Our discussion in class, and the copyright article that June Cleaver posted (excellent article for this class!) got me thinking about Fan Fiction.
As literature fans, I am sure that most of us will grant that the original author of a work has the ultimate creative authority. Meaning, we can't going to place much, if any, stock in what other people create using the original author's characters or setting. For example, when I was in elementary school, I was very taken by Dahl's Matilda. So much so, in fact, that I wrote a sequel. Of course in those days I could not publish this sequel (online or elsewhere), and even at that young age, I realized that (a) my writing was no where near as good as Dahl's and (b) that even if my writing were amazing, Matilda wasn't my character.
Today, even though I love the Harry Potter books (yes, go ahead, brand me), I recognize that only Rowling truly knows how her characters would act and behave. Therefore, how could anyone possibly write anything with these exact characters? What I mean is, because Rowling created Harry, only she knows what he would do as a character; so anyone else writing about Harry (especially stories that put Harry into situations that he would never be in if Rowling were writing) is actually creating a new Harry, a character with the same name but different (much like two people in real life having the same name). Harry would be acting out of character if someone else wrote him; therefore, it's not actually Rowling's Harry Potter. It's Joe Smith's Harry Potter who looks a heck of a lot like Rowling's, may even act somewhat like Rowling's Potter, but because Rowling is the mind behind Harry, anyone's else's Harry is just that, their Harry.
So my question is, at what point is a FanFic character a completely new character? If Harry Potter takes on a sexual role in a FanFic piece, isn't that a new literary character with the same name as Rowling's? When does enough change in major characteristics result in a new character?
I think this is an important distinction, especially after reading the Open Spaces article regarding how our society's perception of copyright law is steady shifting toward one focused mainly on the monetary aspect of someone's work.
This website has some interesting notes on copyright and fan fiction along with a cease and desist database, which ties in well with the discussion in the Open Spaces article of ISPs pulling content off the web at the copyright holders discretion.
2 comments:
What you're describing is what happens every time an actor undertakes to play a part that was written by someone else. Every actor who has ever played Lady Macbeth has been the author of that performance -- and to some extent that version of Lady Macbeth is going to depart from Shakespeare's version. We accept this as being fundamental to the nature of dramatic literature, as opposed to novels, which have never been seen as collaborative in the same way. And however much we recognize the genuinely creative and even authorial contribution of the actor to individual experiences of both the play Macbeth and the character of Lady Macbeth, we still unthinkingly and unhesitatingly identify Shakespeare as the ultimate author of the play (and that isn't likely to change any time soon, despite some of the textual difficulties posed by several of the plays historically attributed to him).
Interestingly, Macbeth is not protected by copyright (nor are any other works of early modern literature), so anyone can produce it or perform it or publish it or do whatever they want to it, and that, it seems to me, is exactly as it should be. Now, I'm fairly indifferent to J.K. Rowling and her work, and you'll never convince me that the Harry Potter novels are in any way comparable to the works of Shakespeare (not that anyone is trying to convince me). But some day those books will belong to the world in exactly the same way as the plays of Shakespeare and the poems of Whitman and the novels of Flaubert. If that means that, for the time being, the ability of fans to collaborate with Rowling in the way that we are able to do with Shakespeare and Shelley and Poe is going to be limited to private fanfic, then that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Despite how it may have sounded in class, I am not advocating authorial tyranny of the kind that Samuel Beckett tries to exert even from beyond the grave: his estate regularly shuts down productions and sues theater companies that dare to alter the smallest details of his plays -- which is an unconscionable betrayal of the ancient and unspoken agreement between the playwright and the actor. But this is my whole point: anyone who chooses to write plays for production understands that at some point he or she must give the script to the director, actors, designers, and audiences -- this is why the life of a play does not end with the first production but actually begins there, and goes on to encompass other productions, films, and publications. Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Ran regularly gets identified as a version of King Lear, but it raises some interesting authorship questions: there's not a single word of Shakespeare's play anywhere in the movie (and not just because it's in Japanese) and Kurosawa is unproblematically credited as the author of the film. So what was Shakespeare's role in authoring it? Again, it is often called a Shakespeare film or a film of a Shakespeare play, but is it really? I return to what I said in class on Monday: there are levels and degrees of authorship, so surely we can see Shakespeare as the author of King Lear (both versions) and Kurosawa as the author of Ran -- Shakespeare's authorial role in the creation of the film seems minimal to me. To use another example, George Lucas has acknowledged that Star Wars was based in part on Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, but I've never heard Lucas claim authorship of Kurosawa's movie, or vice versa.
It's possible that I'm rambling, but I think all this is relevant. The various makers of 10 Things I Hate About You can and should claim authorship of the movie, but not of The Taming of the Shrew. And isn't that the way it's supposed to be?
By the way, I should mention that I'm a comic book fan from way back -- since I was a small child, in fact, when my dad and my uncles would buy their comics, read them, and promptly give them to my brother and me. When I was in junior high and high school, my friends and I would regularly write and illustrate our own fan comics (featuring, for me, Superman and, later, the X-Men). We developed long and elaborate story arcs and circulated them amongst ourselves, and if there had been an Internet in those days I have no doubt that we would have circulated them that way -- and very likely have been forced to remove them by DC and Marvel. But you know what? Even then we understood that these weren't our characters, simply our own interactions with characters and settings and situations that had been created (authored) by others. And on some level I think we understood that the comics we created couldn't ever be for anyone other than ourselves -- and we were fine with that.
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