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Tolkien Estate Says No Historical Fiction For JRR
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the estate of JRR Tolkien isn't just overprotective of his works, but of himself as well. The estate is in a bit of a legal spat with the author of a fictional work that includes JRR Tolkien as a character, and in part discusses his works. The estate is claiming that this infringes on Tolkien's publicity rights, but if that's the case, would it make almost all 'historical fiction' illegal?"
That's really what it comes down to. The lawyers are just doing the bidding of Tolkien's offspring.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
To be able to ban the sale of Pirates of the Silicone Valley.
No historical fiction? Would that include Irregular things like Web Comics?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Tolkein was/is a public figure, feels like there isn't much to stand on here especially if its fiction and portrayed as such. Seems like this fall well within the fair use realm.
More evidence that the copyright term is much too long.
Just change the character's name to R.J.R. Token (Ronald John Token), clearly explain on the cover the Token is a fictional character inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien and then tell the estate to get stuffed.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
How come there isn't an Estate of George Washington? Is every dead person entitled to a perpetual corporate entity?
Apparently you misread...
That's "TOLKIEN" not "TOKING"... one involves the manifest results of the epic imbibing of hallucinogenic substances and the other pot. I hope that clears things up.
Once upon a time there was this fairly cool guy called JRR Tolkien who wrote some popular books. Then he had some descendants who were leeching cunts. The lawyers on all sides lived happily ever after. The end.
This is OK because it's not fiction, right?
Ah you must mean Christopher Tolkien. He's been sucking off the teet of his father for decades.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
The Scribd document contains the text of Hilliard's court filing, but not what the Tolkien Estate said in its original cease-and-desist letter. It says it includes a copy of the Tolkien Estate's letter as Exhibit B, but there is no Exhibit B in the Scribd document. Until we can see the original language used in the cease-and-desist, it's hard to say whether there might be any valid complaint there. I get the gist of line 17 of this document, which amounts to "I can say whatever I want because of the First Amendment," but that's not strictly true, and it's usually a bad idea to go straight for the Constitution as your first line of defense. Case law could easily support the Tolkien Estate's position.
I'm sure there will be countless posts about the evils of intellectual property law, but I, for one, see no reason why this complaint and counter-complaint should not be weighed in the courts.
Breakfast served all day!
Parody is protected, so just make Tolkin, Toking, and turn him into an old doobie smoking proto-hippie.
Eyeing the half dead orc, J R R Tolkien discreetly scanned the surrounding for those who might be watching. Once satisfied that the two were alone, he made quick work of his pants. Mounting the orcs lacerated leg, Tolkien muttered "Oh yes, my precious, your leg shall be mine. Oh yes". The orc said nothing and simply stared in quiet horror. His eyes said everything that could possibly be said.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Seriously, do they? I never knew that. I never knew that publicity rights could be inherited. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe the estate is 100% full of it and thought they could pick on some who would just give up immediately.
Seriously, according to the article this is not about copyright, which does persist after death and can be inherited. Publicity rights? Good grief...
It's a fun comic book about the usual good vs evil stuff, kinda.
Tolkien is not a central character in it, but he's definitely in there, on the side of all that is Good too.
You can check out the reviews at http://www.amazon.com/Heavens-War-Micah-Harris/dp/1582403309 to get a feel for it.
Someone makes an "Untergang" of Hitler denouncing these leeches.
Well, I hate to inflame on me the hate of all Slash.dot posters.. But ... Shouldn't all 'historical fiction' at least require the permission of the persons involved (or the people/institution representing that person) ? I mean, what makes you think that *you* have the right to include 'real' people into your fake fictional works ? Really ?
You could say that about anyone who inherits his dad's hardware store. It's not as if all Christopher Tolkien has been doing has been firing off lawsuits. In all likelihood nobody would have ever seen The Silmarillion were it not for him. How different would Middle-Earth fandom be then?
Breakfast served all day!
It would feel odd if my real life character had less legal protection than a fictional character I create.
If patent- and copy rights would just end with the originator of the work - if s/he dies, all becomes public domain.
It sure would drive innovation and what are heirs/patent-right owners actually contributing? They just rub their hands - how lucky I am to have this ancestor or made the investment.
Dreaming on...
...Honestly, it'd be better if you had Tolkien singing a Hobbit-esque song as he goes about his business of Orc rapin'.
worked for Mark Twain in Riverworld, even if is science fiction instead of historic one. And, btw, Tolkien should had been around there too.
From the Hollywood Reporter article:
Stephen Hilliard is going to court in an attempt to release "Mirkwood, A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien," to be published by Cruel Rune. The 450-page book is described as taking place from 1970 through near-present day in the United States and features six characters -- five fictional and Tolkien himself. "Mirkwood" is portrayed as both a piece of fiction as well as an exercise in "literary criticism." Hilliard hints that the book will take issue with the lack of female characters in Tolkien's works, including "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" series.
If you want to do literary criticism then critique the actual literature. Wannabes write "historical fiction" when they want to make a quick couple million slandering the name of somebody who earned his fame.
They are inventing a new right, apparently out of whole cloth, but certainly not based on copyright law.
As I understand it, it's not entirely whole cloth: it comes out of the intersection of privacy and trademark.
Salinger's people threatened to sue over his name use in Field of Dreams. Salinger was a character in the book Shoeless Joe but the name was changed to Terrence Mann for the movie. http://njjewishnews.com/kaplanskorner/2010/01/29/j-d-salinger-terence-mann-and-field-of-dreams/
You could say that about anyone who inherits his dad's hardware store...
Except the hardware store would need to continue to be well run. Your analogy simply isn't good. The actual truth seems to be that current, over-extended, copyrights are just like family fortunes. In my opinion, wealth should be earned, not entitled. Indeed, I'd postulate that many of the world's problems are rooted in the undeserved transfer of the world's wealth.
In all likelihood nobody would have ever seen The Silmarillion were it not for him. How different would Middle-Earth fandom be then?
Only a select few would refer to Mithrandir by all his twenty three names.
In addition to trademark and unfair competition issues the complaint includes: "(t)he Estate claims that it holds the rights of publicity to exclude others from the use of the name and personality of J.R.R. Tolkien in a fictional novel, and those rights include the right to preclude Hillard from authoring and Cruel Rune from publishing Mirkwood."
California has an unusually strong statute for "deceased personalities": California Civil Code Section 990 Deceased Personality's Name, Voice, Signature, Photograph, or Likeness in Advertising or Soliciting
Although it prohibits some commercial uses of a "deceased personality" there's an exception for "(a) play, book, magazine, newspaper, musical composition, film, radio or television program, other than an advertisement or commercial announcement ... " [emphasis added] From the complaint it's not clear what their argument is then re. "the rights of publicity" referred to in the complaint ...
IANAL
thank you for information
Google reklamlar
Please do be more specific about this one.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That's too absurd to be mistaken for a real event. The problem is with writing untrue things that could reasonably be interpreted as assertions of fact.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
BP for example would immediately hire assassins to murder all clean energy researchers. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/02/19/1555243/Oil-Companies-Patent-Trolling-Biofuel-Production But I do appreciate the basic sentiment, that one accomplishment should not become a perpetual free ride. I would just err on the side of protecting the rights of individual innovators against work that could be slanderous, or laws that make murder a good investment.
How about, only individual humans can own intellectual property, not corporations or any other collectives? I think corporate "intellectual" property is a much more important problem than squabbles among artists of various kinds.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Except the hardware store would need to continue to be well run.
Define "well run"? Christopher Tolkien has published some fifteen volumes of serious Tolkien scholarship, which is more books than J.R.R. himself published in his lifetime.
In my opinion, wealth should be earned, not entitled.
