...asked J.K.Rowling in the American court.
The case of JKR v EVDA (Eric Van der Ark) is an intriguing and somewhat confusing one - the waters of the case started out clear but have got muddier as the NY court hearing has progressed but the basis of the complaint is that EVDA has taken chunks of JKR`s books and reprinted them wholesale in his Companion to or Encyclopdia of, the Harry Potter books - i.e. he has gone way beyond what it is universally regarded as an acceptable amount of in-copyright text to reproduce ( or nick ) for your own purposes. Everything else would seem to be irrelevant so it does boil down to JKR`s question, 'Are we the owners of our own work ?'
The murky ocean of copyright law is one into which I have barely even dipped my little toe. Is there any difference, copyright-wise, between matter on the internet and matter in printed books ? Because it is the internet which has changed everything forever and made the work of the copyright police well-nigh impossible.
JKR has approved EVDA`s fan website on which his companion to all things Harry Potter is based. Perhaps it is very different from the printed book. But it is also relatively easy to bring a case against a printed book and, if successful, to have all copies destroyed. Still, two wrongs do not a right make and if EVDA has indeed nicked very large chunks of JKR`s work and simply reproduced them for his own purposes, including the making of money, then he is in breach of her copyright whether he puts his work up on the net or publishes it as a book. None of this has absolutely anything to do with JKR`s fame or money, it is simply to do with her claim to own the copyright, within the law as it stands, of her own material. So, legally perhaps a little less murky than we thought.
But we come back to her question. 'Are we (authors) the owners of our own work ?' Within the law, and subject to its qualifications, and for 70 years after the date of the our death, the answer is, of course, yes. But in some other senses rather key senses, the answer is 'no'.
Once I have published a book and it is out there, its content, its characters, its images, its message, whatever it may be said to contain, belongs to everyone who reads it. They change it. Reading is a two-way process, an interactive communication between author and reader. Until it is read by someone else, a novel is a dead thing. The reader breathes life into it by the process of reading. When you pick up my novel and read it you share in its creation, you participate in bringing it to life. Without you it has none. It is dead matter. Every reader CHANGES the text even though, paradoxically, the text remains the same.
A novel is read. People have opinions about it. They envisage its characters for themselves. They write essays about it and join book groups to discuss it with other people whose opinions and images are all quite different. None of this has anything to do with me, the author, once I have not written but published the novel. That is the key word. PUBLIC-ation. After that I no longer own my own work. Let us suppose the novel is turned into a play or a film. Someone else takes over my story and my characters, breathes a different form of life into them, changes them in all manner of ways. It is like having a child. While it is in your body and known to no one else, part of no one else but you, you could be said to own it. The second it breathes and lives an independent life, you no longer do. The child, like the book, belongs to itself and to every other person with whom it will interact. The analogy is not a perfect one of course but it serves.
Watching your child grow away from you, changing and being changed as it does so, is something about which any parent has mixed emotions but over which they have no control. In the end it is inevitable. If you don`t want it to happen, don`t have a child. If you don`t want others to change the book you wrote and make it part of themselves instead of part of you, write any number of them but do not give them to another soul to read and above all do not make them public - publish - them.
I am not suggesting that JKR doesn`t know all this - of course she does and the court case is about a much narrower area. But her question is a useful one for any author or would-be author to address. There are many aspects to this and I have thought about many of them over the years. But there`s always something new so this weekend I have been asking myself what my attitude would be if someone some day proposed to publish a Companion to the Simon Serrailler crime novels, or what will eventually be the 'Gullywith books'. Would I try and stop it. Allow it to go ahead provided it made clear that it was 'Unauthorized ?' Or would I decide to compile one myself on the grounds that it would be The Authorized Version.
Would I ignore anything on the internet because of the near-impossibility of having websites closed down, but, like JKR, object if unauthorized books went in print ? Would I check out how much of my material had been lifted into someone else`s book verbatim and only object if I thought there was too much ? How much is too much ?
Well ?
