Litigation and . . . time

In 2005 I learned about a class action lawsuit against Google through a writers’ organization. This one is different from the current lawsuit against Google for unauthorized digitizing of the world’s library. The one I’m talking about here is Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation. I received a notice yesterday (actually three notices by mail) telling me that I had filed three claims, two were disallowed, but the third was being processed. I filed my claims within the deadline and sent paper backups. In 2005. In the interim I heard not a word.

I remember filling out some of the paper work for this claim. Even more vividly I remember going through my files and listing every piece of published writing done within a certain period, and being very surprised at the number. I hadn’t realized I’d been so prolific in writing nonfiction on a variety of topics. A lot of the works were book reviews, and I have no idea how those will fare in this claim. I also recall receiving an email that certain works wouldn’t be allowed because they hadn’t been copyrighted. I sent them copies of the copyright registrations by registered mail.

This is the second class action lawsuit that I have found myself benefiting from. A few years after I published an article in Clues: A Journal of Detection (1996), I received a letter stating that the university had sold the rights to articles published in the journal without receiving permission; a group of writers (as I recall) had sued, and here was my piece of the settlement. In the envelope was a check for $750.

I don’t know what the settlement in this current lawsuit will be, but I do know that some of it will depend on my registration of copyright with the Library of Congress. While it is true that today a writer owns the copyright of a work the minute it is created, it is also true that those who register the copyright with the Library of Congress will collect more in the way of monetary damages than those who do not register their copyright.

I did nothing to bring about the settlement with Clues. I filed a lot of paper for the Database Litigation but I had nothing to do with filing the lawsuit and following up. I occasionally receive a request for information on whether or not I flew a certain airlines within a certain period, and after that I might receive a small check as part of a settlement. I’ve occasionally received a voucher for a small amount of money.

After the Snowden and NSA debacle, no one should be surprised that someone somewhere out there is misusing someone else’s information or work but it is still a surprise to me—a pleasant surprise—to find that others are fighting back, even as I wander about in ignorance, and that I have been included in the settlement.

And as a result, I will continue to register my copyrights even when others tell me it’s a waste of money. And I will also continue to pay my dues to the various writers’ groups who keep track of these things like lawsuits and let their members know that it’s now time to sharpen those fingernails and get clacking on those keys, and file those claims.

I don’t know if I’ll get much in the way of compensation, but I’m looking forward to getting a check in the next . . . few years.

The litigation is in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, in re Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation, M.D.L. No. 1379.

Just how much of your book do you own?

I have been watching the Google lawsuit and settlement talks play out over the years, and with each announcement, mostly in favor of Google, I went from anger and disbelief, to confusion, and now to a glimmer of understanding of how writers could find themselves not quite owning their own work. I stumbled across this insight while reading Robert Spoo's book on how copyright protections (or the lack of them) affected the introduction of modernist literature in the United States, with a focus on Ezra Pound and James Joyce. 

Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain, by Robert Spoo (Oxford University Press, 2013)

I came across this book by accident. When I picked it up in a local library after being drawn in by the title I expected something that would seem relevant to me as a writer grappling with the changing environment for commercially and self-published writers. The challenges facing writers opposed to Google’s digital copying program are nearly overwhelming, and I was stumped to understand why courts found it so easy to rule against writers and in favor of Google and others. I still don’t understand completely, but I have a better understanding of how we got where we are and why Google has been successful so far.

Robert Spoo, well recognized in his chosen field of copyright law and literature, is interested in how copyright laws, or the lack of them as we understand them today, interacted with modernism in literature. He takes for his example the writer James Joyce, and his attempts to have an unexpurgated Ulysses published in the United States.

Spoo’s history of copyright in this country is an eye-opener. Writers often talk about books in the public domain as though they had drifted into this ocean as a result of neglect or the passage of time or creation by the US or state government. But the public domain was in fact created by Congress through earlier copyright laws to ensure that those involved in the book business in this country had work here and didn’t face competition from outside the country. The only books that received copyright in this country were those that were printed and bound here, manufactured here; all others, no matter where they were published or by whom, were in the public domain. Once in the public domain, which occurred within a very short time after publication elsewhere, the book was fair game for anyone who wanted to publish it here. Writers who published abroad could gain a copyright here if they met stringent requirements, but otherwise the copyright failed in the US. This was the case well into the twentieth century.

