Nothing stops storytellers of today from releasing their works as creative commons or public domain. And nothing stops the public from taking up these public domain works instead of the for-profit products released in movie theaters or in print.
Their publishing company / record label / film studio stops them from releasing their work as CC / Public Domain. Because the middlemen of the entertainment industry want to ensure a profit. They're also the one's lobbying the government to make the copyright term longer and longer. So changing this is beyond the means of the lone storyteller or fan embracing an alternative. We need shorter copyright terms.
In the dellusional hope that "nothing" stops a self-budgeted GoPro filmed internet movie from competing with hundrend-million budget, non stop marketing, major studio distribution movie?
That really kind of proves the point, doesn't it? If studios spending hundreds of millions to make/market movies is what gets people to watch them, then aren't they the ones adding most of the value of the movie? And if so, why should any proceeds from that process ever accrue to anyone who didn't make that original capital investment?
Sure you can, but no one will read them. My novel "Darwin's Theorem" (available on Amazon for a nominal price in e-book format, a less-nominal price in paperback) is published under a CC license but that doesn't mean anyone will read it.
The fundamentally borken part of the indie ecosystem is marketing/discovery. Publishers still act as gatekeepers for the reading public. Most people don't read and what they do read is almost entirely determined by the amount of marketing done for it, and while marketing is a learnable skill (I've run my own consulting shop, so done a lot of it) it is difficult to do on the kind of budget most indie authors have available for what amounts to a hobby.
The indie music industry has done a better job of discovery but that's in part because music is consumable in much smaller pieces than novels. The solution to this in writing has been--to some extent--to return to serialization, but while that has worked a bit in non-fiction (people write blogs they turn into books) it has so far seen only one or two successes in fiction, and they have been... not notable for the quality of writing, for the most part.
I've experimented with a couple of alternative forms to see if this can be overcome, but no luck so far. One was an illustrated serial prose format (finished version here: http://www.siduri.net/songsofalbion/songs_of_albion.html), the other an somewhat informal poemed illustrations format (http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html) that appeared on the artist's blog and developed as a kind of jazz work as we tossed themes back and forth. The latter actually got a bigger following, although we promoted the former a lot more heavily. Go figure.
So far it looks like conventional serial narratives--probably pod-cast--are the best bet for the indie author. Some kind of serial pod-cast will likely be my next move, more in the spirit of exploration than anything else. I'm fortunate to have some training as a voice actor, but the number conditions on an idie author to be successful are many, and the difficulty for readers in discovering work they might enjoy is considerable.
Writer of the original article here. I've been avoiding commenting so far as the discussion's made most of the points I'd want to make, but I thought I'd chime in on this one.
Speaking as someone in the same position as tjradcliffe but in the movie (and now comics) world rather than prose, his analysis is spot-on. Discovery's the problem.
In the indie narrative film world - which is in a much, much worse position when it comes to discovery and distribution than the self-publishing world in most ways for reasons somewhat too complicated to go into in a short comment - there's an aphorism about the current situation that I'm hearing more and more.
"There's never been a better time to make a film, and never been a worse time to get anyone to watch it."
Like tjradcliffe, I'm experimenting with ways around it. And like him I've ended up settling on serial works - both Carcosa, which is mentioned in the article, and other stuff that I'll be bringing out shortly. But that's far from a complete solution to the problem.
I have found that the best way to get people to read my graphic novel about a robot lady dragged out of reality by her ex-boyfriend[1] is to spend money on advertising. I should probably do more of that soon. I mean there's nothing wrong with slipping a link to it into a somewhat related discussion online but buying ads (with some thought given to where they are) consistently brings me new interested eyeballs like nothing else.
It's nice to dream of doing something that goes viral!!11!!! and gets me a lot of new followers but I don't think that's any more likely than me getting "discovered" out of the blue when a major publisher stumbles across my comic and excitedly offers me a publishing deal.
