime, we uphold what Steinbeck had wanted,” [the estate's agents] said.
This isn't true as the article states earlier that Murder at Full Moon – has survived unseen in an archive ever since being rejected for publication in 1930.
As this was never published, how does copyright law affect it? Will the estate have no say in the matter when the novel becomes 96 years old in a few years?
This is a really interesting question. If I send a manuscript to a publisher, the publisher declines, but a clerk of that publisher attempts to republish the work under their own name, is that not a copyright violation? The wording in [1, and link to "fixed"] suggests to me that the work is covered by copyright because the author conveyed it to a publisher with intent to publish.
Something created but not published before 1978 gets basically the "modern" copyright duration: life of the author plus 70 years, with a caveat that none of these would fall into the public domain until 2003. To encourage publication, if you did publish a previously-unpublished pre-78 work before 2003, you got a bonus extension of that term until 2048.
This was written before 1978, was not published before then, and not published before 2003 either, so it is protected by copyright for 70 years after Steinbeck's death: he died in 1968, so through 2038.
As to the hypothetical unpublished work that the publisher takes and publishes as their own: with newly-created work nowadays its easy: the work was copyrighted at "fixation," no need to publish or intend to publish. Before 1978, the author had state-level common-law copyright in unpublished works that would have applied.
Fixed in a tangible medium means recorded in some fashion. In a computer's non volatile storage, on paper, on a tape or record or CD or wax cylinder, etc. But, not simply performed for an audience (or oneself).
Under modern copyright law, if it's a qualified work, and it's recorded, copyright begins then. No intent to publish or special marking or registration or other such ceremony is required. Marking and registration do have benefits in lawsuits about infringement, however.
For works created before the modern automatic copyright, other rules probably apply.
Yes - everything you produce is instantly copyrighted nowadays - the question is when such would fall out. Likely if the clerk kept the copy until after you died, he'd get away with it.
copyright is automatic and implied, if someone somehow got a legal opportunity to see it, and managed to copy the work (or indeed if the publisher who originally refused it decided to publish it from their records), they would be breaking copyright from the original work regardless.
But once the copyright runs out then the publisher can publish it regardless, and a viewer could quietly copy it and publish it, unless someone in the estate made altered copies for anyone viewing it, then the altered copies would have fresh copyright, confusing the whole issue.
Now. Wasn't true then. But others who are probably more knowledgable than I are saying that older non-copyrighted work inherited the modern Berne regime automatically.
Your spouse works so you can write your book. You publish your book and it's a success, you die the next year. Work is immediately public domain and your spouse gets nothing?
I will go even further and say the lifespan of the author should not be a factor at all. Death is random, and one author’s work shouldn’t get more protection just because they happened to have better genes.
(This is not an argument in favor of extending the lifetime of copyright, which IMO is way too long. But the duration should be constant from the time of publication.)
I also support this, with relatively short lifespan. Like 25 years. Which would start getting interesting in digital age. I even support treating each version or a print as separate work, even if that is a mess.
Will paying your spouse your royalties cause your dead corpse to rise from the grave and write another book? Copyright in the USA can only be used to benefit the artist who produced the art, so that they will make more art.
Separately, society ought to not force artists to starve or sacrifice or be spouse-supported simply to be artists.
Creative people need to stop relying on the broken system of copyright to earn money.
They need to find alternate business models, like getting paid in advance by fans through something like patreon or kickstarter.
However, while the copyright system still exists its damage to the culture should be minimized by letting cultural works go in to the public domain upon the author's death. The public good far outweighs the earning potential of people who didn't even create the work to begin with.
Are you going to back a patreon or kickstarter from someone you've never heard of?
It's a messy business and there is no single way it should be done. New authors need to prove themselves somehow. And they should be compensated for their works.
Which brings us back to the question of whether you'll back someone you have no knowledge of.
Because you're basically asking them to do some work for you for free to start with. And if they can't afford to do free work, etc, etc.
It's just a cycle.
And while there is a lot of material being produced, not all of it is good. Publishers and the like used to act as curators to a degree. Now I have to do my own curation from not just what's passed the previous barriers, but from everything.
