Posts tagged JK Rowling

First off, thanks to c and Kerri. How did I know that the Normalinauts would have my back?

Although, as I watch the site views continue to bump up I was hoping that more people would leave comments. As I said to gilgrim earlier today (via gchat) it’s good for the soul to be told to take your own head out of your ass. And I really do believe that.

But I’ve been thinking more and more about this whole thing because, as an aspiring writer, how this lawsuit plays out may (godz willing) one day effect me and my own “intellectual property.”

Now if this isn’t about the money, as Ms. Rowling has said (and I don’t entirely believe that), and it isn’t about her work being “perverted” in some way (since the HP Lexicon is, essentially, a catalog) then the only thing it can be about, as c mentioned, is control.

Rowling stated in her testimony that the HP books felt like her children. Now, I’m not sure what her children think of that, and by the way it took me nearly a decade…admittedly I wasn’t consistently writing that whole time…to finish my first novel and guess what, given the choice of having to burn the only copy of my book and getting my daughter, guess which one I’d choose in a heartbeat. But that seems like an odd metaphor to me. The fact of the matter is, every writer writes so that people will read his/her writing. It’s that simple. You create something to, essentially, give to other people…and hopefully make a few bucks while you’re at it. Tim Powers (we all know of my love for Powers) says that he is skeptical of any writer claiming not to care how big his audience is. Every writer wants as big an audience as possible. But something odd happens once the writer has finished writing and that manuscript has now become a book that people buy and read. And now I’m going to excerpt from another one of my personal lords and saviors, Neil Gaiman:

(Quick note, the italics are mine)

I once – at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, in Florida, some years ago – went to a presentation of three papers on my work (one of which is reprinted here), and after each paper was presented, I was asked if I would like to make some reply, which is honestly a bit like asking someone who has just undergone an autopsy if he’d like to talk about the experience. (My replies varied, at least in memory, from “Er, thanks. That was very nice of you,” to an “Er, with respect, if you read the issue you’ve cited, I don’t believe it actually says what you think it does”. But possibly I just smiled and nodded.)

Those were, however – with the exception of pointing out the occasional objective mistake – simply my opinions, and I don’t consider them to be privileged. Once you’ve written something it’s not yours any longer: it belongs to other people, and they all have opinions about it, and every single one of those opinions is as correct as that of the author – more so, perhaps. Because those people have read the work as something perfectly new, and, barring amnesia, an author is never going to be able to do that. There will be too many ghost-versions of the story in the way, and besides, the author cannot read it for the first time, wondering what happens next, comparing it to other things that he or she has read.

That comes from Mr. Gaiman’s forward for a book of scholarly papers written about the Sandman. And while Gaiman is addressing a different topic altogether, the sentiment, I think, is the same. I tried unsuccessfully to find an interview I read some year’s ago with George Lucas. I’ll have to paraphrase, but basically Lucas said that, upon the original publication of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye he realized that the universe he had created was much larger then he thought, and it contained many more stories then he could ever tell, and people wanted to hear those stories. In the same way that Gaiman stated that, once you publish a novel, it’s no longer yours, when you are a George Lucas, or a JK Rowling, you create something so large and complex that connects with people in such a way that you cannot ever be the only one to “control” it.

In her testimony Rowling said that if the HP Lexicon were published that she would then be very discouraged about completing a reference book on her own, and my response to that is, “why?” If anything, I would think that it would motivate her that much more, in an effort to publish the “official” reference guide to HP. Or maybe that’s just me…

But let’s change gears for just a moment. We live in a time when broadband internet connections and digital content are the norm. Consider the digital distribution of both Radiohead’s and NiN’s most recent albums. Both of these groups have fan bases that can be described as “dedicated” (although, rabid might be a better term). I would hazard a guess that the HP fan base is at least as dedicated. Did Radiohead or NiN lose money by releasing new albums for free? No. Did they make as much as they might have by going a more traditional route? Who knows. But what I do know is that each of these bands successfully recognized that we are no longer in a black and white “copyright” world. Are these two instances directly related to the current Rowling v. HP Lexicon battle…no. But I think they are instructive. People are going to (more and more as the years go by, I’d wager) increasingly see copyright and ownership of intellectual property as a negotiable state of existence whether or not Rowling wins this case.

Again, I’m going to refer to Gaiman. His publisher recently agreed to host, for an entire month, a freely accessible full digital version of one of his novels (it was American Gods, his largest by far). You know what happened during that month? Sales of the book spiked!

The HP Lexicon, I am convinced, would not take away from Rowling’s potential to continue earning money off of her intellectual property. That will be, trust me, the defining characteristic of copyright law/decisions in the years to come. Not, did that person use your material, but did that person in some way cause you to lose revenue off of your material. The fact of the matter is, HP does not belong to Rowling alone. It belongs to every one who has read and enjoyed the books. She may feel that the books are “her children” but to the rest of us, they are our friends, and as much as she wants to control them, she can’t. It isn’t the 1800′s and you aren’t Dickens, Ms. Rowling.

My guess is, if the HP Lexicon is allowed to be published it will sell decently, but if you, Ms. Rowling, do actually finish your own HP reference work, that one will be gobbled up like mother fucking manna from heaven!

Ms. Rowling, you created something so unique and special that people connected with it in a deeply emotional way. Take a cue from Lucas, Radiohead and Trent Reznor and let go. You may find it quite freeing. And if that doesn’t help, you can always cry yourself to sleep on a mountain sized pile of $100 bills.