Copyright Concerns II: The Sequel

One subject I avoided raising for some time on the OEDILF Forum, for fear of looking as if I was attacking specific individuals, was writing sequels to other people’s limericks and posting them to the database without consultation, rather than just leaving them as a throwaway comment.

In considering this issue, we need to keep in mind that copyright and moral rights are distinct. Copyright is the legal right to authorise and control reproductions of a work—the economic right in the work, if you like. Moral rights are rights of authors to be identified as the creator of a work and to maintain its integrity: that is, to stop others from modifying it without their permission.

Then there’s the right to create derivative works, such as sequels to books, movies, or even verses. A movie of a novel is a derivative work; so is a sequel. These days these rights rest with copyright holders. The high-profile sequel to the novel Gone With the Wind, for example, was only possible with the approval of the copyright holders of Margaret Mitchell’s original. Our OEDILF authors hold all moral rights and copyright in their original limericks, which means they also have the right to control derivative work—including reworkings of or sequels to their work.

Now, the OEDILF has a fairly easy-going culture about such things, and if someone floats a funny sequel to a verse in its workshop the author is usually happy to let them post it in the main database. If the author has given his or her blessing, everything is fine. But if you write a sequel and post it to the database first, it presents the original author with something of a fait accomplis. What’s more, if the sequel-writer is a longstanding OEDILFer and the original author is relatively new, it can be hard for the latter to express their discomfort with the situation. But silence doesn’t automatically imply consent.

I’m not talking here about being inspired by another author’s handling of a word to write a better, wholly original limerick on that word; nobody owns the copyright to a particular word. I’m talking about sequels that take little self-contained stories, with a scene and characters, and write the next scene with the same characters without asking first. We wouldn’t write an unauthorized sequel to a movie or a novel and expect the original author to be automatically okay with it.

When setting limericks to confirming, I’ve sometimes come across these sequels to other people’s limericks with links back to the originals, and have found myself approaching them in two ways: if the original author’s RFA is present on the derived work, I take that as implied approval of the derivation, and all is well. But if the original author is nowhere to be seen in the workshop and hasn’t said “sure, go ahead” in the original workshop either, it’s awkward. I’ve seen sequels reach approval stage with no sign of the original author’s RFA, no comment by them, and nothing in the original workshop.

I propose taking the following approach: if you write a sequel to another person’s limerick, post it in that limerick’s comments and ask the author if they mind your posting it with a link back to their original. They might decline the link back or decline altogether, but they might equally say sure, go ahead—either way, you’ve given them the final say, which is as it should be.

If such a limerick sequel is posted, ideally it should have the RFA of the author of the original; or, failing that, a comment in its workshop from that author saying that they’re fine with it being there; or, failing that as well, a comment in the original workshop to that effect. Without any of these, the sequel is effectively an unauthorized derived work posted without the permission of the original copyright holder... and we shouldn’t really be approving those. Under current U.S. law, at least, unauthorized sequels constitute copyright infringement. Pretty small-scale infringement, sure, but if we’re serious about our authors retaining rights in their work we should take any infringement seriously.

I’ve drawn a distinction between throwaway workshop comments and verses intended for approval in their own right because the latter are our equivalent of the published novel or the movie in theatres, while the former is more like fan fiction. Many authors will tolerate fan fiction, but try to release your novel Spock Loves Kirk as a properly published volume and see what happens. Our approval process is the equivalent of preparing a limerick for official release.

If the author is happy for you to post your sequel, then everything is fine. That may or may not end up in co-author situations; whatever works for you both. But if you can’t get the original author’s approval for your sequel, you ought to rework or abandon it. Abandoning it would be a shame, but we’ve all felt disappointed at times when authors haven’t liked our workshop suggestions, yet we all cope with that. Is it worse than the discomfort they would otherwise feel about not having been consulted? If someone feels uncomfortable in this situation then it isn’t easy either way, but we can at least try to minimise the potential for lasting bad feeling.

To me, this is as important as letting authors have the final say on their punchline or whatever else. If I ever feel miffed that an author didn’t like my workshop suggestion, I remind myself of a response by John Wellington Wells when I tried to suggest a “punchier punchline” for one of his limericks:

Sorry, I like my punchline better than all the other punchlines in the world.

I had to laugh at that, and had to concede his point. We often love our own work, and it can be hard for someone else’s take on it to compete. Yet as the creators of these original works, preserving their integrity—as we see it—is our right.

 

See also: Copyright Concerns and Abandonship.

Written for an OEDILF Forum thread in March 2007.