Musician here. It's possible to record your own album, book your own gigs, be your own marketing department, and make a living wage from it. Just like it's possible to ride a unicycle over a tightrope across the grand canyon. Of course, even with a label, you have as good of a chance making good money from original songs as you do being struck by lightning.
Most artists who were successful at the DIY thing got fame with a major label at some point (Trent Reznor, Radiohead, etc). So as long as artists depend on labels to get their music heard, labels are going to dictate copyrights and licensing to a degree.
The problem is that nearly nothing opts in to do that (they don't have any incentive to; the system rewards the lucky ones that don't do that), so authors are blocked from using elements of modern culture and myths.
Because the short-term incentive of turning a profit doesn't match up with the long-term incentive of benefiting everyone. The latter can lead to the former, but it's neither sufficient nor necessary.
We're stopping people from growing and contributing to the mythos in favor of rewarding the original creators. But for current law the original creators are long dead by the copyright expiration date.
No fantasy author in their right mind would think "Wow, my work will stop being censored only 90 years from now, even though I will be dead! I will refrain from writing it because my ancestors will make less money."
A fantasy author is getting a little bit too caught up in their fantasy world and forgetting how the real world works if they they think their decisions now will affect how much money their ancestors will make. :-)
As others have commented, this goes against all the established business practices. Even Baen books, that release some books[1] (mostly the first in a series) for no cost, and drm free, doesn't give away copyright to the commons.
If people are to live from writing books, the advance for writing books need to come from somewhere. Crowd funding might be one viable way forward -- I've funded a few graphic novels on kickstarter -- but I don't think any of those have released the work under a CC0 or similar license (I would have been even more exited to fund them if they did).
One problem is that when something is published, it is under copyright. So copyright/the license will need to be changed. I suppose one could print a license text in a book/comic stating that "all rights are reserved until 2020, at which point this work shall be free under a CC0 license". But it will only be under a CC0 license as long as the original author/publisher maintains copyright.
What happens if someone buys the copyright? I suppose the license can't be revoked (that'd be the end of copyleft software) -- but it could create some confusion if a second instalment was released under stricter copyright. Not to mention the need for a trademark license (as I understand it, that's needed for things like characters?).
I don't think I own any notable works of fiction that are recent and not under traditional copyright. I have purchased some music that is, and eg. the TV series "Pioneer One"[2].
Well, I suppose I have a copy of some of Cory Doctorow's novels, but I haven't gotten around to reading them yet -- nor have I bought any of them (yet) either.
The only way they would not be leaving money on the table is if their work was so irrelevant that making it public domain would be a waste of time anyway.
'People' are a diffuse interest. Big budget publishers and intermediaries are a concentrated interest; they can create demand/cultural relevance for their products and demand protectionist regulation. Because publishers are the path to popularity/cultural relevance (with a minor price discrimination/marketing assist from piracy) it doesn't make any sense for creators with aspirations of even minor stardom to go outside the system.
Stross (edit: guest poster Hugh Hancock) and zillions of others are complaining about the outcome of this dynamic, not proposing any way to change it. I like your critique (don't complain, go outside system personally) but as a personal recommendation it will be rejected almost always (see above). To have a real crack at changing the dynamic, 'people' need to figure out how to peer produce cultural relevance independent of the system and compete on policy in a way that furthers peer production rather than merely mitigates excesses. Demanding public domain for public funding is one policy item to push on, currently outre for cultural funding/subsidy.
The system is set up in a way that ensures that individual creators (or, rather, their rightsholders) can profit, at the expense of the public domain that no powerful entities can profitably defend.
Basically, copyright is now a one-way street, when it was supposed to be a two-way bargain.
We do. How much money went into making new Star Wars movie? How much money is tied up in the forty-odd Marvel movies being made over the next few years?
For that matter, how much money has gone into making any of the retellings of traditional fables and myth that has been bread and butter for Disney's animated features since 'Snow White'? (And into relentlessly policing the unauthorized use of the Disney rendition of these characters?)
