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Harlan Ellison Sues For "Star Trek" Episode
Miracle Jones writes "The ever-quotable speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison has launched a lawsuit against Paramount and the Writer's Guild West for rights to residuals surrounding his famous and award winning 'City on the Edge of Forever' episode for the original Star Trek series. Ellison, recently featured in the documentary 'Dreams with Sharp Teeth,' said that 'The Trek fans who know my City screenplay understand just exactly why I'm bare-fangs-of-Adamantium about this.' Regarding his lawsuit, he had this to say: 'The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who "have more important things to worry about," who'll have their assistant get back to you, who don't actually read or create, who merely "take" meetings, and shuffle papers — much of which is paper money denied to those who actually did the manual labor of creating those dreams — they refuse even to notice... until you jam a Federal lawsuit in their eye. To hell with all that obfuscation and phony flag-waving: they got my money. Pay me and pay off all the other writers from whom you've made hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars... from OUR labors... just so you can float your fat asses in warm Bahamian waters.'"
This is not YRO. This did not happen online. The summary is so bad that I'm not even sure that this is about his rights.
HE, by contrast, has had no real impact on anything, beyond pissing a lot of people off.
While I'm not personally a fan and find it trite and overdone, there's a general consensus of those in the know about such things that Dangerous Visions really did push the boundary of what was acceptable to publish a long way forward, and started a new trend in SF that is still having impact today. The fact that as a modern reader looking back we see nothing remarkable about it is, I'm told, a testament to just how much influence it had: nothing before was like it, but everything since has been.
We've tried this system; that's how art was funded prior to the invention of copyright in, what, the 18th century? The problem with this system is that it encourages funding of a few big name artists while everyone else struggles to get noticed. The resulting body of artwork lacks diversity and tends not to challenge the status quo for fear of offending the people holding the purse strings.
Did you just describe the current situation or the 18th century? I couldn't tell.