Please sign this petition. Almost all of the 500k books that they removed are actually no longer in print and inaccessible to many.
The publishers did not care about those books in the first place but they did this anyway because they have vendetta against open access.
An Aggressively Friendly Good Morning To You (my title)
From: Stories, Weird and Wonderful, 1889
Standing Shiva or Temple Guardian (Dvarapala)
Happy Public Domain Day!
This NPR article has a great breakdown of what’s happening this year, but also links to much more comprehensive lists of what’s now free to play with!
The New Year’s baby of 1925 sits in space listening to the radio on headphones. The American Legion Weekly. December 26, 1924.
Alan Dean Foster is an sf legend - a writer who produced a shelf of original novels but also made a reputation novelizing movies and TV from Star Wars to Aliens, turning out books that transcended quickie adaptations, becoming beloved bestsellers in their own right.
Disney now owns a bunch of these books, thanks to their acquisitions of Lucas and Fox, and these books continue to sell briskly. Disney not only isn’t paying Foster any royalties for these books - they’re refusing to even issue him royalty statements.
Disney has blackholed Foster’s agents and lawyers, and also the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA); to the extent that they have communicated with him, they have espoused a radical (jaw dropping) copyright theory.
This is Disney’s theory: When they bought Lucas and Fox, they acquired the copyright licenses that enabled them to sell the Foster’s books - but not the liability, the legal obligation to pay him for his books.
As SFWA president Mary Robinette Kowal says, this theory could absolutely upend the nature of copyright itself. Any publisher that wanted to go on making money from an author without paying them could simply sell the rights to a sister company, which then denies any obligations.
Foster brought his case to SFWA’s grievance committee - a group that has worked on my behalf in the past, extracting a fee from a multinational publisher that commissioned and accepted a story from me but then offered an odious and unacceptable contract they refused to amend.
Usually griefcom work happens in the background: a SFWA member goes to griefcom, griefcom goes to the publisher, the publisher settles. This is the first time in more than a decade that SFWA has gone public with a complaint.
To be fair, Disney DID offer to meet with Foster, but demanded that he sign an NDA PRIOR to any negotiation. This is Not Normal. Sometimes the OUTCOME of a negotiation is confidential, but you don’t go into a negotiation under NDA.
Disney appears to be taking a page from the private equity fund that acquired Taylor Swift’s masters from the cartoonish villain Scooter Braun, who refused to meet with her without an NDA.
Foster’s case is a gross injustice. He has cancer and his wife is ill. He wrote these books, Disney bought them. They’re making money from them. They owe him money. Period.
But beyond the individual injustice being visited upon Foster, Kowal and SFWA worry that this represents a suite of new, corporate anti-writer tactics: flipping assets without liabilities, refusing to talk about it without an NDA.
You can follow Foster’s case with the #DisneyMustPay hashtag. If you’re a writer facing similar tactics (even if you’re not a SFWA member), they’re seeking your story, via this form:
am I misremembering this or is the arthur conan doyle estate absolutely off the hinges over what little control they have over sherlock holmes and ready to pull the trigger on anyone who writes the character as gay or as a nice person
ok so this is weirder than I thought
sherlock holmes apparently has kind of a complicated copyright situation; it’s in the public domain most places but because of the US’s very long copyright (thanks disney) some of the stories from the tail end of the canon are not in the public domain, at least in the US.
and the ACD estate goes HARD on this. guns blazing on everything from star trek parodies to this year’s netflix movie Enola Holmes, alleging that the character traits they give sherlock holmes are only present in the copyrighted material ( the last 10 stories out of about 60)
Delightfully, like most claims, it’s available online so we can see exactly what traits sherlock holmes is banned from having:
through a quick google search it would appear this also extends to sherlock holmes being written as gay, because it ”isn’t true to the spirit of the books” but mostly because andrea plunket is kind of grossed out by gay people
EXCEPT apparently andrea plunket isn’t actually a member of the estate and is only pretending to be after she sued for the rights in a divorce years ago and failed to get them; now she goes around falsely representation them and keeping the gays out of sherlock holmes. She’s even threatened to sue the BBC to keep them from “making any more sherlocks” (a plural i will absolutely be using in my daily life from now on)
Unfortunately the main citations to this story (through legitimate sources) are lost to time, and the story of andrea only remains told through the hushed whispers of “johnlock conspiracy” blogs
important add on to this
Hallowe'en Greetings
Halloween Visitors to the Oval Office during the Kennedy administration
10/31/1963
From US National Archives
An illustration of a child’s dream from The ladies’ floral cabinet v.3:no.33 (1874).
Full text here.
In celebration of American Archives Month, the National Archives is teaming up with the The Academy of American Poets. Throughout the month we’ll be publishing original poems inspired by the holdings of the National Archives. To view the poets performing their original work, visit the National Archives YouTube Channel.
Today’s poem, “Much Tattooed Sailor Aboard USS New Jersey” by Jehanne Dubrow, was inspired by a photograph of sailors during World War II.
Lt. Comdr. Charles Fenno Jacobs took this photograph of two sailors in December 1944. Jacobs was part of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit—a group of military photographers, under the command of Edward Steichen, who documented activities of the United States Navy during World War II.
For the full story, including Jehanne Dubrow’s poem and video, go to today’s Piece of History post: http://blogs.archives.gov/prologue/?p=14188.
Image: Much tattooed sailor aboard the USS New Jersey. 12/1944. (National Archives Identifier 520883). http://research.archives.gov/description/520883