There is a lot of creative accounting going on in Hollywood, but there is an entire industry built on making these movies that are the only lawyer-approved way of working with these characters. It has its pitfalls but if you can get into it, you can have a fairly comfortable middle-class lifestyle, if you don't mind regular periods of unemployment when one feature/tv show/etc ends and you haven't found a new one yet. And occasionally having some creative accounting fail to pay the last few bills of the subcontracted effects company you working for.
We are even beginning to get better about rewarding the people who work down in the comic-book trenches creating these characters. Creators reaching their prime learnt from the miserable treatment Marvel and DC gave folks like Siegel & Shuster (Superman's creators) or Jack Kirby (co-creator of pretty much the entire fucking Marvel Universe), and became more canny about not signing all their rights away - Eastman and Laird (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) are a great example.
If you did so without using Disney art (or things strongly resembling Disney art) I would actually be surprised if they managed to make trouble for you. Which isn't to say there's no chance I'll be surprised...
>Nothing stops storytellers of today from releasing their works as creative commons or public domain.
Yeah, nothing except no studio would touch those works if you tell them you want to put them out as public domain / CC, much less fund them (so visually they wont be able to compete in the first place).
Besides, movie theaters have distrubution deals with those same studios and distributions companies, and as they wont be taking those movies, theaters wont get them either.
>And nothing stops the public from taking up these public domain works instead of the for-profit products released in movie theaters or in print.
Yeah, nothing except of actual non availability at a movie theater near them, or (especially for web based distribution) the relative power of hundrends of millions of advertising and marketing vs the obscurity of some new indie movie.
Pinning a massive culture shift away from ancient mythos on something as particular as copyright law seems absurd. The move away from historical knowledge in general and towards a permanent-present is evidenced across our media, from entertainment to news to politics.
> pinning a massive culture shift away from ancient mythos on something as particular as copyright law
I don't understand how you got from the article to this. The article's claim is more like there isn't enough of a culture shift, because ever-extending copyright terms means nothing is ending up in the public domain anymore.
This isn't relevant to the main point of the article, but the paragraph about the power of mythology reminded me of Frank Herbert's Dune. The book does an excellent job of dropping you into a new universe starting with the very first pages. Herbert relentlessly uses new terminology from that universe without explanation, but you gradually learn what the words mean through context. For me this is an immense aid to immersion since you are surrounded by the new universe, similar to learning a new language by living in the country that speaks it.
If you haven't read Dune, go pick it up. It's a great piece of science fiction with a mythical element like the article describes.
Ursula Le Guin does a similar thing in all the novels of hers I've read. Even character/race descriptions sometimes are only provided piecemeal over the course of the novel rather than all up front. Allowing you to reexamine what you thought you knew or understood about the world and its peoples.
In the sprawl trilogy, the big black character that gives the hero his mission he's [sic] using a fax machine embedded in the seat of the cab where they first met. A fax machine. That spit out paper with ink on it. It was already old tech and weird when I first read the book 4 years after the published date.
In Dune, they are reading texts on ridulian crystal. When I read it in the 90's I thought "must be some kind of indestructible paper". Herbert didn't describe the item which incidentally allowed the 2000's SciFi series to show ridulian crystal as some kind of a very thin and intelligent screen reader.
Ridulian crystal will never age but FAX machine, e-mail[0], etc will and they will pull you out of that suspension of disbelief state.
With that said, and for what it's worth, I prefer Gibson to Herbert and I dislike made-up name such as `ridulian system`.
Fair enough. Haven't read any of the Sprawl trilogy in a while and don't recall the fax machine or Case and the rest of the crew relying on email to communicate. However, now that you've turned my attention to these obvious anachronisms they seem quite jarring.
But to Gibson's credit, many of his inventions were ill defined and had a chance to mutate just like Herbert's terminology and tech. I won't get into the details because I am sure that you already know the obvious ones.
Anyways, I am really interested in checking out Dune now. I heard the first book is fantastic, but almost unreadable because Frank's writing style was atrocious and it got better over the years ... is this true?
By the way, why was this post down voted? Valid insight IMO.