"while there is a lot of material being produced, not all of it is good. Publishers and the like used to act as curators to a degree. Now I have to do my own curation from not just what's passed the previous barriers, but from everything. Sorry, no one has time for that."
You don't need to be your own curator. There are plenty of curators out there that aren't publishers, but just people who choose to promote or feature art based on their own personal taste -- which is pretty much what traditional curators like publishers did, but now that power is no longer concentrated in just a few hands, but anyone can do it, and many do.
So you just have to find those curators whose taste is compatible with your own.. those could be friends whose taste you trust, or even people you don't know who like the sorts of things you do.
We no longer have to bow down to the whims of those who live in an ivory tower. Curation has been distributed.
Of course, you might still have to curate the curators, but there are curators of curators too.. like articles on the "best blogs" or various awards to content aggregators, or, again, friends who can recommend you stuff.
The core problem is information overload, and no one has an ultimate solution to it yet, but I'd much rather have today's world of an incredible amount of information, cultural production, and content, than yesterday's world of relatively little content trickling through a few gatekeeper priests.
"you're basically asking them to do some work for you for free to start with. And if they can't afford to do free work, etc, etc."
I'm not asking them for anything. Many artists naturally make art, writers write, etc.. and it's just a fact that a huge amount of them publish their creations for free.
Artists now realize that because of the information and content glut their problem is mostly one of getting noticed, so they'll release plenty of work for free.
I'm not asking them for it, but many are almost trying to force it on me (and everyone else).. trying to get more eyeballs on it, because they realize that once they've got an established fanbase they can monetize it and become more famous and successful... and once they are then the patreon/kickstarter model becomes viable.
Not everyone can do it, but, too bad. If they can't then they can remain a hobbyist or just keep their art to themselves (as I have throughout most of my life).
I'd love to have a utopia where every artist gets paid to create and do nothing else, but copyright has absolutely failed to bring us there, and it's becoming less viable as a means of helping the vast majority of creators every day. It's mostly the lucky few and the middlemen that get to successfully play that game. Instead of propping up this broken system we should be working to find new alternatives which don't rely on artificial scarcity or putting sharers in jail.
Art is in no danger. There's an absolute glut of art, since making all sorts of art has never been easier. It's also never been easier to learn how to make art.
It used to be that in order to be a photographer you had to buy an expensive camera and have access to a darkroom, or at least spend money to get your photos developed. Now you can take high quality photos with your phone, that everyone has, and no development is needed. So more people than ever are taking photos, many of them artistic. There's no shortage of photography and unless civilization collapses, never will be. If anything, there'll be more and more photography every year, and sharing it has gotten easier than ever.
The same is even more true of video, which used to be even more expensive to create than photos, but now is just as easy and virtually free.
Same with desktop publishing ever since cheap personal printers became available. It used to be that you had to either own a printing press or pay to have someone print your work for you. Now you can print it yourself on your personal printer, or just put it up online, skipping the printing step.
Digital art creation programs have made creating visual art way more affordable, as now you don't have to pay for expensive physical art supplies.
Same with digital music creation tools, etc...
The many digital distribution platform, from Facebook, to Instagram, to Etsy, to Amazon have made publishing one's art super easy too. There's less need than ever for agents, publishers, or other middle men.
All together, this has led to an enormous amount of creativity and art creation, with probably hundreds of millions of people becoming creators compared to what existed just 40 years ago, before the personal computer revolution or the internet boom.
So I'm not worried in the least about art. There'll always be more than enough of it to go around.
I'd love it if creators got paid for their work, but it's not at all essential for art to live or thrive. More than enough artists will continue to make art regardless.
Because people should not be going to jail for copying and sharing artwork (or bits, really). Throwing people in jail and ruining their lives is a tangible harm, and it's harmful to society to disallow the public to view, share, or remix art and literature unless they can afford to pay for it. Society and culture advance with the sharing of knowledge, while copyright runs directly counter to this.