So if your father spends his whole life working his ass off in a coal mine to put food in his children's mouths, then dies of black lung disease when you're fourteen, his savings should all go to the state and your mom should have to go door-to-door looking for a job, huh? What is the incentive to earn wealth if you're not entitled to use it how you wish -- including making your family comfortable? Even Warren Buffett, who is not generally in favor of big inheritances, has said he will leave his children enough money to do whatever they want (just "not nothing").
Breakfast served all day!
It began with the forging of the Great Rings. For within these rings was bound the strength and the will to entertain each race. But they were all of them deceived, for a new ring was made. In the land of Mounting legalese Doom, by the fire of the Tolkien Study, the Dark Lord Sauron forged in secret, a master ring, to control all things Tolkien. And into this ring he poured all his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One ring to rule them all. One by one, the free peoples of Earth fell to the power of the Ring. But there were some who resisted. A last alliance of men and lawyers marched against the armies of Mount legalese Doom, and on the very slopes of Mount legalese Doom, they fought for the freedom of Middle-Earth. Victory was near, but the power of the ring could not be undone. It was in this moment, when all hope had faded, that Christopher, son of the king, took up his father's work. And Sauron, enemy of the free peoples of Earth, was defeated. The Ring passed to Christopher, who had this one chance to destroy evil forever, but the hearts of men are easily corrupted. And the ring of power has a will of its own. It betrayed Christopher, to his death. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.
Not one is pretending it is factual.
If, as Hilliard claims, his work of fiction is "an exercise in 'literary criticism'" then the fictional events must be intended to say something about Tolkien the man, specifically about his character -- something which Hilliard believes is real and true and significant about Tolkien's character or saying it wouldn't amount to critiquing Tolkien's works, it would just be telling a yarn. And if any of what Hilliard is saying is insulting then that is getting awfully close to the definition of slander: untrue, insulting claims about a person in print.
"Hilliard hints that the book will take issue with the lack of female characters in Tolkien's works, including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series."
The right way to do that is in an essay, actually critiquing "the (perceived) lack of female characters in Tolkien's works" not by making things up about the person.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Tolkien could obviously leave his children all of they money he earned on his works during his lifetime. Also, his sons (and whoever else) has all the right to earn money on new works that they create. At issue is the question if an inheritor should be able to earn new money on a creation that they had nothing to do with. And not for nothing, but the original creator did not wholly invent the work themselves. They used constructs of plot and form, and often tropes and characterizations, that were not developed exclusively by themselves.. They were working off of the creation of another author themselves. We should have the opportunity to do the same.
--
$tar -xvf
This is simple. Since this lawsuit is so bizarrely obnoxious, tell the judge that the claim must be based in a false reality where such silly lawsuits are possible, and countersue the plaintiffs for using your name in a work of fiction.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
No you could say that about anyone who inherited his dad's hardware store and then set about suing people for all slights real and imagined rather than continuing to produce/sell hardware on his/her own. Silmarillion aside, It's a shame the way the estate treats his works as a revenue stream rather than an opus to be built upon. It's a miracle any derivative works were decent with this group of sucklers involved.
In the UK this pretty much happens already.. You have death tax (haha even in death there is no escape) and then any inheritance has a huge tax on it too.
This is why you give all your assets to your offspring before you die.
I think inherited copyrights should be taxed the same way money is in my opinion.
Only a select few would refer to Mithrandir by all his twenty three names.
And this is different from current reality how?
#DeleteChrome
> nobody would have ever seen The Silmarillion were it not for him Not seeing it would not necessarily have been a bad thing.
Item 1: JRR Tolkien's children are claiming a story that includes his character violates his "publicity rights".
Item 2: A dead person typically has no ability to control much of anything.
Conclusion: JRR Tolkien now walks the earth as a ZOMBIE! AAAHHHHH!!
#DeleteChrome
... that a Moderator didn't want to notice.
... or didn't want to notice in context. You nailed it, in five or six words (depending how we count contractions). Rambo was neither conceived nor produced in a way that it could ever be taken as an account of real events by any sane person. A "historical fiction" on the contrary, especially one focused on one person, invites the reader to assume that the events say something relevant and true about that person's real character. Otherwise, the author would have told his story using all fictional characters, not use one real one but make up all the rest.
"Rambo wasn't a documentary film...."
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Even Warren Buffett, who is not generally in favor of big inheritances, has said he will leave his children enough money to do whatever they want (just "not nothing").
That is because Warren Buffet is a hypocrite. His children already have the benefit of having him as a father, i.e. access to top schools, access to high quality food, access to social connections, access to luxury clothing and accessories, access to technological items that make their lives easier, and probably a nice car... all courtesy of daddy. You cannot say they are disadvantaged if their dad leaves them nothing, because if they even put a half-assed effort in developing a skill or a career on their father's tab they still have a much greater likelihood of having a better life than 90 percent of the hardest working amongst the lower class. Frankly, they deserve nothing unless they used the resources handed to them efficiently, and that would mean applying themselves in something worth a shit. Your analogy is very bad. There is a difference between leaving your offspring the rights to a creative work they had absolutely nothing to do with and leaving them the money you made from it. Leaving your offspring intellectual property is just a step away from leaving them titles such as "Baron" or "King", etc.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Your analogy is very bad. There is a difference between leaving your offspring the rights to a creative work they had absolutely nothing to do with and leaving them the money you made from it.
Why? Your creative work is a business, just like any other. If you had lived, you would have been able to keep operating that business, making money of the works you did in the past (and any new ones you choose to create). Why should you be able to hand your hardware store down to your heirs, but not a media business? And by your own logic, which is worse -- handing your kids a pile of money, or handing them a thriving business to operate? Are lottery winners happy? No -- generally, they piss it away and end up in debt. On the other hand, if your heirs materially participate in the business of managing your creative works (as Christopher Tolkien did while his father was alive, and continues to do long after his death), then they don't "have absolutely nothing to do with" the creative work, do they? Comments like yours just sound like sour grapes to me.
Breakfast served all day!
"If more of us valued food and cheer above hoarded gold, it would be a much merrier world."
— J.R.R. Tolkien
"In my opinion, wealth should be earned, not entitled. "
Ditto here, my vote goes to a 100% estate tax, even if it means that Paris Hilton would have to flip my burgers.(ick)
Most fiction involves real places, and almost all involves a real species, i.e., human beings.
Neither places nor the abstract concept "species" have any feelings to hurt. Las Vegas per se doesn't care how CSI portrays it, even if the mayor and the Tourism Board do care.
It's only lying if you say things that are untrue with the intent that someone reading them believes them to be true ...
I'm with you to there.
... and that will not be true of anything which specifically calls itself "fiction."
But it's not being called simply "fiction" pure and simple like you suggest it is. The author is calling it "historical fiction" and including one character who was a real person and five others who are fictional. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/blogs/thr-esq/jrr-tolkien-estate-threatens-lawsuit-101528
Stephen Hilliard is going to court in an attempt to release "Mirkwood, A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien," to be published by Cruel Rune. The 450-page book is described as taking place from 1970 through near-present day in the United States and features six characters -- five fictional and Tolkien himself.
Obviously, the part that's "historical" is not the five characters who are totally made up. The intent is clearly to make stuff up about Tolkien and give the impression that at least some of it is "historical."
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Christopher, son. Fuck off.
how is babby formed?
Very true... Mod parent up, please.... ?
Have you noticed how the Mods with all the positive numbers seem to be around only for the first few dozen comments in any thread? ;)
It doesn't bother me. If my karma was all shiny and immaculate, it would just attract karma thieves anyway.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
I always get them switched. Thanks for the info, even though I'm sure to forget and make the same mistake again, probably soon.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Probably a hell of a lot less ultra-geeky lame, and more just geeky, in the good way.
