h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>Did you even bother to read the Coda?<<

Blatherskite, I did read it and therein lies the problem. It makes it perfectly clear that Bradbury does not consider this kind of thing theft: "I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the "Moby Dick" mythology, dedicated to Melville". If he doesn't think lifting an entire plot is theft but merely dedication, then who else would you have me think believes it given that you wrote the post?

>>You can feel free to call him a foolish old crank afterwards, if you like.<<

The question is whether you think he's a foolish old crank. If so, then all is made clear, because there's no need for him to apply the same standards to himself as he does to others, but it would have been helpful if you'd averred a belief in his inconsistent application of principles.

My own view is that he knows full well it's not theft and was irked firstly because he doesn't like Moore's faux folksy style too much, and secondly because Moore didn't do him the courtesy of asking permission (which Moore probably failed to do because he didn't need to and he knew what the answer would be anyway).

Let's try this again.

First of all, nobody owns individual words. Language belongs to everyone. So when I took the word blatherskite, stuck on mugwump, with a 'the' to glue them together, I didn't do anything to anyone, and that analogy, if you meant it as a joke, was a very poor one, as "savagely raped" is not a phrase often taken lightly.

However, you can own your own words, when you've strung them together. Then they become art. Someone who copyrights their words owns them in a very real and legal sense, though you don't necessarily have to copyright them to claim ownership.

Ideas, however, are not usually owned. Someone reading Melville and saying, "What if we did something like that, but in space," has a perfectly legal right to be written, even if he publicly acknowledges that Melville's story inspired it. Bradbury could have asked Melville's permission, but he'd been dead for quite some time, and the copyrights had long since worn out.

Bradbury still owns copyrights to Fahrenheit 451. And as we can see, he's still very much alive. He owns that title, which means he owns those words. That gives him some say in how they are used.

Blatherskite, I truly think you're reaching! It's an homage, obviously.

Obviously, Bradbury doesn't see it that way.

>>Bradbury still owns copyrights to Fahrenheit 451. And as we can see, he's still very much alive. He owns that title, which means he owns those words. That gives him some say in how they are used.<<

I thought copyright allowed for quotation of work without permission. So the problem isn't that the title was used, it's how it was used (and that it was changed), yeah?

I'm not sure that Bradbury does 'own' the title in the way that he owns the whole work (I don't know that much about copyright though - can someone clarify?). Especially given that the phrase Farenheit 451 was already a phrase in the English language. It's not like he invented that string of words. What he did was create an artistic work that gave that string of words an additional meaning.

I'm thinking this is a similar issue to music sampling which appears to not require permission or even acknowledgement.

At the very least common courtesy would insist on asking permission if not just notifying Bradbury of the title. A fair, reasoned, thinking approach would be to ask what would be required in order to use the title. IMHO anyway.

Presumably then the people that have reused Moore''s title 'Stupid White Men' for their book 'Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man' should have asked Moore for permission?

No, because one is a spoof of the other. Satire is protected under law.

ah, but irony is not.

Nope, sorry. God is an iron. Satire is a law.

For good reason, I think. Satire is a method of ridiculing or pointing out flaws in political or public figures. It's ideal is to lay bare the foibles of figures who have legal, societal, or social influence on us and thus change for good. That would be protected under personal freedoms that date back to English Common Law. Irony is merely a subsection of Punnage in my humble opinion. Thus it can stand on it's own (and often has to).

Seriously, irony can fall under slander a lot easier than satire can. The difference is comedic intent.

Yes, I agree about the value of satire being protected.

I haven't looked at the big fat white man book so I don't know if it is satirical (or to what extent it is).

I don't know much if anything about copyright law, but in the second list in this conversation it is mentioned that copyright does not apply to ideas and titles.

It is pretty obvious that Moore's title is borrowing from Bradbury, however it is not being done malicously or to detract from F451?thread=I don't know much if anything about copyright law, but in the second list in this conversation it is mentioned that copyright does not apply to ideas and titles.

It is pretty obvious that Moore's title is borrowing from Bradbury, however it is not being done malicously or to detract from F451. If anything it is probably stimulating sales. Try to think of another good title. Perhaps 'How George Bush was awarded the presidency by lazy media and is now running out of bad choices to make' would have been accurate, but wouldn't fit on the signs at the theatre. I am not familiar with Bradbury's work, but Moore's title seems fitting. The topic is 9/11, and people are pretty hot about it, and what should have been done. The 9/11 Commission released it's report today. It seemed like alot of people were hoping for more blaming and finger pointing, but I haven't read it yet.

