[ week 36 | 49 ]
A fortnight of years ago—
Tuesday, 22.43
Lisa’s been blogging Con José, and (it sounds like) having the sort of just-reading-it-for-the-articles fun one ought to have when one is meeting minds and not ogling costumes; wish I was there. (No, I don’t. Not really. There’s work to be done and I’ve done my con for the year and it was San frickin’ Diego and I still haven’t written that thing about comics and masking and icons and eidolons and safely transgressive sex, have I? Shut up, Nicholas.) —What I’m thinking of, though, was sparked by this particular entry on a panel re: the DMCA and Fandom, and it sounds genteel enough for a topic worthy of getting some blood on the floor (I’m not going to bring up Harlan Ellison, and let’s just note I think textual poaching is not just a right but a responsibility and leave it at that). And what I wanted to bring up was kicked over for some reason in the back of my brain specifically by Lisa’s call at the end for creators to assert their right to decide what rights to hold onto and what rights to license away—and see, that was what reminded me of Scott McCloud’s Creators’ Bill of Rights.
It’s fourteen years old and it says “Comics Creators” at the top but read it through (and then for extra credit read McCloud’s background essay on some of how and why it came to be). —Every single one of those rights is in some way pertinent to the creation and distribution of any art in the industrial mass-production age. And if you were to examine any of the standard business practices of any of the major genera or idoms or forms of industrial, mass-produced art—movies, television, comics, novels, commercial illustration, newspaper columns, online flavor text, yadda and so forth—you’re going to find every single one of these rights compromised or utterly bargained away.
Now this is not to say that this practice is wrong, mind you. This bargaining of rights for money. No. But this is to say that here is where the creator starts, and this is what the distributor, the producer, the A&R person, the moneybags buys—and maybe, just maybe, you look at it this way, they’ve been getting a fucking steal the past few decades. (How much for Superman? How much for Robert Johnson? How much for Buffy the Vampire Slayer? —Well. A lot, for that last one. See? Sometimes the system works.)
And this is not to say I wholeheartedly agree with all 12 principles myself. (They interact rather playfully with my own insistence that art is a gift, after all; I’d say they need some little tweaking for the post-industrial, mass-personalization age, but that’s just me.) But in all this talk these days of the rights of copyright holders, it’s easy to forget the rights of creators—who all too often don’t hold the copyrights to their work these days, or hold them in part, in shreds and tatters, and who all too often have no idea what they give up to get their work out there.
So. Something to think about; truths that damn well ought to be held self-evident.
[ # ]
Who knew?
Tuesday, 21.47
Apparently, Oliver Willis is writing for South African tabloids.
(Okay, I kid. —Snagged from Daze. How could I resist? Could you? C’mon. You know you want to tell somebody. Just one other person. Go on. I won’t tell. Indulge. Insidious, isn’t it?)