Anyway, free speech applies to exploitative assholes as well as nice people.
Say I write a story about a young JRR Tolkien meeting Mark Twain and HG Wells. They spend a day playing poker, discussing philosophy, writing and language.
Now, that would fall under what?
Could have happened. Would be an interesting story too.
Most importantly, I have every right to write that story.
Of course, I have no creative writing skills, so I'm going to spare the world the pain of me writing fiction.
Why? Why isn't fiction a legitimate way to explore real issues and put forward a critique?
Actual, bona fide fiction is legitimate for that purpose and I never said it isn't. What I said is that fictions about the person of the author is not a legitimate means of critiquing specific literary works which is exactly the stated purpose of "Mirkwood."
From the article: "'Mirkwood' is portrayed as both a piece of fiction as well as an exercise in 'literary criticism.'" I say, pick one. Write a piece of fiction, or write lit crit, not both. And of course, I just mean not both at the same time, not in the same publication.
Why do you need a straw man to disagree with me? Because I'm right and you're wrong.
Should Tolkein have written an essay critiquing historical developments since the middle ages, rather than writing the Lord of the Rings?
None of Tolkien's fictional characters existed in real life. Unless you know of somebody who bears a striking resemblance to, say, Gollum or another unfavorably portrayed character from Tolkien's novels, the equivalence you're trying to claim is just nonsense.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Anyway, free speech applies to exploitative assholes as well as nice people.
Of course, you don't lose your freedom of speech just for being an exploitative asshole! But although Constitutional rights are broad, they are not absolute and the right to free speech is broadest when it applies to political speech about the government. Skating on the edge of one's free speech rights for commercial gain is not only less ethical than making political statements that the powers that be would prefer not to hear, it's more tenuous legally. If the Founders were so incompetent at ethics and law that they gave the same legal protections to Courtney Love as to Julian Assange, we'd be wrong to respect them. But they didn't do that.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
They'd still be living under a coating of orange dust in their mothers' basements, I'm sure.
So Tolkien's son was 14 when he died of a writing-related illness after being forced into writing major pieces of fantasy literature? And then all the wealth he earned was stolen by the state before it could be inherited?
Poor analogy. A better one is, "So if your father spends a significant amount of his spare time lovingly crafting a fake world for his own enjoyment which unexpectedly turns out to be a big seller. Upon his death, his children (aged between 53 and 44 years of age) benefitted enormously from continued sales of his work across the world along with a percentage of some major movies and associated merchandising which made then *very* rich indeed."
Quoth: "What is the incentive to earn wealth if you're not entitled to use it how you wish -- including making your family comfortable?"
To spend it yourself? Besides, money was *never* the motivation for Tolkien. He worked on it for decades before making a penny. It was a labour of love.
bang goes my karma... again...
The intent is clearly to make stuff up about Tolkien and give the impression that at least some of it is "historical."
I don't see where you get that from. Obviously, some of what the book includes will be historical; there'd be no point including Tolkien as a character if the character didn't have some things in common with the real Tolkien.
Exactly!
But I don't see anything about the book that depends on the reader believing any of the specific events narrated in the book are real. In most historical fiction, the general setting is real, but the specific events (with the occasional exception of particularly famous historical events) in the work are not, so I think most readers of this novel would assume the same is true in this case.
From the article, a primary stated purpose of Hilliard's pseudo-biography of Tolkien is "literary criticism." So please explain, how do you believe one could critique something as personal as another's life work -- and that is exactly what Tolkien's novels were -- not in the proper format for literary critique, which is an essay, but in a "fictional" work in which "the general setting is real, but the specific events (with the occasional exception of particularly famous historical events) in the work are not"?
Even supposing for the sake of discussion that all "the specific events (with the occasional exception of particularly famous historical events) in the work are not" real, "only" allegorical, for those fictional, "only" allegorical events to add up to "literary criticism" -- which is Hilliard's own claim, verbatim from the article! -- they would have to be quite personal allegories, wouldn't you say?
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
I didn't mean to be anonymous the first time.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
So if your father spends his whole life working his ass off in a coal mine to put food in his children's mouths, then dies of black lung disease when you're fourteen
... his kids should get everything the coal mine ever produces again, without ever having to lift a finger? ... by suing the people who dare to do the work themselves? ... in their own mines, because their coal somewhat resembles the coal their father mined?
Let me know when your analogy breaks down.
Geeze Guys, I think you're missing the main point here - the legal action isn't over publishing rights to Tolkien's works, it's to use his likeness in a novel. It's akin to the estate of George Washington taking legal action against any author who has ever written a novel featuring their ancestor. Making money off the published works of a relative is one thing.. holding the world at ransom over using his name or likeness? That's bullshit. If that were the case, no new work of fiction (or non fiction) would ever be able to reference real people(or *their likeness*) without paying royalties. That's screwed.
From a legal point of view I think the estate is wrong, but I can definitely understand having a dad like Tolkien and not wanting someone to make millions from a book that uses literary deconstruction, of all ways, to say your dad was messed up in one way or another. I'm being presumptuous but if in the end the book is just about shock value to drag Tolkien through the mud, that is kind of messed up.
At issue is the question if an inheritor should be able to earn new money on a creation that they had nothing to do with. And not for nothing, but the original creator did not wholly invent the work themselves. They used constructs of plot and form, and often tropes and characterizations, that were not developed exclusively by themselves.. They were working off of the creation of another author themselves. We should have the opportunity to do the same.
OK, but suppose your dad isn't a writer, he's a carpenter. And suppose he builds himself a fabulous house, with his own hands. Every nail he hammers himself. This is an awesome house. And then he dies. By your logic, should your mom, you, and the rest of his offspring be allowed to live in a house that they had nothing to do with? Not only that, but your dad didn't even wholly invent the work himself -- the house sits on land, which was here long before your dad ever was. It gets power, water, and sewer from the city services -- so the house is kind of public property, really. It was OK for your dad to live in it for a while why he was alive, but when there are homeless people on the streets, why shouldn't you have to work to put a roof over your own head, the way your dad did?
Breakfast served all day!
What is the incentive to earn wealth if you're not entitled to use it how you wish
He probably should have thought about that fact before accepting the deal of copyright, which does have a payment attached to it, and is not being paid back to us.
You get to leave things to your kids that you own. You don't get to leave them things already promised to the public domain.
Christopher Tolkien is an exception in that he actually did do something with his inheritance. He also would have done very well just with his Fathers unpublished manuscripts which I presume he could have copyrighted after editing them and releasing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
"In my opinion, wealth should be earned, not entitled. "
Ditto here, my vote goes to a 100% estate tax, even if it means that Paris Hilton would have to flip my burgers.(ick)
MMmmmmm... slut burger......
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Net effect ... lots of really high payout life insurance policies.
Downside... using the bulk of your assets to purchase such a policy leaves you with little for non-lethal sudden expenses.
There should be zero estate taxes. Its not a fucking gift. Its a goddamn sad event most of the time, and every fucking penny has already been taxed when it was income for the deceased.
Maybe we should apply your opinion that wealth should be earned not entitled to the government. They'd have to produce good government before getting funds, instead of the current "we're the government.. we're entitled to your money, even though we spend it fucking wastefully, stupidly, and on projects that have no hope of serving the public interest" mode.
They got to pay taxes on the house or the government takes it away. Your analogy is only apt if the father was so creative as to make the house into a tourist attraction. Should the family own the house and keep the revenue from the tourists that show up? Yes, because they aren't infringing on any fundamental rights. Christopher Tolkien is.