Meanwhile, there's no right to make money. It's an artificial scarcity model that mostly benefits corporations and middlemen along with a small minority of extremely popular artists, and once the artists die it doesn't even benefit them either but does continue to benefit corporations and middlemen.
If creators want to keep control of their work they shouldn't publish it at all, but once they do there should be no artificial legal framework to imprison people that copy or share it.
However, artists can still get paid by asking to be paid in advance through sites like patreon and kickstarter.
For the rest, they can remain hobbyists.. and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. As I said before, there's no shortage of art.
In the system I'm advocating for, no one gets sent to jail and no one's lives are getting ruined for copying or sharing bit, art continues to be made, and artists continue to get paid (though now in advance rather than a legally mandated system of artificial scarcity).
They already do. The average income from writing for novelists is low enough that the vast majority of published writers can not live off their writing alone.
Outside a very tiny proportion of best sellers you need to expend significant efforts on promotion if the income matters to you.
This is not new, or unique to literature, and never has been.
All the wonderful unauthorized sequels, medium-conversions, re-makes, re-mixes, et c., that would have come to be seen as on par with or better than the originals, and possibly even more commercially successful, that aren't being made. Inherently multi-media works (film, games, that kind of thing) not being able to choose freely from non-super-old popular media to include, without having to both beg permission and pay someone else (as with soundtrack music, for example).
Disney shouldn't own Star Wars now, to pick one example. Everyone should own it. Any person or company who wants to try to make a go at financing and selling a new entry, or a re-make, should be free to. Film-makers who grew up on it and want to put their spin on it without having to get permission first, should be able to try.
Companies still making sequels to or remakes of 80s games should have to face competition from others trying to make better sequels or remakes of those games.
The best recorded version of the Beatles' oeuvre might well be one that won't ever exist now, because the person who'd have made it couldn't have made made any money at it, and died or will die of old age before the copyright expires, even though they weren't born when Let it Be was released.
I hesitate to name a number (14 seems fine, though, and 28 not catastrophic if you want a longer duration that covers a large portion of a normal person's working adult life) but what we've got now is way too long.
Because not everything is an overnight success. Someone could make a song/comic that never gets popular.
Years later, someone takes it now it's free from copyright, uses it and achieves popularity. The original creator is still alive and has had nothing back.
Even further, if it has no copyright huge companies like spotify would not have to pay any royalties at all to sell or distribute music, pocketing everything themselves.
OK. And that drives the value of creative output to zero... how? To zero. How?
I'm not seeing the part where the possibility that one's work might flop for a decade or three and then be made a smash-hit by someone else keeps people from creating almost exactly as much original art as they do now. I'd expect the effect on behavior to be negligible, especially with terms closer to 30 years. Meanwhile it would free up an awful lot of material for creative inspiration. I have no doubt that would result in more good art, overall.
I'm not disputing that it would give an increase in creativity, but it would open countless doors for huge corporations to completely exploit creatives. You're encouraging a situation where it becomes completely nonviable to be an artist commercially. It's already bad enough as it is at the moment with Spotify et all pocketing the vast majority of proceeds.
It's shocking to me that you're willing to completely overlook the fairness of the system in return for 'more art'. It is not appropriate whatsoever to strip ANYONE of their ownership of a piece of art they have created. Why do you feel entitled to that?
> It's shocking to me that you're willing to completely overlook the fairness of the system in return for 'more art'. It is not appropriate whatsoever to strip ANYONE of their ownership of a piece of art they have created. Why do you feel entitled to that?
Are you genuinely unaware of the arguments that got us the invention of copyright in the first place, or are you aware of them and just asking me to quote them?
[EDIT] in case it's the former, let me just note that it's very much not obvious or in any sense "natural" that a person who hums a tune they just thought up gets to keep anyone else who heard them from humming it, in any context or for any reason, including for pay. That we, collectively, will it so (with laws) is precisely to encourage more art to be both created and shared. The enhanced level of creation is the entire point. Copyright lets you put an idea in someone's head and then prevent them from doing much with it. That is also an imposition, and a pretty damn extreme one, at that.