I reread Dune recently, for the first time since middle school. It is not as good as I remembered it. It's certainly readable, but it's awkward in places and there are whole sections that barely make sense. Also, much which was probably groundbreaking in the 1960s is now just standard trope. To a contemporary reader (or to me, at least) it seems like an amateur application of a formula, even though it's really the original formula itself in all its Alpha 1 glory, without any subsequent refinements. I think the best way to approach it is as an important cultural artifact, as opposed to a novel you really want to read.
> But to Gibson's credit, many of his inventions were ill defined and had a chance to mutate just like Herbert's terminology and tech. I won't get into the details because I am sure that you already know the obvious ones.
Yes, I also note that - as he stated it himself - the tech and the world he describes in his novels come to look more and more like our own until the blue ant serie where both meet and are the same.
> Anyways, I am really interested in checking out Dune now. I heard the first book is fantastic, but almost unreadable because Frank's writing style was atrocious and it got better over the years ... is this true?
I only read the translation (and almost a decade ago) so I won't comment on the style but the plot line still stands on its own as well as the characters, the themes and the ambiance.
I don't remember improvements regarding style over time I'd chalk it up to the translation.
edit: From Herbert I only read Dune and that other book about the God school or factory. I only read Dune because of the Dune I game.
Indeed. It's so annoying seeing how common it is for writers (whether in literature or film/television) spoon feed every little detail to the reader. That blunts the impact of the narrative the same way as explaining a joke ruins it.
Sounds rather similar to the way that the *Souls games (Dark Souls, Demons' Souls) present their narrative - as bits and pieces, hidden in an otherwise difficult to understand world.
Please could you post an archive.org link to the site when it was about tech? Maybe a link to an old version of the guidelines before they said "anything that good hackers would find interesting".
The article doesn't explain why Lovecraft's works are in the public domain. Lovecraft's intention was that R.H. Barlow serve as executor of his literary estate. My recollection is that this was never properly carried out, so control over the estate devolved to his aunt, Annie Gamwell. Gamwell turned Lovecraft's papers over to Barlow who deposited most of them in the John Hay Library at Brown University. Throughout all of this, the copyright remained vested in Gamwell.
In the 1940s, Derleth approached Gamwell's survivors and requesting permission to reprint his work and later fraudulently asserted copyright over the entire literary estate. Derleth also bought out the reprint rights for volumes of Weird Tales that contained Lovecraft's work, but Lovecraft had retained copyright for all stories in Weird Tales published after 1926. His output between 1924 and 1926 amounts to six stories as far as I can tell. Derleth may have legitimately obtained the copyright on these stories, but I can't say with any certainty. S.T. Joshi probably knows for sure. As for everything published after 1926, Gamwell's survivors never renewed the copyright on Lovecraft's work, so the body entered the public domain.
Edit: I'll add that I'm disappointed that Lovecraft's letters aren't freely available. Arkham House hasn't printed his collected letters in nearly 40 years. If Brown were willing to make digital copies of his correspondence freely available, I'd be willing to contribute toward their digitization.
> It's very easy to see that this trend has developed and accelerated over the last 30 years. In 1981, 7 out of 10 of the year's top-grossing movies were original material. In 2014, it was 1 out of 10.
The best reason for this I've seen is repeated material plays well in the Asian etc markets. The initial movie becomes essentially an ad for the squeals.
Because of the huge copyright infringement in these markets, ads are to expensive to run to the whole population to get them to the movies.
But once the first movie is out the profit by sheer numbers in these markets on squeals makes it worth while.
> The best reason for this I've seen is repeated material plays well in the Asian etc markets. The initial movie becomes essentially an ad for the squeals.
wait, what? this is how sequels work everywhere, not just asia.