Publishers who wanted to publish work by someone who had already published it abroad faced the Wild West of publishing for decades. In response to this chaotic world they developed something called the “courtesy of the trade,” or “trade courtesy.” This phrase referred to a gentlemanly agreement among the larger, more established publishing houses to let the first to claim the work to have it. If Publisher X announced through a magazine ad or in some other way that he was going to publish the work of a popular British poet, his colleagues left him to it. The trade courtesy was an understanding among publishers to not poach on others’ writers from their publishers, and to not try to undercut other publishers with cheap reprints. None of this was legally binding, and no one could stop another publisher who ignored the unspoken rules.

A publisher who ignored the rules was called a pirate. The term is not accurate because the publisher operating outside the rules of trade courtesy wasn’t breaking any law, but some felt so strongly against what he (it seems mostly a he) was doing that the term was used freely. Publishers who wanted to get ahead published anything that wasn’t protected by copyright, which meant almost everything published overseas. One of the more famous of these publishers was Samuel Roth, who hoped to publish James Joyce’s work, especially Ulysses.

A publisher who published with no regard to the gentlemanly agreements of others faced no legal repercussions but plenty of social costs. He was shunned and subjected to unrelenting negative gossip and boycotting, others published cheap work to undercut his prices, and writers might sue to get any monies they could extract. Public opprobrium could drive a publisher out of business.

Into this topsy turvy world came Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Joyce bitterly resented anyone taking his book and publishing an altered version, one cleaned up for the censors. Pound believed in disseminating literature, and in the end chose that over Joyce’s right to control his publishing in its entirety. When we think of Joyce’s lawsuit to get Ulysses into the US, we think he was challenging the prudish laws of the US. But in fact, Joyce first sued Roth for using his name for advertising without his permission. Joyce sued for damages he felt he must have suffered by not having control of his work, but in the end Joyce and Roth settled by agreeing to a consent decree (dated December 27, 1928). But even this had a very limited effect. This decree, according to the author, and despite Joyce’s grandiose claims, “has not been cited by a single court in a reported case” (p. 224). Joyce thought this decision would give authors their natural moral rights in the ownership of their labor, echoing Locke and European attitudes, but US courts and legislation have never gone this far (p. 225).

The second step in getting Ulysses safely into the US, where Joyce’s preferred publisher, Bennett Cert, could publish it, was to have it seized by Customs. Once this happened, the book was subject to the Tariff Act of 1930, and the Cutting amendment. This amendment made the object confiscated the defendant in a case, and forced the government itself to defend its actions. The sender and the receiver of the item in question, in this case Ulysses, were not part of the case. During Prohibition, according to Spoo, lawsuits were often filed against the truck carrying bootlegged liquor and the like.

Ulysses was confiscated, the case went to trial, and Judge Woolsey decided in favor of the book, in 1933. The book was free to enter the US, but it was still without copyright. Joyce’s great work was now subject to the trade courtesy practices that he and others abhorred, but he had no choice.

This is a story of stunning twists and turns and surprises in getting Ulysses published in the US, not the least of which was Joyce’s attitude towards his lawyers’ bills (he refused to pay them).

Equally surprising to me as a writer is that copyright as I have come to understand it only became law in 1976. Legislators have continued to tinker with copyright law so that even now the public domain is occasionally given a great book and deprived of another for a few years. It is a patently crazy system. The US didn’t sign the Berne Convention until 1989, when the US finally agreed to recognize foreign copyrights and afford works so protected overseas the same protection in the US. There is more, but by now you should have the idea that the history of copyrights in the US is anything but tidy and linear.

The text is dense, but the writing is free of academic jargon, in some cases delightful. The author makes every effort to explain the legal niceties in simple, clear language. I learned more about Ezra Pound and James Joyce in this book than I ever did in college English literature classes. Highly recommended.