Play Command HQ online
It's an interesting example of language. Legally, the tax on inheritence is called an inheritence tax. Opponents, in an effort to make it sound scarier, started calling it the death tax. As a proponent, I like to call it the Paris Hilton tax.
It's also all been taxed when it was income for the company that paid them. Money circulates. It's all been taxed before, many times. There is nothing wrong with that.
Say I write a story about a young JRR Tolkien meeting Mark Twain and HG Wells. They spend a day playing poker, discussing philosophy, writing and language.
Now, that would fall under what?
I would classify that as a positive portrayal. It evokes memories of Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Moriarty on Star Trek the Next Generation, ways that I would like for somebody important to me to be portrayed.
Of course, I have no creative writing skills...
Ha! So, we have that in common even though we don't agree 100% on what rights we have to write about things we both do not even want to write about anyway.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
So, that's totally different.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Then make sure you pay the children of your plumber, your electrician, your gardener and garbage engineer in perpetuity, because after all, you wouldn't want to deny them the fruit of their father's business, would you?
Christopher Tolkien is entitled to get paid for the work *HE* did. Not the work of his father, but his work. Let him reap whatever benefits he is getting from Silmarillion. But that doesn't give him the right to act as though all of Middle-Earth and his father's name belong to him. They don't. They belong to the public, which had a strong hand in creating The Lord of the Rings anyway.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
went something like that. It was set in the 1920's and two of the characters were Albert Einstein and James Joyce. They teamed up to save the fate of literature from William Butler Yeats or something like that. It was actually a pretty good book. I guess at the time of its writing, Einstein and Joyce had been dead for longer than Tolkien has been dead, but not by THAT much. Actually maybe not even as long--Einstein died in 1955 and Wilson's book is from 1981.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masks_of_the_Illuminati
A fascinating question which is addressed in my historical alternative-history novel where C Tolkien and JRR (aka Barry) Tolkien discuss his legacy
how different? well, a lot more clear it would be! silmarillion is like a collection of background texts to make writing lotr or similar stories easier, badly edited.
and yes, he could have you know, written his own saga. be his own person, now he's turning into a joke in the long run whilst having contributed very little - diluting the tolkien universe like it was dragons lair.
it's ridiculous if we can't speculate on tolkiens life and why he did what he did, wrote what he wrote.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It's a shame the way the estate treats his works as a revenue stream rather than an opus to be built upon.
Wait... so, say, Frank Herbert's Dune series as "an opus to be built upon"... this is a good thing?
Leave Tolkien's works well enough alone, I say. Christopher Tolkien's life's work has mostly been about cataloging, organizing, reconstructing, and re-presenting his father's original papers and fragments, and providing his own insights as one of the few people who were close enough to the source material to really have anything to add. If he had decided instead to pump out two or three trilogies filling in the years between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I wouldn't defend him at all.
You say Tolkien's estate treats his works "as a revenue stream." The other way to look at it would be that Tolkien's estate vigorously defends his original works and prevents derivative works from appearing precisely because Tolkien's work is something to be preserved and cherished, not mercilessly capitalized upon. (Christopher Tolkien himself was vocal about his skepticism that movies of The Lord of the Rings could truly preserve the intent of his father's work.)
Year after year, countless people are pounding on the doors of the Tolkien estate to make products based on JRRT's work. Should we fault the estate for only authorizing the best of them, and litigating against the rest? For an example of what happens when "derivative works" run amok, look no further than the Star Trek franchise.
Breakfast served all day!
In the UK this pretty much happens already.. You have death tax (haha even in death there is no escape) and then any inheritance has a huge tax on it too.
Ineritance tax is not a case of taking everything someone owned for the state. Don't exaggerate. Additionally, if you didn't have a progressive inheritance tax, that would be one less thing standing in the way of a permanent owning class of dynasties that accumulated and accumulated until everything was owned.
This is why you give all your assets to your offspring before you die.
Check out Capital Gains tax.
I think inherited copyrights should be taxed the same way money is in my opinion.
Inheritied copyrights are a potential wealth, not an actual wealth. If someone gives you a house, we can look at its market price and say that you have received X amount of wealth. If someone leaves you copyright on a load of old manuscripts, well we don't know whether they'll sell for tens of thousands or if they'll earn you nothing. Unless you're assigning courts the power to see the future, or like playing the lottery, then you can't "tax copyrights the same way money is". If you're, for example, Christopher Tolkien and you put a lot of work into editing and preparing those manuscripts and they do sell well, then guess what - you are then taxed on your earnings. So taxation has taken place. But so has someone benefiting from what their father has left them and from their own efforts in realising that potential.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Wrong. Death duties is just the old name for inheritance tax. One tax, two names.
Wrong again.
Not everyone pays Inheritance Tax. It's only due if your estate - including any assets held in trust and gifts made within seven years of death - is valued over the current Inheritance Tax threshold (£325,000 in 2010-11).
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Where did WB claim they would be? Perhaps he just doesn't want them to turn into spoilt brats like Paris Hilton.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Christopher Tolkien is an exception in that he actually did do something with his inheritance. He also would have done very well just with his Fathers unpublished manuscripts which I presume he could have copyrighted after editing them and releasing.
He's also an exception in the success of the unpublished manuscripts. Most people who inherited some manuscripts might make a modicum of money off them. And why not? Do we want to reward only people who create short-term and immediately profitable things by saying only such people are allowed to pass on the full benefit to their children? If Christopher Tolkien is to be excused the large rewards for the amount of time and effort and thought he put into it, shouldn't others also be excused their lesser efforts for the vastly smaller amounts of money they make from inherited manuscripts other than those by JRR?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
He's been sucking off the teet of his father for decades.
Mmmmm... nice salty-sugary man milk... yum!
Physical objects are not equivalent to abstract rights. The home from your example is unique, a physical object that can only belong to one party at a time. Mentioning the connections to public services is only disingenuous, really, since those are services that the landowner buys, not services that the landowner receives income from—the municipality reserves the right to cut off service if the tenant does not pay.
For your analogy to be even close, the house would have to be an apartment complex that the city owns, and as thanks to the father's work he received an apartment rent-free according to contract, and contracts of that sort can be terminated according to the terms, and follows certain laws. It still does not map well to a right to declare who is allowed to make a copies, or are you going to state that I cannot build a house that uses the same design as the house your father built?
Mind you, TFA isn't even about the rights to make copies, but the right to use the author as a fictional character in a historical novel. This could possibly fall under the right to privacy, but since the late Professor Tolkein qualifies as a publicly known person even that right is restricted. In my opinion this is a doomed effort, as it cannot ignore the fact that deciding in favour of the family would ignore the huge precedence caused by unauthorised biographies and the common usage of public personalities in novels ever since stories have been told.
If they couldn't stop David Day from publishing his compilations based on Tolkien's actual works, I can't see how they expect to stop someone from writing about Tolkien himself.
It was one in the wide genre of "post apocalyptic" series, but in this one, a couple of the main characters are massively influence by LotR, with one (the evil one,) taking "the lidless eye" as his banner, and the other naming her group "The Dúnedain Rangers". Some of the other characters make fun of the flights of fancy of the two, and there are references to Tolkien throughout. (Although the author never directly refers to Tolkien by name, nor LotR by name - there ARE plenty of direct name uses, such as Dúnedain, Nazgûl, and Uruk-hai.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I thought his logic was pretty clear. He's saying that just because you are associated with someone who died, you shouldn't be able to treat the world as if you were him by proxy and maintain the conditions present when he was alive. Basically, he doesn't think that people should still sponge off of daddy once daddy is dead. That would have nothing to do with a house which was inherited as it's no longer daddy's, it's whoever inherited it. I'm not sure where you are getting by his logic from.