1 Raiders of the Lost Ark
2 On Golden Pond
3 Superman II
4 Arthur
5 Stripes
6 The Cannonball Run
7 Chariots of Fire
8 For Your Eyes Only
9 The Four Seasons
10 Time Bandits
1 American Sniper
2 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
3 Guardians of the Galaxy
4 Captain America: The Winter Soldier
5 The LEGO Movie
6 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
7 Transformers: Age of Extinction
8 Maleficent
9 X-Men: Days of Future Past
10 Big Hero 6
Big Hero 6 isn't original, if that's what you're saying there -- it's drawn from the same Marvel universe as Captain America and Guardians of the Galaxy.
No, not in the sense of not using copyrighted material published in other channels -- it's based on several books. I don't think the screenplay could have been legally used without agreements with at least some of the authors there.
Not also how all of those are fantasy movies for kids and adult geeks. No Raging Bull or American Grafitti or Apocalypse Now or Three Days of The Condor, etc etc.
> It's very easy to see that this trend has developed and accelerated over the last 30 years. In 1981, 7 out of 10 of the year's top-grossing movies were original material. In 2014, it was 1 out of 10.
Most articles on the subject tend to treat this as a mistake. The assumption is that Hollywood executives are greenlighting these projects because they're "safe". I'm really not convinced by that.
Big-budget movies are a business, and are more expensive than ever. If you're going to be looking at the top 10, then yes, you're going to find 'safe' titles. A better analysis would be looking at all movies.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadYou might use one to finance your work. Or market your work, which is their best talent these days.
But you don't need them. You can produce and release your work freely without them.
The fundamentally borken part of the indie ecosystem is marketing/discovery. Publishers still act as gatekeepers for the reading public. Most people don't read and what they do read is almost entirely determined by the amount of marketing done for it, and while marketing is a learnable skill (I've run my own consulting shop, so done a lot of it) it is difficult to do on the kind of budget most indie authors have available for what amounts to a hobby.
The indie music industry has done a better job of discovery but that's in part because music is consumable in much smaller pieces than novels. The solution to this in writing has been--to some extent--to return to serialization, but while that has worked a bit in non-fiction (people write blogs they turn into books) it has so far seen only one or two successes in fiction, and they have been... not notable for the quality of writing, for the most part.
I've experimented with a couple of alternative forms to see if this can be overcome, but no luck so far. One was an illustrated serial prose format (finished version here: http://www.siduri.net/songsofalbion/songs_of_albion.html), the other an somewhat informal poemed illustrations format (http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html) that appeared on the artist's blog and developed as a kind of jazz work as we tossed themes back and forth. The latter actually got a bigger following, although we promoted the former a lot more heavily. Go figure.
So far it looks like conventional serial narratives--probably pod-cast--are the best bet for the indie author. Some kind of serial pod-cast will likely be my next move, more in the spirit of exploration than anything else. I'm fortunate to have some training as a voice actor, but the number conditions on an idie author to be successful are many, and the difficulty for readers in discovering work they might enjoy is considerable.
Speaking as someone in the same position as tjradcliffe but in the movie (and now comics) world rather than prose, his analysis is spot-on. Discovery's the problem.
In the indie narrative film world - which is in a much, much worse position when it comes to discovery and distribution than the self-publishing world in most ways for reasons somewhat too complicated to go into in a short comment - there's an aphorism about the current situation that I'm hearing more and more.
"There's never been a better time to make a film, and never been a worse time to get anyone to watch it."
Like tjradcliffe, I'm experimenting with ways around it. And like him I've ended up settling on serial works - both Carcosa, which is mentioned in the article, and other stuff that I'll be bringing out shortly. But that's far from a complete solution to the problem.
It's nice to dream of doing something that goes viral!!11!!! and gets me a lot of new followers but I don't think that's any more likely than me getting "discovered" out of the blue when a major publisher stumbles across my comic and excitedly offers me a publishing deal.
1: http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/
Most artists who were successful at the DIY thing got fame with a major label at some point (Trent Reznor, Radiohead, etc). So as long as artists depend on labels to get their music heard, labels are going to dictate copyrights and licensing to a degree.
No fantasy author in their right mind would think "Wow, my work will stop being censored only 90 years from now, even though I will be dead! I will refrain from writing it because my ancestors will make less money."
