The Frenzy '09 Support Thread

[Strangler Lewis]

Originally Posted by LSPoorEeyorick

Oh my gosh, I had just planned to walk ignorantly into the good night without any thought of legal at all!

I never doubted you for a second. It just seems that, notwithstanding its enshrinement in our constitution, the kids today don't have much regard for kindly old Mr. Copyright.

Originally Posted by LSPoorEeyorick

Seriously, though, the general process for untested writers, as I understand it, is to adapt the work, or at least part of it, as a spec script before rights are requested - so that the author can consider the spec script before granting anything. And that's what I'm doing now.

That's good to know. Now, I can get to work on my screenplay inspired by the spermcube.

Withering criticism alert: Ideas 2 & 4 genuinely intrigue me. Ideas 1 & 3 set off my alarms that the stories are going to be about jokes & gestures & moments that will resonate to the author and her quirky friends but will not have sufficient universal appeal. Of course, movies and shows about people and their quirky friends get made all the time whereas movies that, to use a random example, set the Oedipus story in the Clinton White House, don't. So what do I know? I look forward to reading anything you're inclined to share.

[LSPoorEeyorick]

Originally Posted by Strangler Lewis

...set the Oedipus story in the Clinton White House...

If it isn't headed toward movie, I bet it would make a great novel! In which case, I look forward to reading it.

I very much want to read that short story. Unfamiliar with the writer.

I can lend you the book if you like! (I will be done with it in May.) I think you will love it. I wanted to hug it.

[Eliza Hodgkins 1812]

Originally Posted by LSPoorEeyorick

I can lend you the book if you like! (I will be done with it in May.) I think you will love it. I wanted to hug it.

Yes, please.

[Strangler Lewis]

Originally Posted by LSPoorEeyorick

If it isn't headed toward movie, I bet it would make a great novel! In which case, I look forward to reading it.

That one will probably stay in dramatic form. After all, Sophocles didn't write a novel. Why should I?

However, the great vasectomy script is going novel, and my midlife crisisy Oscar-written-all-over-it tearjerker "And Somewhere Children Shout" may as well.

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by Strangler Lewis

the kids today don't have much regard for kindly old Mr. Copyright.

Maybe that's because kindly old Mr. Copyright refuses to die, like all things are supposed to. Tell me where it's enshrined in the constitution that copyrights are endless, and works never, ever become public domain.

Sorry for the potentially derailing rant. But old Mr. Copyright should be put out of our misery.

[Kevy Baby]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

Sorry for the potentially derailing rant. But old Mr. Copyright should be put out of our misery.

You can't be saying that copyright laws should be banished in their entirety? Maybe a cap should be put on it, but not abolished altogether.

[Strangler Lewis]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

Maybe that's because kindly old Mr. Copyright refuses to die, like all things are supposed to. Tell me where it's enshrined in the constitution that copyrights are endless, and works never, ever become public domain.

Sorry for the potentially derailing rant. But old Mr. Copyright should be put out of our misery.

Last I looked, which was a while ago, it was life of the author plus 50 years. Patents, I think, are 17 years.

Sounds fair to me.

[Eliza Hodgkins 1812]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

Maybe that's because kindly old Mr. Copyright refuses to die, like all things are supposed to. Tell me where it's enshrined in the constitution that copyrights are endless, and works never, ever become public domain.

Sorry for the potentially derailing rant. But old Mr. Copyright should be put out of our misery.

I've researched enough to call myself anti-copyright, but I do have a lot of respect for Creative Commons and am interested in derivative works.

Also of interest is an essay by Jonathan Lethem entitled The ectasy of influence: A plagiarism, though more than he I believe an author should at least credit his references, even if kept vague. (Example: I've quoted verbatim the works for So And So.)

And though this is seemingly unrelated (other than I've been reading about him and he had some interesting things to say about patents and intellectual property), I give you Tesla, who saw the future rather than dreamed it:
As soon as it is completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power, without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction. - On the Wardenclyffe Tower, in "The Future of the Wireless Art" in Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony (1908)