The rest of what you posted is severely misguided. This is because the so called house is no longer in his dad's possession and nothing becomes public property by association. This scenario differs from the op's statement in that no one living in the house is pretending that Daddy is still alive and in control. Dad is dead, his personal and everything else about his identity died with him. What you need to do is come up with some example or scenario in which someone is pretending that dad is still alive and they are calling the shots for dad by proxy. Only then will you get his logic right. You are probably going to have a difficult time in doing it too. The persona of someone isn't generally protected in any way unless they somehow become famous. Even serial killers who become famous and their heirs do not have the ability to control what is written about or how that person is used in fiction after that serial killer is decease.
And should the owner of the house be paid money for every photograph it happens to be in?
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Just call him JTT Rolkien and, for safety, add that he had a small penis
HermesPod: Free Podcast Download Manager for Windows
I'm glad we have you to tell us what we can and cannot write.
Play Command HQ online
In most places it is. Well outside of exemptions to the tax that is.
When a person dies, whether they are intestate or testate, one of the requirements before the estate can be settled is an accurate inventory with accurate appraisals of worth. There is an estate tax assigned by most states and the federal government. Currently, I believe there is an exception to some if it's not over a certain amount. When it's over, the estate of the decease is responsible on paying the estate taxes even if it has to sell your inheritance to do so (meaning you get the difference).
Now an estate tax is different and separate from an inheritance tax. Some areas (the US federal government doesn't have one, I'm not sure about other countries) or states have an inheritance tax on top of that. You may end up having to pay a sum in taxes in order to keep your inheritance that is in addition to any estate tax paid before you got it. Most areas allow a certain amount of estate taxes to count towards inheritance taxes paid and there is an exemption under a certain amount, but I'm not sure if all or which ones do.
Now you can be screwed in giving your assets away too. There are actually taxes called a gift tax. A gift tax is a tax assessed to anything of value given or the use of given to someone for no return or below a fair value in return. It too has a threshold limit and is paid by the donor. This is why it's important that when you gift something to offspring, you consider gifting it to grandchildren. You pay the same tax, the parent can use the money or property to aid the child freeing up their own funds.
Governments around the world have found ways to tax people, even after they are dead. The copyrights should have been taxed just like money unless your country has a specific exemption for them. The problem is that, just like money, if they have any value, sinces taxes aren't quite 100%, there will be enough to pay the taxes and have something left over.
Nonsense. If a piece of copyright has been making x amount of income for the last x years you can tell very well.
In all likelihood nobody would have ever seen The Silmarillion were it not for him.
Hangin's too good for him.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Over 325,000? How much is the average estate worth in the uk? A quick google search shows close to 200,000. So if you own a house, you are more than halfway to that target. I work in a call center in the US (not a high paying job) and in 3 years I have saved close to 30,000 (including company matching) for my 401k. It is not unreasonable for me to assume that someone could save 100,000 over the course of their lifetime. With furniture, cars, etc, I think that 325,000 can be hit by many people.
But more to the point, inheritance tax is a higher tax on money already taxed.
Paris Hilton is independently wealthy and whilst she may trade off the association with the rest of her family, does not receive any significant income from it. Reports of her earnings vary wildly but even the lowest figure of about $7 million means she isn't going to be seen flipping burgers in a MacDonalds near you anytime soon.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I, for one, would love to see historical fiction eradicated from the face of the Earth. It's the preferred medium of sloppy writers who can't be bothered to develop their own characters or story arc, and instead choose to write about how the Americans broke ENIGMA using captured UFO technology, or the steamy romance between Winston Churchill and Catherine the Great, using H.G. Wells' time machine.
I think it's hilarious that you used a coal miner "working his ass off to put food in his children's mouths" as your example of how someone might accumulate enough wealth to even be relevant to a discussion of inherited luxury. Nice try though.
We are all just people.
That analogy is absurd. With copyright, we're talking about the design of the book being protected, not the physical object.
A better analogy would be that you (and the rest of his offspring) should no longer be allowed to charge other people for the right to build houses based on the plans that he drew up. Those designs were created by standing on the shoulders of all those who designed houses before it. Thus, they should be protected for a very limited period of time, and in no case more than twenty years after the creator's death (and only then if the creator did so on death's door).
No one is arguing that you should not be able to have the physical fruits of your parents' labor, merely that you should not be allowed to continue to profit almost indefinitely off of their ideas.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
OK, but suppose your dad isn't a writer, he's a carpenter. And suppose he builds himself a fabulous house, with his own hands. Every nail he hammers himself. This is an awesome house. And then he dies. By your logic, should your mom, you, and the rest of his offspring be allowed to live in a house that they had nothing to do with? Not only that, but your dad didn't even wholly invent the work himself -- the house sits on land, which was here long before your dad ever was. It gets power, water, and sewer from the city services -- so the house is kind of public property, really. It was OK for your dad to live in it for a while why he was alive, but when there are homeless people on the streets, why shouldn't you have to work to put a roof over your own head, the way your dad did?
The family should get to keep the house, but other people should also be able to make houses like it without paying rights to the family. Imagine if you had to pay IP rights on every piece of technology you buy. Rights on the design of your socks, rights on the concept of socks, rights to the ancestors of the inventor of the zipper, etc etc etc. Obvious IP rights need to have a expiration date. The question is: how long should that last? The answer is: Get a job.
We are all just people.
With furniture, cars, etc, I think that 325,000 can be hit by many people.
Which is still no big deal for most people. If you have £350,000 only the £25,000 excess gets taxed. So if that's split between two children they get a £170,000 inheritance instead of £175,000.
Also, in many cases the following applies:
Since October 2007, married couples and registered civil partners can effectively increase the threshold on their estate when the second partner dies - to as much as £650,000 in 2010-11. Their executors or personal representatives must transfer the first spouse or civil partner’s unused Inheritance Tax threshold or ‘nil rate band’ to the second spouse or civil partner when they die.
Ref: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/inheritancetax/intro/basics.htm
The correct comparison would be if your dad was a builder and he built lots of houses, but if anyone wants to add an addition to any of those houses they have to pay you a fee.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Why? Because copyright is a bargain. We temporarily give up our right to copy an artist's work in exchange for that work eventually going into the public domain (and not just being squirreled away unread in an attic somewhere).
In the last generation, copyright holders have systematically broken this bargain, extending copyright terms to insane lengths, expanding copyright scope, stifling fair use, etc. Using the threat of legal harassment to deter new writers from writing about long-dead public figures is just another in a long chain of abuse of wealth, power and a broken copyright regime.
-Esme
Agreed.
It's lucky for Tolkien and his parasitical offspring that no one owns the 'intellectual property' for Merlin - Gandalf was so blatant a ripoff that it probably wouldn't last more than five minutes in court.
If he had decided instead to pump out two or three trilogies filling in the years between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I wouldn't defend him at all.
Yeah, but what if he was actually a really good writer and those turned out to be well written trilogies that meshed with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings almost perfectly?
IANAL, but if you want to use Tolkien in historical fiction, why not write it in the US, call it a parody, and hide behind the First Amendment? It worked for 2 Live Crew when they covered "Pretty Woman" as "Hairy Woman".
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Again, you are trying to equate oranges to apples. The point is, that you would be protesting and have the legal right to stop another carpenter building a similar house next to your land. How is that normal?
And how about the fact, that for intellectual property you don't pay inheritance(estate) tax? If we are to treat IP as regular property, then make sure that taxes are equal for inheriting shares in a company as well as income from sale of IP.