Humming a tune and claiming copyright when someone else hums it is not the same as working on an album writing personal songs and producing, mixing and engineering it for a year for someone else to completely rip it off scott free.
Since, as you acknowledge, there's an enormous amount of content available, then we don't need to give it any special protection using copyright, do we?
Well from my pov just because there's lots of it doesn't mean it's interchangeable? I think legal protections on what you create gives you an avenue towards making a full time career out of what you do. And I don't think the patreons or kickstarters of the world replace that because it firstly makes you a slave to your audience and secondly forces you to become a marketer which probably great disadvantages anyone who isn't either good at that or who isn't already comfortably well off enough to afford the time to get good at it.
Finally I think it would greatly decrease the quantity and quality because frankly your time would be better spent elsewhere on things that can support you financially.
Thankfully, it's never going to happen so it's a bit of a hypothetical conversation.
That rule would greatly discourage publishers from accepting works from authors who are near death. And it would also be impossible to enforce for anonymous or pseudonymous authors. I think a fixed term term of copyright, like 20 or 30 years, would be better.
I think the author's life + 70 years is a good default for anything not explicitly handled elsewhere, as by that point I and everyone involved will be dead (I suppose my grandkids will still be around at that point, but if 70 years of preparation for the publication of my list of Minecraft mods isn't enough, that's their problem).
We're not talking personal or private matters here, we're talking something that would have been published if a publisher had said yes at the time. There's obviously a remuneration aspect and the wishes of the author and heirs should be taken into account, but as some point those diminish.
What I'd like to see is some way to handle abandoned works - something like "if this book/game/movie is no longer in print you can obtain some form of archival copy for a fee, paid to the library of congress and transferred to the author/assigns/heirs if possible".
Books can wait around for 70 years to be handled/digitized, but lots of other works are being lost (or are being preserved "illegally").
Is everyone here aware that this would apply to any source code we write too? If an author writes a private book for his/her SO, that would pass into public domain because the copyright s/he gave to the SO would go away at time of death. I'm assuming that would mean we could not assign rights to source code to our family while we are alive. (Or anyone else come to think of it?) Since those rights go away when we die. This would change a lot. It would change almost everything.
If they wrote a private book for their spouse, presumably the spouse would have the only copy and would not be required to provide access to it. Copyright wouldn't change that case one way or the other.
I can see how this could be argued for published work, why should it apply to something unpublished? Should all of their personal correspondence be released too?
There's a huge profit motive for, say, pharmaceutical companies to manufacture unsafe or deadly medicines, for food companies to manufacture unsafe food, etc.
But laws, regulations, and agencies like the FDA keep them mostly in check. Yes, there have been some abuses and regulatory capture, but compare the state of US food and medicine before the creation of the FDA and after.
The chances of corporations starting to murder authors to profit off public domain assets is unlikely, especially as everyone will be able to use those assets when they become public domain.
It's exclusivity and artificial scarcity that earns these companies the most money (or corporations like Disney wouldn't have fought tooth and nail to extend copyright protections).
I don't know how Mr. Steinbeck still enjoyed his fame and legacy while being found as a major benefitciar of intellectual misconduct, and obviously belittle women.
When he was writing the grapes of wraith, he was reading Sanora Babb's manuscript from his publisher friends. He was already an established writer, and managed to publish his own work heavily borrowed the structure and major plot from Sanora's work.
And obviously, no publishers are willing to publish Snora's work, because Mr. Steinbeck is telling them he is writing one that is very similar (which is obvious, because he is essentially copy the book's story line). Ms. Babb's work is only published in 2004, 70 years later after its original completion in 1930s.
I think Mr. Steinbeck probably deserve being stripped of his Nobel prize for this blatant misconduct.
The Wikipedia page you linked to doesn't make the claims that you are. It says that Babb volunteered for the FSA to help migrants, and that her supervisor Collins asked her to keep notes on her work there. Collins seems to have later shared the field work notes from her, as well as others, with Steinbeck when he was doing research. There's no claim that he read (or was even aware of) her manuscript, or that he dissuaded her work from being published (it says her publisher decided not to publish it after The Grapes of Wrath was successful).
