And you can chalk it up to the fact that possibly Colting’s book wasn’t any good.
The decision in the Salinger case was just one decision, of course, and for certain arcane legal reasons it is not clear what weight it would hold in a future case. A federal court in New York ruled that any attempt to characterize the new book as commentary on the classic was, “post-hoc rationalizations employed through vague generalizations about the alleged naivety of the original, rather than reasonably perceivable parody.” Which is to say that she didn’t buy that just writing something that incorporated a character from the original book could constitute “commentary” or “parody” and therefore fair use. Salinger successfully challenged as unauthorized. Just a few years ago, a writer named Frederick Colting produced a sequel to Catcher in the Rye that J.D. Even if it hadn’t, she probably would have been OK with the doctrine of fair use in copyright law, because writing a novel that critiques another novel is likely to be viewed as a “transformative use,” sufficient to keep anyone from having to pay a licensing fee. Rhys was lucky any copyright Brontë had would have long since expired when she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea. Feminists and post-colonialists believe the book to be a classic because the book, by exploring Bertha’s story in further depth, illuminates some of the assumptions embedded in Charlotte Brontë’s romance: namely, that women are crazy, and that West Indian women are even crazier by virtue of geographical location. Rochester’s wife and her former life in the Caribbean, and what led her to be locked up in that attic. Though Jean Rhys did not announce it as such, the 1966 book is a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre. Take, for example, one of the great novels of the 20th century, Wide Sargasso Sea. And the thing is, literary novelists have a long tradition of being, ahem, “inspired” by each other’s work. They were designed for merchandising and licensing and spinoffs. The Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl: those are clearly commercial literary properties. Setting aside the question of whether or not anyone will actually make use of these rights, though, the very fact that this kind of licensing is becoming standard practice should raise eyebrows. Are any Vonnegut characters household names? Am I missing something? Never mind that it seems to vastly overestimate the American public’s engagement with literary fiction. Vonnegut is a bit of a square peg in that company. The Kindle Worlds program, which struck the deal, has in the past limited its acquisition of rights to series like The Vampire Diaries.
One of the weirder bits of news sailing through the Internet this week is Amazon’s acquisition, from the Vonnegut Trust, of the right to publish fan-fiction based on the, uh, Kurt Vonnegut universe.
0 kommentar(er)
