emma

emma , 10 months ago

Key point - rights to certain royalties were given by the author to the leading children’s hospital in the UK. This makes it very different indeed. Helping fund Great Ormond Street Hospital is the far greater good.

emma , 10 months ago

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Yes, the rich should pay more, a hell of a lot more. I’ll go further and say that in a perfect world they shouldn’t be allowed to become so wealthy in the first place because the only way to do that is through exploitation of collective resources and other people’s labour.

Yes, Great Ormond Street should be fully funded via the government, as should the rest of the NHS. Yes, it should be stable and not subjected to party politics, disaster capitalism or grift. We’re a very long way from any of that though and we are talking about children’s lives. And even in a perfect world, more money will still be of use.

Children need new stories but they don’t need new Peter Pan stories specifically. Moreover, writers and other creators who want to write new Peter Pan stories can still do so. They just have to pay a percentage of the income from the use of this particular IP in the UK as royalties.

I’m not keen on your framing at all.

emma , 10 months ago

This is also an inaccurate and misleading framing.

It’s not censorship or a free speech issue. Neither GOSH nor the government control who can create derivative works. It’s just that a percentage of book or ticket sales have to be paid as royalties to GOSH.

That’s it.

emma , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

From the article you linked to originally:

"As a result, the hospital is still entitled to royalties for uses of Peter Pan in the country. However, these rights have several key limitations: “Royalties Only: The provision only allows the hospital to collect royalties, not to grant permission for uses. This came up in 2007 when the pornographic graphic novel Lost Girls was delayed in the UK until 2008, after the copyright Barrie’s work expired.”

From your “this is not the case” wiki entry: “On 23 June 2006, officials for Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) —which was given the copyright to Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie in 1929—asserted that Moore would need their permission to publish the book in the UK and Europe… [Top Shelf] delayed publication of Lost Girls in the UK until after the copyright lapsed at the end of 2007.”

So two of YOUR sources note the 2007 change in status. Until the end of 2007, GOSH held copyright control in the UK. They no longer do. Barrie died in 1937, 2007 was 70 years after his death. Normal UK copyright law.

<Selectively assigning monetary costs to certain speech is an abridgement of free speech,> Are you saying that ALL royalties for derivative works/use of IP are an abridgement of free speech in your view? I’m not keen on that redefinition of the term.

emma , 10 months ago

Chilling effect? Chilling effect? Seriously?

Because an explicit graphic novel which invented childhood pasts of sexual abuse and exploitation for three famous fairy tale girls was delayed in its UK publication by two years?

Good lord.

emma , 10 months ago

“The motion will be heard on March 18, 2005”

Oh look, another one BEFORE the 2007 change in status.

I’m really don’t have the spoons for your lack of understanding on this basic fact. Besides your bizarre instance that authors require the free use of someone else’s characters to express their ideas instead of, oh I don’t know, creating their own characters to express those ideas.

emma , 11 months ago

Narrow, literalist readings of Jewish writings collected in the Ketuvim (Writings) section of the Tanakh (Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim) fit that.

There wasn’t a hard distinction between learning and leisure like we pretend there is today. A story could have a kernel of historical truth, or perhaps a lot, or none at all; convey important truths about society, the world and our place in it; and be told dramatically to capture attention (ie entertaining) so listeners pay attention to those truths and remember them in difficult situations.

Jewish tradition is to look for 4 levels of meaning in a text, including allegorical and hidden meanings as well as the general plot. Even those who believe the surface level as literally true spend most of their time working with interpretation, what lessons we can learn from the stories.

Then along comes a Greek proselytiser who insisted the particular salvation religion he followed was literally True and therefore better than other salvation religions. And that literalness got read back into a different people’s texts, came to be seen by most of the world as the only way to read them and here we are today.

emma OP , 1 year ago

I got myself onto the city library system’s e-book app specifically to read Becky Chambers (city closed our local branch so getting and returning physical books is difficult for me). There is no Becky Chambers on that app, nor anything else I searched for. Which is how I ended up with the one I found such a depressing slog.

Not sure it really is easier to make people feel something good. Live music can really do that. Comedic opera thrives on it. Chinese and Korean dramas can dive deep into grief but also soar with joy.

Perhaps it’s more that when we’ve put unnecessarily put ourselves through something difficult, we’re inclined to justify it by according it more significance? Not sure, thinking out loud here.

emma OP , 1 year ago

Romance isn’t exactly a respected genre. Misogyny has a lot to do with that but the genre’s tendency towards formulaic tropes doesn’t help.
And before you get to the Happily Ever After? It has to be a rocky road, with a break-up. It’s almost like the HEA has to be earned through pain.