Pirates!

I was excited to see that one of the featured stories in the September 2011 issue of the Writer’s Chronicle was about the so-called “culture wars” and piracy. Yes! Let’s talk about it! As a magazine dedicated to the concerns of writers working in the academy, The Writer’s Chronicle is poised to investigate the ways that intellectual property, content sharing, and scholarship interact. (Hint: making articles available online would be a great start.) These heady topics might well interact like bleach and ammonia, and create a poisonous gas. But isn’t that dangerous “what if” tension the stuff of compelling stories?

So it was quite disappointing to find that the article, “One Novel’s Sojourn Through Culture Wars and Piracy” was eighty percent personal history, mostly a lengthy rant about one writer’s struggles with the publishing industry (albeit fairly exciting ones), and twenty percent lumpy Wikipedia info drop about changes to American copyright law in the 20^th century. The writer, Robert Gover, seems uninterested in the larger implications of his discovery that a novel which had earned him critical acclaim and the deep wrath of conservatives had appeared in pirated form on Amazon.com. He also appears to be unaware of the fact that the term “pirate” is applied by behemoth corporations to anybody who downloads anything for free. Damn! It is hard to type with my hook.

At the close of Mr. Gover’s piece, we learn that he still owns the copyright to his work, but has decided it is too expensive to pursue his claim of infringement. What!? While his early career derring-do is interesting, this is the story worth investigating: what would happen if he took said capital “P” pirate to court?

I do feel badly for Mr. Gover: finding your novel reissued, reformatted (the second version, according to Gover, runs paragraphs together where chapter breaks had previously delineated two different points of view), and offered for sale without your permission is every writer’s nightmare. But our author is too emotionally involved to think or write clearly about his topic, so all his story accomplishes is to capitalize on that fear, without offering any useful information. How many other writers have found their works republished without their permission? How likely is this to happen? What protections do writers have? What protections do they need? How does Mr. Gover’s story illustrate (or fail to illustrate) issues that are pertinent to other artists, writers, and scholars?

These are the questions for which I had hoped to learn some answers. I’m afraid that by not assigning another writer to this story and expanding the discussion beyond printed work, the Writer’s Chronicle failed both the author of the piece and its readers.

Are you unclear about copyright, what it means, and how to protect your work? A good place to start is this handy web site: http://copyright.gov/. There is even an animated “Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright” version, featuring a 70’s soundtrack and a junior detective named Cop E. Wright: http://www.loc.gov/teachers/copyrightmystery/#/copyright/. Ready for more swashbuckling ideas about content sharing and ownership? Check out http://creativecommons.org/: Creative Commons licenses provide simple, standardized alternatives to the “all rights reserved” paradigm of traditional copyright.