People can read the summaries of both if they like; there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap other than they're both about downtrodden Okies trying to make it out West.
Edit: Also worth noting that Steinbeck's nonfiction account of migrant workers in California, The Harvest Gypsies, was published two years before Babb began her volunteer work with the migrant farmers.
I have never even once heard this accusation. I skimmed his Wikipedia article and didn't see a reference to any of this.
Is there clear plagiarism? The Great Depression wasn't exactly an obscure topic and was still fresh in the minds of many people at the time.
What is going on? Is this posthumous cancel culture?
Wasn't it prudent to look for similar media and clear the wake? Publishing was a smaller, more difficult world back then and publishers wouldn't back two of the same thing.
Wouldn't you drum up support for the novel you worked on? Especially after having struggled for years as a manual laborer trying to make it? Would you willingly table your book that you worked on so that someone else could take your place?
Is that malice?
Unless there's clear evidence, it's like saying Marvel plagiarizes DC. And that Disney should be cancelled for scheduling their movie premieres around the best moviegoing dates. (Is that highly competitive? Sure. Evil? no...?)
The reason you’ve never heard of this accusation is because it was Babb who was wrongly “cancelled” soon after she wrote her novel. She was the subject of intense FBI scrutiny for her “leftist” writing and blacklisted by the “House Un-American Committee” so she fled to Mexico. She also dared to marry an Asian man as a white woman which was not just frowned upon at the time but illegal.
Regardless, I think it’s odd you find something utterly unbelievable simply because you haven’t heard it until today. Surely the entire internet is full of true things that you, and I, and most people have never heard of? Not having heard a piece of information before doesn’t make it any less credible.
> She was the subject of intense FBI scrutiny for her “leftist” writing and blacklisted by the “House Un-American Committee” so she fled to Mexico. She also dared to marry an Asian man as a white woman which was not just frowned upon at the time but illegal.
the original comment is itself perhaps over-confident in its accusation. as far as i can tell, the known facts about what materials steinbeck received of babb's are hazy. certainly seems suspicious though.
It's still illegal for a white woman to marry an Asian man if she's already married to a white man. Still awful. I'm just making a point that these social norms are pretty relative and if you don't have any underlying system of morals to judge them by, you'll probably just end up reinforcing whatever morals your own society already has, with no regard to their awfulness.
Also her leftist tie was derived from her marriage to a Chinese man:
"""
Howe met his wife, a white woman named Sanora Babb, before World War II. They traveled to Paris in 1937 to marry, but their marriage was not recognized by the state of California until 1948, after the law banning interracial marriage was abolished.[5][13] Due to the ban, the "morals clause" in Howe's studio contracts prohibited him from publicly acknowledging his marriage to Babb. They would not cohabit due to his traditional Chinese views, so they had separate apartments in the same building.[14]
During the early years of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, Babb was blacklisted due to supposedly having Communist ties from her marriage to Howe; she moved to Mexico City to protect the "graylisted" Howe from racial harassment.[5][15]
Howe raised his godson, producer and director Martin Fong after Fong arrived in the United States.
"""
There's some information in the William Souder Biography of Steinbeck that came out last year. Though it wasn't presented as a clear-cut case of plagiarism there were definitely questions. He'd apparently had access to her manuscript for "Whose Names are Unknown" and he and Babb were traveling the migrant worker camps in Central California working on stories for various publications. They did appear to cross paths. I've yet to read "Whose Names are Unknown" to see how similar it might or might not be to "Grapes of Wrath".
It's not so clear cut here; Steinbeck submitted it for publishing, got rejected, then seemingly spent years improving his art and produced his major works.
I certainly don't blame him for not wanting to throw a werewolf murder mystery out there after being recognized for what he must consider his "real" work. But it was commonplace to destroy unwanted manuscripts or simply to say, don't publish it, or destroy it when I die, etc, and he didn't. To me it seems like license to print, as long as the context is explained in a good introduction. Scholars of the American novel will go nuts for it.