(no subject)

Legal battle over Watchmen movie

Film studio Twentieth Century Fox has applied to a Los Angeles court to block the release of Watchmen, based on the comic books written by Alan Moore. [...] Fox spokesman Gregg Brilliant said it planned to stop the release of the movie and "any related Watchmen media that violate our copyright interests in that property".

BBC News
August 19, 2008

Gorram. Everbody wants to get paid.

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Randomly - Did you know that Rosanne has a blog? It doesn't suck - I don't agree with everything she says, but she totally owns her opinions. **ETA** She is so on drugs and it's fascinating.

And randomly the second - I'm heading to my LCS today or tomorrow to pick up Jonathan Hickman's Network News, and Tori Amos' Comic Book Tattoo. Anyone have some more recs for me?

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Now for the meat of this entry:

Cory Doctorow talks about the OTW, comparing it to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. OTW is really getting a lot of press for a fan org.

The other thing is that the CBLDF is, itself, a kind of model for the kind of organizations that other people who are involved in other dangerous cultural acts are turning to. For example, Naomi Novik, she won the Campbell Award last year for best new science fiction writer. She comes out of the fanfic culture of people who make stories out of other people’s universes—this is something that’s pretty common in comics, and obviously, the shared universe is a real common piece of comic storytelling, in the way that comics have always taken place. And even where you have unauthorized, thinly-veiled shared universes—you have things like The Watchmen and so on. So Naomi and her friends, they want to defend the rights of people who are involved in fanfiction, because this is as old as culture, the retelling of stories to suit your own needs.

She said she wanted to make a CBLDF for fanfiction, and that just conveyed so much in just a little phrase. So what the CBLDF has actually done is provided us with a useful vocabulary for describing a certain kind of advocacy organization that’s small, incredibly nimble and intelligent in the way it conducts itself, committed to an important cause, and really fueled by creators and the work they do. So I think for that reason as well, I’m really game for doing stuff for the group.

Cory makes a case for fanfiction being a similar kind of artistic endeavor to writing in shared universes like comics (or if you extend it further television, particularly franchises) - the primary differences, as he sees it are:

1. Experience. Not talent - experience. He doesn't distinguish between pro/fan writers in terms of capability, but he does say that on average, pro writers tend to be more skilled.

Pro writers also operate within an immense infrastructure of editors, publishers and promoters, where they learn to write what sells, or they don't get to be pro writers anymore. I mean, of course there are some incredibly skilled fan writers, but there are also bajillions of us for whom fandom is our first experience with creative writing. And there are lots of us who are more interested in telling our stories, than in developing our skills. Pro writers don't have that option.

What I really like about this point is that Doctorow is committing the fallacy of talent=success, or that success=talent. And that therefore, lack of success=lack of talent.

2. Community. Internet fic, as he points out, is a very public activity. Much more public and interactive than say, writing Action Comics, where the fans only see selected previews and the final product.

Even old school zine fic encouraged much more back and forth between writers and readers, writers and writers, and readers and readers, all on a (more of less) level playing field, than pro writers are likely to experience. My anecdotal evidence suggests that fic is increasingly being treated as a communal experience, especially on eljay where there's very little demarcation between blog-space and story-space (ie fic happens in comments, sometimes even to blog-style entries). So you get tiny ficlets in response to other peoples ficlets, all part of a story-conversation that happens much faster than would be possible in pro writing circles. It's also a conversation in which the more and less skilled can equally participate.. Contributions won't be valued equally, but we technically have equal opportunity to chime in with our say.

3. Subject matter. Doctorow points out that a lot of fic is fundamentally concerned with three things: sex, politics and sexual politics. This is part of why copyright and trademark owners get nervous about fic - it strays into territory which might, if they were to go there themselves, negatively impact marketability.

This is an interesting one. The sex part is easy (fanfic is for porn!), politics less so. Is a fifteen year old Harry/Ginny shipper really engaging in political activity/making a political statement? Well, yes. It's kind of hard to get away from politics. *g*

There's the politics of the medium, the politics of the activity and the politics of the messge. We don't all write fic with the intention of doing politics or making the same kind of statement, but even the most innocuous fic is political.

100 Calories of Obama per package

What's up with the 100 calorie trend? Where did it come from - marketers, dieticians? Anyone have a lead?

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Invoking pragmatism doesn’t help the average voter much; ideology, though it often gets a bad name, matters, because it offers insight into how a candidate might actually behave as president.

Truer words. I hate the a-political strategy. Bullshit he's post-partisan. Anyway, I'm halfway through this article, which I totally recommend. A snippet:

How Obama Reconciles Dueling Views On Economy

Among the policy experts and economists who make up the Democratic government-in-waiting, there is now something of a consensus. They agree that deficit reduction did an enormous amount of good. It helped usher in the 1990s boom and the only period of strong, broad-based income growth in a generation. But that boom also depended on a technology bubble and historically low oil prices. In the current decade, the economy has continued to grow at a decent pace, yet most families have seen little benefit. Instead, the benefits have flowed mostly to a small slice of workers at the very top of the income distribution. As Rubin told me, comparing the current moment with 1993, “The distributional issues are obviously more serious now.” From today’s vantage point, inequality looks likes a bigger problem than economic growth; fiscal discipline seems necessary but not sufficient.

In practical terms, the new consensus means that the policies of an Obama administration would differ from those of the Clinton administration, but not primarily because of differences between the two men. “The economy has changed in the last 15 years, and our understanding of economic policy has changed as well,” Furman says. “And that means that what was appropriate in 1993 is no longer appropriate.” Obama’s agenda starts not with raising taxes to reduce the deficit, as Clinton’s ended up doing, but with changing the tax code so that families making more than $250,000 a year pay more taxes and nearly everyone else pays less. That would begin to address inequality. Then there would be Reich-like investments in alternative energy, physical infrastructure and such, meant both to create middle-class jobs and to address long-term problems like global warming.

David LeonHardt
NY Times
August 20, 2008