I specifically said that I think its wrong to hand your kids a pile of money at death. Handing them a business is completely different that handing them intellectual property that lasts 100 years. They don't have to put ANY effort into maintaining the copyright, so it is not even comparable to your hardware business analogy. Perhaps Chris Tolkien released more of his fathers work over time, but it still was already there for him to use. He didn't have to put as much effort into releasing it as his father did creating it. Furthermore, the length of copyright is completely asinine and stifles innovation and new creative works as shown by this article, especially when you have asshat offspring that sues everyone because they think they have some right to what their father created.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Im not sure what you mean. What I said was the fact that they have a rich parent automatically gives them access to better education, better clothing, better everything. So, even if their father leaves them no inheritance, they still have benefited from his wealth and have way more opportunities to succeed and live well in life than 90 percent of the rest of the world.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Yes, J.R.R. Tolkien left Christopher some very valuable things: primarily his notes. Christopher has done a perfectly reasonable thing, and made a perfectly reasonable living, by working them into books and selling them. Few people have any objection to that kind of thing; some fans may find they dislike the new books, but they cannot reasonably deny his right to publish them. That is a reasonable use of a literary inheritance. It has involved honest and creative work.
The problem arises when the Tolkien estate starts claiming to own things that are not traditionally passed on from generation to generation, such as the "right" to refuse to allow anyone else to write books about J.R.R. Tolkien.
You can hand down the business all you want - it's a collection of physical and legal assets (contracts etc.) - assuming the contract for those assets allow the transfer of ownership.
But a copyrighted work exists at the expense of the public who allowed it - allowed it for the express purposes that it would encourage the creation of more. When it's passed to children who do nothing but make sure no more are created, it has been corrupted, is no longer in the public benefit and therefore should no longer be copyrighted.
It's really quite simple. It's not real fucking property! It's a gift that people are abusing.
There is no such thing as "money already taxed". Taxes are on events, not on dollars or on pounds. The event of my employer paying me is taxed; the event of me taking my pay and buying a six-pack of beer is taxed.
Similarly, the event of wealthy Mr. Smith getting his dividends from Corporation X is taxed; and the event of the state transferring Mr. Smith's wealth to Smith, Jr. after Smith's death is taxed.
"Money already taxed" is another counter-factual right-wing shibboleth.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Yes, you can. Inherited wealth is as bad as any other form of inherited power. That hypothetical hardware store should go to the employees whose labor built it.
Then let him share in the copyright, or have some right to royalties, for the The Silmarillion, if he worked to make it happen. That has nothing to do with copyrights for LOTR or with publicity rights.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Nonsense. If a piece of copyright has been making x amount of income for the last x years you can tell very well.
You know you're absolutely right! When Christopher Tolkien inherited the manuscripts for The Silmarillion, it had never been published and had made zero money in the last x years. Consequently, we could reliably predict that it went on to make zero amount of money in the years afterwards. And as to published works! Well, we all know very well that their sales are consistent and predictable year on year. Their sales are never influenced by popular review, re-releases, sequels, adaptations into film and television, et al.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Not everybody. He is allowed. ;-)
Yep, people are always angry at others who inherit things. Jealousy is a bad emotion to go running wild with. I wish I'd inherited my fathers natural awesomeness with mechanics. He can do anything it seems like.
Which is still no big deal for most people. If you have £350,000 only the £25,000 excess gets taxed. So if that's split between two children they get a £170,000 inheritance instead of £175,000.
While you are right int hat they aren't taxed for the amount under that part, you're still wrong.
Here is how to state it: 'So if that's split between two children they get a £170,000 inheritance without taxes on it, and get the additional £5000 after taxes of 40%, which means £3000 after taxes.'
We have to be very careful about how we say that...I don't know about the UK, but lying about how tax rates work is a favorite hobby of the right over here, where apparently if you make slightly over $250,000 a year you get taxes to pennilessness.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Oh, wait, nevermind, you were right.
Ignore me.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Why do you bring up The Silmarillion? It wasn't published therefore why should it be taxed for inheritance as per my suggestion above?
Also you said it yourself,
What with your double standards? It's not ok to accumulate money until it's all owned but copyrights that never expire (it's been 40 years now) is ok with you? Having a bit of trouble understanding you..
Hilliard's "historical fiction" is inevitably, to some significant degree, an assertion of fact. And in my opinion, the ambiguity about what is "historical" and what is "fiction" makes it worse, not better for Hilliard's case, and for so-called "historical fiction" generally.
He has Tolkien finding actual manuscripts in Elvish. Basically, the story is that Middle-earth was real. No one is going to stand up in court and say that's to ANY degree, "an assertion of fact".
It would still be up to the Tolkien estate to agree that it's tasteful and let it happen
No such right exists. I could list hundreds of books, movies and TV shows that violate that rule.
And I don't think anyone has a problem with Christopher Tolkien having a copyright on his dad's stuff Christopher released, especially considering he had to do a hell of a lot of editing and whatnot.
The clock on unreleased works doesn't actually start ticking until released, anyway. Of course Christopher is entitled to that copyright, even if he did nothing. Copyright is incentive to publish works, he published a work that wasn't published, we aren't here to run around judging how much work it took, he gets a copyright.
The problem is twofold:
a) With copyright's irrational 'X years after death', this will result in a lot of stupidity. If Chris lives another 30 years, the copyright for LoTR will expire 70 years before the copyright on the Silmarillion, published only 20 years later, does.
Copyright needs to be for a set amount of time, period, and have nothing to do with how long anyone lives. That idea is just crazy. If we want to 'help their children', well, first off, 'children' do not need support for 75 years, and secondly, that's accomplished simply by having copyright be inheritable. I'd even be fine without taxing it. (Which we don't.)
And can I point out the inherent insanity of 'helping' orphaned dependents by having the clock start ticking on copyright's expiration? Even if the clock takes near-forever to run out, that really doesn't make sense in any logical manner.
b) Copyright is way too long to start with. Lord of the Rings should be public domain now. Hell, the Beatles should be. The Silmarillion should be bumping up against expiration if not already expired. 40 years is more than long enough to incentive people to make stuff.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Physical objects are not equivalent to abstract rights. The home from your example is unique, a physical object that can only belong to one party at a time. Mentioning the connections to public services is only disingenuous, really, since those are services that the landowner buys, not services that the landowner receives income fromâ"the municipality reserves the right to cut off service if the tenant does not pay.
Interesting. You neglect the intangible possession implicit in the example you're arguing. You speak of a house, and yes, it's tangible and inheritable. But what about the land it's on? It's on the deed. It's owned, and taxed, and serviced, but completely intangible.
I hear the enraged and incredulous squeals now. "Land ownership is timeless, ancient, well-accepted. Land is tangible!"
Dirt is tangible. Land is not. Land is an abstract geometric description of a fundamentally 2-d surface. You don't necessarily own any material below the ground-air interface, and you sure as Hell don't necessarily own the air above it. Even if you have exclusive possession rights to the "dirt", you many not necessarily own any valuable substances in it (e.g., mineral rights).
Ownership and possession rights are not some absolute. The most fundamental possession right is "It's tangible and in my physical control, and no one here is strong enough to wrestle it away." Beyond that, it's all conventions and customs and laws governing abstractions and intangibles, so any argument based on consistency and intuition has no basis in realty.
Take-away? Intellectual property is property because the law says it is. Q.E.D.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
A guy can dream, can't he?
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Imagine if you had to pay IP rights on every piece of technology you buy.
We already do. But here is some irony, Hollywood was set up in California because it was lax with patents, in particular Thomas Edison patents.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Gift tax, Fringe benefit tax etc... all came up as folks worked out ways *around* taxes, by either paying folks with fringe benefits rather than salary or just giving them a "gift" every now and then.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Amen brother. I have read (parts) of the Silmarillion, and they dry and boring. Moreover, they really add nothing to LoTR on the whole. Does it really matter if we know of Suaron's beginnings, or who Gandalf is? Not one bit.
