The problem with this statment is that knowledge and ideas are built upon earlier knowledge and ideas. It’s almost impossible to create a new idea in a vacuum. New ideas can be twists to old ideas, extensions of old ideas, new applications of old ideas. Ask any artist what their inspiration was and your asking upon what framework of ideas did you extend to create this new idea.

I think the great difficulty with intellectual property is that with all ideas being built upon each other, it becomes very difficult to seperate them out. Like the earlier post about the problem with telling if the rights to the invisible man belonged to the movie or the book. If you have an incredibly creative new idea, who determines how new New has to be to truly be a different idea or just a derivative work. Right now it’s the courts, and they’re having a hell of a time.

Homer rode the coattails of the classics (of his time) when he wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. Likewise with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Shakespeare rode the coattails of Ovid, and numerous people have ridden the coattails of Homer, Ovid, and Shakespeare.

Someone should start collecting a list of major works of western culture created by virtue of access to the public domain. I think we would all be astounded to learn how large the list is. I don�t think Shakespeare wrote a single work without lifting a plot from somewhere else.

(originally posted on Jul 24 03 at 4:59 PM)

When Disney made Cinderella, or Snow White, or their other (now beloved) classic animations, they “rode the coattails off the classics” except what they did was use creativity to add new elements to the old tales (dancing animals, etc.) People loved these new variations of the old stories. And that’s how the public domain was supposed to work.

New characters are great too, but as the article on LXG pointed out, if you wanted to do what Moore did for 20th-century characters, it would be very cool to see Doc Savage team up with Nancy Drew — except it will probably never be allowed. What Disney did back in the 30s and 40s is almost impossible to do today. That’s what this is all about.

When the film rights for The Invisible Man was purchased in 1930, the book was still under copyright and they would have needed to license the character and story. But now the book is in the public domain. Copying the movie would clearly be an infringement, but licensing a comic book which is derived from the book seems to my non-lawyer self to be perfectly kosher.

The article suggests that the acquisition of film rights in the 1930s essentially reset the clock on the character’s copyright in the medium of film. That sounds bizarre (though it wouldn’t be the first time something in copyright law sounded bizarre to me).

I can understand why a businessperson would want to avoid being sued for copyright infringement even if the suit were baseless and frivolous–there can be a chilling effect even on noninfringing uses. Is that what they’re talking about? Or does the law really say that you can’t make any movies of the Invisible Man until the copyright on the movie runs out?

What’s a new character? Tom Sawyer much more “new” when Twain wrote the first story using the name than when he was written into this movie. Consider this page to see the various sources and pretexts from which Twain drew to ‘create’ Sawyer.

-kd

Additionally there may be an element of play, a “where’s Waldo” sort of game with the reader when Moore includes cameo appearances by other famous literary characters, or where he imagines futures for some of the characters–divorce for Mina Harker, opium addiction for Quatermain–that are at odds with how the original authors portrayed them. (I don’t think Haggard’s Quatermain was an opium addict, though I may be mistaken on that point. I know that Stoker’s Dracula ends with Mina and Jonathan still married, and with a son, Quincy.) Part of Moore’s point is that the happy ending imagined by Stoker for Mina–or required by his readership–is not necessarily what we would expect Mina herself to have considered a happy ending. Using the pre-existing character, rather than a “substantially similar” character, is an efficient way of making this point.

On my own earlier question, it seems that H.G. Wells’s works have been restored to copyright in life+70 countries, i.e. western Europe except for Switzerland, so that the film must clear the rights for The Invisible Man in those countries, or use “an invisible man” instead. That they can use the latter approach illustrates one complaint that some commentators have made about the film: where Moore’s comic actually used famous characters from gaslight-era literature, the characters in the film, according to these critics, are simply generic action heroes with famous names.

The idea that copyright required Tom Sawyer to be called “agent Sawyer” is likely to be a mistake. The actor who played “agent Sawyer” according to one interview I’ve seen, thought he was playing Tom Sawyer, but this is inconsistent with Twain’s novels. Twain’s Tom Sawyer was born before the American Civil War. The young man portrayed in the LXG film (the action takes place around 1899) can’t be the same individual. Maybe it was this chronological difficulty the screenwriters were trying to work around by calling their American “agent Sawyer.” Maybe they see him as Tom Jr.