If people are to live from writing books, the advance for writing books need to come from somewhere. Crowd funding might be one viable way forward -- I've funded a few graphic novels on kickstarter -- but I don't think any of those have released the work under a CC0 or similar license (I would have been even more exited to fund them if they did).
One problem is that when something is published, it is under copyright. So copyright/the license will need to be changed. I suppose one could print a license text in a book/comic stating that "all rights are reserved until 2020, at which point this work shall be free under a CC0 license". But it will only be under a CC0 license as long as the original author/publisher maintains copyright.
What happens if someone buys the copyright? I suppose the license can't be revoked (that'd be the end of copyleft software) -- but it could create some confusion if a second instalment was released under stricter copyright. Not to mention the need for a trademark license (as I understand it, that's needed for things like characters?).
I don't think I own any notable works of fiction that are recent and not under traditional copyright. I have purchased some music that is, and eg. the TV series "Pioneer One"[2].
Well, I suppose I have a copy of some of Cory Doctorow's novels, but I haven't gotten around to reading them yet -- nor have I bought any of them (yet) either.
[1] https://www.baenebooks.com/c-1-free-library.aspx
[2] http://vodo.net/joshbernhard/pioneerone/
Stross (edit: guest poster Hugh Hancock) and zillions of others are complaining about the outcome of this dynamic, not proposing any way to change it. I like your critique (don't complain, go outside system personally) but as a personal recommendation it will be rejected almost always (see above). To have a real crack at changing the dynamic, 'people' need to figure out how to peer produce cultural relevance independent of the system and compete on policy in a way that furthers peer production rather than merely mitigates excesses. Demanding public domain for public funding is one policy item to push on, currently outre for cultural funding/subsidy.
The system is set up in a way that ensures that individual creators (or, rather, their rightsholders) can profit, at the expense of the public domain that no powerful entities can profitably defend.
Basically, copyright is now a one-way street, when it was supposed to be a two-way bargain.
For that matter, how much money has gone into making any of the retellings of traditional fables and myth that has been bread and butter for Disney's animated features since 'Snow White'? (And into relentlessly policing the unauthorized use of the Disney rendition of these characters?)
There is a lot of creative accounting going on in Hollywood, but there is an entire industry built on making these movies that are the only lawyer-approved way of working with these characters. It has its pitfalls but if you can get into it, you can have a fairly comfortable middle-class lifestyle, if you don't mind regular periods of unemployment when one feature/tv show/etc ends and you haven't found a new one yet. And occasionally having some creative accounting fail to pay the last few bills of the subcontracted effects company you working for.
We are even beginning to get better about rewarding the people who work down in the comic-book trenches creating these characters. Creators reaching their prime learnt from the miserable treatment Marvel and DC gave folks like Siegel & Shuster (Superman's creators) or Jack Kirby (co-creator of pretty much the entire fucking Marvel Universe), and became more canny about not signing all their rights away - Eastman and Laird (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) are a great example.
It's not a magic unicorn world that automatically reward what's important.
First when the company was founded, and then when they started selling music via iTunes.
Yeah, nothing except no studio would touch those works if you tell them you want to put them out as public domain / CC, much less fund them (so visually they wont be able to compete in the first place).
Besides, movie theaters have distrubution deals with those same studios and distributions companies, and as they wont be taking those movies, theaters wont get them either.
>And nothing stops the public from taking up these public domain works instead of the for-profit products released in movie theaters or in print.
Yeah, nothing except of actual non availability at a movie theater near them, or (especially for web based distribution) the relative power of hundrends of millions of advertising and marketing vs the obscurity of some new indie movie.
I don't understand how you got from the article to this. The article's claim is more like there isn't enough of a culture shift, because ever-extending copyright terms means nothing is ending up in the public domain anymore.