If you think that the Tolken estate is bad, wait until George Lucasdies....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Okay, the take away is "This is the way it is because it is the way it is?" Really? Seems silly to me. Okay, we get that intellectual property is property because the law says it is, but you have not proved that there is no difference between intellectual property and physical property. In fact, there is a huge difference: intellectual property is not exclusionary! You can make infinite perfect copies of it. Ignore that huge, blatant, glaring fact and your whole argument just looks ill-considered. The question was never "does the law treat intellectual property the same as physical property," it was always "SHOULD the law treat intellectual property the same as physical property." and based on the fact the one is exclusionary while the other isn't, I would say the law should not treat them the same way at all.
The other issue is the reason we have intellectual property. We do not protect intellectual property to benefit the creator. We do it to benefit society, that part is written into the constitution. So, not only are intellectual and tangible property very different, the reasons we protect each are very different as well. In short, your argument is rubbish.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I would be for an exponentially increasing tax after the death of the person who created the work and absolutely NO term limits. It would give an incentive to the offspring to do exactly what you said. Release more works if they exists, release compilations, etc.. The first year the tax could be 50 bucks. The second year it could be 100 bucks. The third year its 200. After 10 years it would be 51200. Of course, it can be tweaked to be mostly unaffordable after 14-20 years. This way, if the copyright was still making a lot of money the person could afford to keep the copyright, otherwise, it goes to public domain. As am amateur musician, I would be pissed off if in my lifetime someone told me I no longer have the copyright to my own music. However, I don't want my kids to inherit it and get a free ride off of it (in the incredibly unlikely chance it becomes popular) since they didn't actually create it. Ill make sure my kids have what they need as children, and help them some through college. If they are very lucky, don't piss me off, and work hard I may leave them a house (assuming I ever get one).
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
A guy can dream, can't he?
Indeed he can, but why waste such dreams on just flipping burgers? ;-)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Having a bit of trouble understanding you..
You originally said that inherited copyrights should be taxed in the same way that inherited money is. I pointed out, by example of The Silmarilion, that it wasn't possible to know what value inherited copyrights have at the time of inheritence and, indeed, that the value could be affected by the effort the inheritor put into the work or not. If the value of an inheritance is indeterminate, it makes it difficult to tax. The same is true of things that are already published - just because a novel was released two years before you inherited the rights and sold well in those two years, doesn't mean that it's likely to sell as well in the years after you inherit it. Thus all you can reasonably do is tax the earnings that come from that inheritance. Which is in fact, how things are normally done. Hopefully that clarifies what I'm saying.
What with your double standards? It's not ok to accumulate money until it's all owned but copyrights that never expire (it's been 40 years now) is ok with you? Having a bit of trouble understanding you..
I don't consider it a double standard. You can be walking on a beam across a ravine and it's not a double standard to say I don't want to veer left or veer right. I'm in favour of copyright, but think that in many cases, the term lengths could be reduced and that there is also a case for them not being associated with time of death (although the latter would add some complex situations to do with publication dates, etc.) I'm not in favour of "taxing inherited copyrights as with money" because I don't think it is possible to do so fairly.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
As am amateur musician, I would be pissed off if in my lifetime someone told me I no longer have the copyright to my own music.
You may think that, but it's stupid. There's no reason to let people have a copyright until they die.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Not really. If you spend as many hours and years as I have making and recording these things you would be pissed too. It would be like someone coming along and taking your house away you spent time fixing up. Its not effort on a material thing but its still effort, and its a pain in the ass at times. People can enjoy it, just like they can enjoy a new patio, so that's what the work is for. "Fair use" should be broadly expanded in music, but I don't want someone taking credit for things I created after the copyright expires after (hypothetically) 10 years simply because I was an unknown musician. Current copyright law is about twice to three times as long as it should be in my opinion.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Bilbo had his walk. I had mine. Bilbo scored a ring and a pile of gold. I killed the dragon myself, threw the ring to the side of the road (Bombadil), and walked back penniless.
Where are the entwives? Joseph and his men rode through the land and husbanded them in the book of Genesis.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
And you are very right, in the sense that "IP" is discernibly different than tangible property. But again, IP is non-exclusionary, but so (potentially) is real estate. The physical laws of the universe* do not exclude me from occupying the same chunk of land as you, the landowner, the same way that the physical laws of the universe don't deprive you of the exclusive and sole possession of an idea.
*Barring Pauli exclusion, and that only applies because we have the bad luck of being Fermionic matter.
So... yes, IP should be treated differently than tangible property. It has different attributes, and the idea of "ownership" is far less intuitive. But "protected differently" is not necessarily "protected less".
The other issue is the reason we have intellectual property. We do not protect intellectual property to benefit the creator. We do it to benefit society, that part is written into the constitution
You haven't been paying attention, have you? Law protects ALL property rights for the benefit of society, not for the creator or owner or any other possessor. Please examine carefully the transcripts or docket information for any property crime (or any crime, for that matter.) The case will always be entitled "The <governmental entity> versus <defendant>". The victim-in-fact? At most, a witness. At least, a complete non-participant and non-factor. All property is protected, not for the benefit of any individual, but for the benefit of society at large. So there is no meaningful difference between tangible, real, and intellectual property in that.
In short, your argument is rubbish.
In short, you are a sore loser, but a loser you nonetheless are.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
You are talking about right of attribution, not copyright. That's actually a seperate thing from copyright (But included as part of copyright law)...you can lose the copyright on something but have the right to claim authorship. (In fact, you also have the right to demand that your name is removed from something...I keep waiting to see William Shakespeare's heirs running around demanding his name get removed from bad performances of his plays.)
If you want to demand that living artists remain credited, even after their copyright is expired, no one has a problem with that at all. That's a fine law.
And no one's going to take your music away. You'll always be able to play it, no one can stop that.
However, at a certain point, you also don't get to stop other people from playing it.
Or, to put it another way, as an incentive for making it, society gives you the sole right to perform it (or allow others to do so) for a fixed amount of time. And that's it. Somehow, thanks to Disney, this 'fixed amount of time' has absurdly been extended to what could be 150 years, depending on how long someone lives.
Also, I'm pretty certain that most people who want to reduce copyright do not want it to 10 years. Usually people talk about 28 years, which is just long enough for something to enter the collective consciousness and people to grow up with it and start basing stuff of it.
I, personally, would like to see 14 years 'by default' without registration, and then, after the 14 years, people have to pay a $100 filing fee or whatever and actually register it, and get another 14 years. Which would result in the vast majority of 'copyrighted things', which is stuff people made and don't even realize is copyrighted or that they own falling out of copyright at that point.
Actually, I'd like to give everyone two years free, and then have a $5 fee or something for the first 14, but for some reason everyone hates that, despite the fact that 'automatic free copyright' is demonstrably bad for the public domain. No one means to copyright, for example, their posts on slashdot. I understand that mistakes caused by not adding a copyright notice resulted in stuff being public domained that people didn't want, so we'll give people two years or something to catch that.
But people really, at some point, needed to be forced to make some effort to actually claim some sort of copyright. At the very least so the copyright doesn't enter some sort of limbo because the company went bankrupt or someone died and the heirs don't know about it, as happened to a large amount of computer games from the 80s and 90s, and 1950 and 1960 movies sitting in vaults decomposing.
And maybe, after the 28 or 30 years, have another 14 years possible, with a fee of $10000, which can be used to help promising artists.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
No, real estate is not non-rival (I was using the wrong term, excludability means being able to exclude non-purchasers from use, for instance, you can't keep people from using a lighthouse.) You don't seem to understand the concept. It is not a problem of physical use or occupation. Of course more than one person can use a physical object or piece of land. It is that you can not replicate it, it is finite and limited. You can replicate a piece of intellectual property over and over again, perfectly. If two people are using a piece of land, each can only obtain half the benefit. If two people listen to a song, both hear the whole song.