>> It makes it perfectly clear that Bradbury does not consider this kind of thing theft:

Bradbury would not be the first person to decline a verb differently depending on person:

I dedicate my homage to the master
You don't have any original ideas
He is a theiving bastard

B

I've heard a lot about the 911 commission on the BBC today - interesting to say the least!

>>if you meant it as a joke, was a very poor one, as "savagely raped" is not a phrase often taken lightly.

However, you can own your own words, when you've strung them together.<<

Blatherskite, whether you take the phrase lightly or not is of no interest to me, as it's not a phrase I used. As you would have it you own the words, so I look forward to seeing you pompously demand an apology of yourself for this self-inflicted slight.

>>Bradbury still owns copyrights to Fahrenheit 451. And as we can see, he's still very much alive. He owns that title, which means he owns those words. That gives him some say in how they are used.<<

Your understanding of copyright law is flawed: just as with an idea, you cannot copyright a title. The only practical means of protecting the title of a literary work is to trademark it. I'm pretty certain that Bradbury knows this because I'm sitting next to a literary agent who represented him for several years.

By the way, are you still speaking in your capacity as unofficial conduit for Bradbury's psyche, or would it now be safe to assume that you are no longer speaking for him but for yourself?

Titles are interesting things. When they made a movie of Philip K Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' they (not surprisingly) wanted to change the title. They decided on the relatively meaningless 'Blade Runner' but this was already the title of two stories, one by William S Burroughs, another by Alan E Nourse. The makers of the film paid both those writers for the use of the title, even though the film wasn't even tangentially based on the actual works.

I believe that movie titles can be registered, so you can't simply take one movie's title and use it for another. But this doesn't appear to extend to book titles. The recent Paul Verhoeven movie 'Hollow Man' had the same title as a novel by Dan Simmons, but was otherwise unrelated, and I'm not even sure they paid Simmons for the work.

But in this case, Moore merely paraphrased an existing title, so the ownership question is even more tenuous.

One more thing - I don't hink it's true to say that 'Farenheit 451' was a phrase in common use before Bradbury wrote his book - he had to ask a physicist (I think) at what temperature paper burned, so I think it's fair to say that he invented the phrase.

Glad to see someone had clarified the difference between copyright and trademark.


>>I don't hink it's true to say that 'Farenheit 451' was a phrase in common use before Bradbury wrote his book - he had to ask a physicist (I think) at what temperature paper burned, so I think it's fair to say that he invented the phrase.<<

I think I said that it was already in English usage, not that it was in common usage. I was meaning that it wasn't the first time that the word farenheit and the numbers four, five, and one had been used together (in the sense of 'a string of words' referred to earlier). In the same way that 0 degrees celsius is associated with the freezing point of water. Only we don't use farenheit generally here so I wasn't sure if you normally put the numbers before or after usually.

Wouldn't scientists already be familiar with the term farenheit 451 as the burnign point of paper, in the way that they would be with 100 degrees celsius as the boiling point of water?

But I take your point Jim - that Bradbury coined the phrase in public usage.

Hmmm.

One would say 451 deegrees Fahrenheit.

The burning temperature of paper is (a) not a constant (depends on the type of paper being burnt), and (b) not generally used as a scientific measure of anything, unlike, say, the boiling or freezing point of water.

So I'd say that Bradbury "invented" that particular phraseology.

However, there have been numerous examples of films with the same name, as well as films with similar names, examples of which entirely desert me at the moment! Not sure how much money (if any) changes hands when they're used.

RF

The reason why book titles aren't protected is because it's presumed that the author is what the reader goes for rather than the title, thus it's not considered plausible that, say, Stupid White Men by Mycroft would be widely confused with Michael Moore's book of the same name. Movie titles can indeed be registered, and my understanding of the way things panned out with 'Blade Runner' is that Burroughs had registered the title 'Bladerunner, A Movie' when he wrote his novella as a movie script after having seen Nourse's work, and when Scott & co saw that title, they decided they liked it enough to buy it from Burroughs. If Nourse got any money it was probably through scrupulousness on Burroughs part rather than any legal obligation.