If you haven't read Dune, go pick it up. It's a great piece of science fiction with a mythical element like the article describes.
http://english.bouletcorp.com/2010/05/21/fantasy/
In the sprawl trilogy, the big black character that gives the hero his mission he's [sic] using a fax machine embedded in the seat of the cab where they first met. A fax machine. That spit out paper with ink on it. It was already old tech and weird when I first read the book 4 years after the published date.
In Dune, they are reading texts on ridulian crystal. When I read it in the 90's I thought "must be some kind of indestructible paper". Herbert didn't describe the item which incidentally allowed the 2000's SciFi series to show ridulian crystal as some kind of a very thin and intelligent screen reader.
Ridulian crystal will never age but FAX machine, e-mail[0], etc will and they will pull you out of that suspension of disbelief state.
With that said, and for what it's worth, I prefer Gibson to Herbert and I dislike made-up name such as `ridulian system`.
[0] But let's not get into __that__ debate.
But to Gibson's credit, many of his inventions were ill defined and had a chance to mutate just like Herbert's terminology and tech. I won't get into the details because I am sure that you already know the obvious ones.
Anyways, I am really interested in checking out Dune now. I heard the first book is fantastic, but almost unreadable because Frank's writing style was atrocious and it got better over the years ... is this true?
By the way, why was this post down voted? Valid insight IMO.
Yes, I also note that - as he stated it himself - the tech and the world he describes in his novels come to look more and more like our own until the blue ant serie where both meet and are the same.
> Anyways, I am really interested in checking out Dune now. I heard the first book is fantastic, but almost unreadable because Frank's writing style was atrocious and it got better over the years ... is this true?
I only read the translation (and almost a decade ago) so I won't comment on the style but the plot line still stands on its own as well as the characters, the themes and the ambiance.
I don't remember improvements regarding style over time I'd chalk it up to the translation.
edit: From Herbert I only read Dune and that other book about the God school or factory. I only read Dune because of the Dune I game.
It's a very effective trick.
Yeah, the same thing holds for most man pages...
Me neither.
In the 1940s, Derleth approached Gamwell's survivors and requesting permission to reprint his work and later fraudulently asserted copyright over the entire literary estate. Derleth also bought out the reprint rights for volumes of Weird Tales that contained Lovecraft's work, but Lovecraft had retained copyright for all stories in Weird Tales published after 1926. His output between 1924 and 1926 amounts to six stories as far as I can tell. Derleth may have legitimately obtained the copyright on these stories, but I can't say with any certainty. S.T. Joshi probably knows for sure. As for everything published after 1926, Gamwell's survivors never renewed the copyright on Lovecraft's work, so the body entered the public domain.
Edit: I'll add that I'm disappointed that Lovecraft's letters aren't freely available. Arkham House hasn't printed his collected letters in nearly 40 years. If Brown were willing to make digital copies of his correspondence freely available, I'd be willing to contribute toward their digitization.
The best reason for this I've seen is repeated material plays well in the Asian etc markets. The initial movie becomes essentially an ad for the squeals.
Because of the huge copyright infringement in these markets, ads are to expensive to run to the whole population to get them to the movies.
But once the first movie is out the profit by sheer numbers in these markets on squeals makes it worth while.
wait, what? this is how sequels work everywhere, not just asia.
(Plus in the US they can afford real ads, ie new movies have a chance)
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/21/why-holly...
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1981
Of which I guess 2, 3, 8 isn't original.http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2:w014
Of which only 10 is original.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hero_6_(comics)
Heavily adapted for a different audience, certainly, but still not an original story.
But it drops off the list I think when you look internationally. Your links are domestic.
http://deadline.com/2015/03/big-hero-6-600-million-third-big...
http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Hunger-Games-Mockingjay-Par...
http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/American-Sniper#tab=summary
Most articles on the subject tend to treat this as a mistake. The assumption is that Hollywood executives are greenlighting these projects because they're "safe". I'm really not convinced by that.
Big-budget movies are a business, and are more expensive than ever. If you're going to be looking at the top 10, then yes, you're going to find 'safe' titles. A better analysis would be looking at all movies.