Economists have defined these words. You can choose to redefine them for rhetorical purposes, but then you are not speaking the same language as the rest of us.
You are flat out wrong about the constitution, too. In no other case is property protection clearly spelled out as being only for the benefit of society. We do not, as many European countries do, acknowledge any moral right an author has to their creations. We do acknowledge the moral right of a person to their own real property.
You can keep on declaring yourself the winner in anything you like, but don't you think the real measure of success in a debate is how well you convince your audience? I don't think you've convinced anyone but yourself, and being snide, condescending, and full of self-importance does not win an audience over to your side. You can keep arguing if you like, but I have determined that you are not debating me, so I will not debate you. You are merely engaged in cock-waving, which is crude and unattractive. Good day.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Your analogy is only apt if the father was so creative as to make the house into a tourist attraction.
Not really. What if you turn one room into a home office? Now you get to make money, and the only way you are able to do that is because you were lucky enough to get a free house. And this is still ignoring the fact that living in a free house lets you avoid catching pneumonia, which is a problem for people who don't have houses. Your house might also come with a garage, which gives you someplace to park a car, while someone who can only afford to rent an apartment might not be so lucky to get a parking space -- so you get to own a car and he doesn't. Physical property has tangible advantages, and if you inherited your property, you didn't work to earn those advantages.
The original argument seemed to be that inheritance was evil because nobody should get any kind of opportunity that everybody else doesn't get. To me that seems sort of ludicrous. Life isn't fair like that. I get the idea that inheriting huge fortunes tends to create economic dynasties, and that this is sort of bad for society, but as a practical matter I simply do not see why a father should not be able to bequeath the works of his life's labor to his heirs -- whether those labors were building a house or writing books.
Breakfast served all day!
If he does rise from the grave, looks like he'd better not start searching for brains at a family reunion.
Life isn't fair because it isn't and so some should get more than they deserve, is simply a circular, nonsensical, argument. Unfair is unfair, no matter how often it's spun around.
The truth is a free ride is a free ride. It doesn't do anyone any good to be a freeloader. Parents should provide, but not spoil their children.
Nor should they spoil themselves. Sadly, greedy people are slowly corrupting everything. Clearly our society is drowning in excessive affluence.
And just how long does it go on? Forever? Until your line dies out? Can you will your property rights to others? Can your descendants?
Do you own the rights of the name even being mentioned? People who insist on wringing every last cent and demanding that no other mention be made are being extremely short sighted.
Assuming the present condition continuing, it is only a matter of time that there will be no more novels or music produced, because there will have been something done before that is close enough for a lawsuit.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It must be getting a bit wormy by now.
A lot better.
Last time I looked, dead people didn't have publicity rights, nor can they be libeled. Is this an English thing?
---dragoness
It's amazing how quickly huge amounts of money can disappear in the presence of adequate stupidity, greedy hangers-on and poor advice.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Life isn't fair because it isn't and so some should get more than they deserve, is simply a circular, nonsensical, argument
Is it? Black coffee isn't as sweet as Coca-Cola, is that a circular, nonsensical argument? At some point you're going to have to stop dealing in philosophy and confront the world as it exists. It would be nice if everybody had every advantage that everybody else has, but that will never happen. But a vision of society that advocates stealing from everybody who earned something so you can give it to somebody who didn't earn it simply won't work.
Breakfast served all day!
By that masterful logic, there is no meaningful difference between both those kinds of property and one's right not to be killed on a whim by murderous psychopaths. Somehow, I think a meaningful distinction could be made there (and most people do make such a distinction), so I fail to understand why you are so adamant against making other meaningful distinctions between those two kinds of properties.
I didn't realise The Silmarillion wasn't released when JRR was alive (or if I did I have forgotten), but would it really be a great loss. I tried reading it after I had read through LoTR, I got about half way through and didn't really find it interesting enough to get back to.
Then make sure you pay the children of your plumber, your electrician, your gardener and garbage engineer in perpetuity, because after all, you wouldn't want to deny them the fruit of their father's business, would you?
They get the benefits of the reputation in the business the father built, the branding, the contracts, etc. They get the property rights of the business. Just as I don't have to pay Christopher Tolkien for the copy of his father's book I bought 20 years ago, I don't have to pay the plumber's kids for the sink install he did. But just like I can't take away the property rights to the land the office is on just b/c dad died, I can't take away the property rights Tolkien left his kid. I don't think he has the rights he is asserting in the article, but nor does he have no rights.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
I understand your point. A carpenter creates physical products, and thereby gets ownership, which is transferable to his inheritors. Doesn't a writer also create a product, and shouldn't they be able to give it to their estate just as a carpenter could?
Here's the big difference and the problem with the analogy: it's clear who nailed those nails. Either the carpenter did, or he paid someone else. No one did it for free. He paid for the nails, and for the land on which the house sits. There is a clear transfer of title to those items.
The differences is that with ideas, the original provenance is not as clear. The author added some value of his own, but largely used tools that were already in the public domain--for instance, the language in which it was written. The ideas for plots, characterizations, even the method of storytelling is hardly ever unique. The only unique thing is the particular ordering of the words into that very particular manner.
Perhaps that particular ordering should be regarded as the unique property of the creator and the creator's heirs, indefinitely. But any derivative work that changes the construction of the work should be regarded as a new work.
--
$tar -xvf
This is equivalent to your dad having named the house Dadland, and then you suing your neighbor because they use the name Dadland when referring to the house.
There is no such thing as "money already taxed". Taxes are on events, not on dollars or on pounds
Events can happen multiple times to the same object (Surprise!) When someone says "money already taxed" i.e. "money taxed multiple times" it is a body of money that would otherwise be untaxed (bigger in amount), several times over.
To put it another way:
Money is taxed (1) when it is paid in the form of salary or sales (a sales tax or income tax - the only difference is if you include the tax as part of the price or tally it separately) then (2) the same money -- what economists would call the savings -- is taxed again by the estate tax. Count it yourself, the government takes in revenue not once but twice before that savings is ever spent. You may not like it but those are the definitions, so stop arguing against a by definition argument.
There is nothing "counter-factual" about "money already taxed" and perhaps you should learn what an "opportunity cost" is before you try and declare otherwise.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Actually, in legal discussions I rarely see the term "intellectual property" used, but instead "copyrights", "patents", "creator rights", and so on. Most legal systems do not treat IP as property, but as a different form of rights than the right to ownership of a physical object, or the ownership of physical property. There are good reasons why the right to control who is allowed to make copies of a complex work of art are different from the rights to control access and usage of pieces of land.
You could say that about anyone who inherits his dad's hardware store.
Yes, but the hardware store continues to create something. Don't get me wrong, I gather some of what Tolkien's brood have done to promote his lesser known or incomplete works does him credit. I'm just saying that intellectual property is VERY different from physical property.
Hey there is a book called bored of the rings that was written in 1969 what is the statute of limitations on this new law they are trying to make.
It's fascinating how all those people in such threads don't have anything against inheriting money, or property acts falling into hands of family - both things more transitory than works of art; and abstract numbers or data for some time now, meaningless without society, without culture which sustains them (even greater riddle: people here being quick to voice their contempt for bankers, financiers, etc. ... while cherishing financial results of few companies, provided by very same people). All the while US is at the bottom among developed nations in social mobility (meaning: large part of success is determined by social status of parents)
It's even more fascinating how you managed to avoid being modded down into oblivions... (though not shouted at)
One that hath name thou can not otter