All you need is . . . art

This is the time of year when school committees put together their budgets for the coming year. That means this is the time of year when some schools look for places to cut, to balance the increases that will be made elsewhere. Every year I cringe as I hear about the art and music classes that will be lost or severely reduced. This is, to my way of thinking, irrational.

It is customary for people today to talk about art and music classes as the one place where students can have a respite from academic work or to compensate for not making sports teams. These may be real concerns and valid reasons, but I think art and music programs are important for other others.

I have long believed that putting the focus on art in schools is one way to ensure that students get a real education. I’m not talking about the well-rounded personality, which reduces art to something like finishing school. I’m talking about an education that goes much deeper, into a way of living and thinking and being. What I say here is only an abbreviated discussion of my thinking but I hope it is enough.

First, anyone who focuses on art must learn to listen, to listen to himself or herself within first and foremost. And this young artist must learn to listen to others who talk about what works and what doesn’t, who speak from experiences that are similar but not the same. Can you mix these solvents together and get this color? Can you add dirt to an acrylic? Can you play the keys without weight? Can you use this tool to create this effect? Can a man really say this in these words? You learn to listen well, for meaning, for nuance, for possibility. As part of this listening, the young artist also learns to look and to listen, to look at art with an intensity and clarity that doesn’t come from memorizing names of paintings and their creators; or to listen to a piece of music and recognize patterns and nuances within those patterns, and grasp the composer’s intent.

Second, if you want to do something and are not sure how to go about it, you look for answers. You read because you want to know, not because someone is standing over you telling you that you have to read this or that book. You read with intent or purpose, and you read to understand. You want to know how this craftsperson managed to get this effect. How did that guy make this paper so smooth and rough at the same time? What equipment did he create or modify? And how does it work? And if you read the instructions half a dozen times and you still don’t understand them, you have enough sense by now to guess that perhaps the manual wasn’t written very well. You read and discern. If you’re building large sculptures, you learn more math and algebra and more. Artists in this realm learn like engineers.

I think of the writers I have known who read so carefully and closely that they come away understanding Toni Morrison or Charles Dickens better than any academic because they want to understand how the writer did what she or he did. They read to grasp both meaning and technique. Some discover the beauties of handcrafting books, and they keep alive skills that would otherwise fade away. Musicians understand the craftsmanship that goes into making a good musical instrument, and many can make their own and have.

Third, once you have created something beautiful or stimulating or challenging, you will send it out into the world. You become a business person, and you learn about marketing, sales, promotion, setting up and running a business, negotiating and managing conflicting demands. You learn about taxes, managing data on a computer, budgets, and more.

Fourth, those who learn to do something well and in depth carry a deep appreciation of what it means to accomplish something. They can look at anything else that takes time and effort to create and understand some of what goes into it because they have already done the same in their own area. In the study of literature, this is called the philological approach, focusing on knowing one work completely and thoroughly.

It is by learning to create something, to move from nothing to something, that we learn how to live in the world, how to respect tiny details and avoid shortcuts, how to have patience to finish something when we’re tired and would rather quit. We learn that to make something is to contribute, and that only by making do we grow and find more to offer. But we also learn to listen within, to live with self-knowledge and self-respect, immune to the false world that swirls around us.

A Writer's Fantasy: Myth and Reality

Every writer has a fantasy about cutting loose from mundane responsibilities and going someplace exotic and just writing. That exotic place could be an isolated village in Newfoundland, an apartment in Paris, or a bungalow on a palm-lined beach. We have Hemingway to thank in part for our yearnings for tropical climes, with the breeze flowing through open windows, our bare feet tapping on a concrete floor while we stare at a blank page. The fantasy may go no farther than imagining ourselves at the desk in that long-dreamed-of location. If it does go further, it’s usually the community we’d become part of—the fun we’d have in an entirely different world. What really happens the rest of the time isn’t part of the dream.

Since I’m right now sitting at a desk with this computer, a stone’s throw from the Arabian Sea, with a warm breeze billowing the floor length curtains into the room, I can tell you what happens after the first image of the fantasy takes hold.

My desk, small as it is, is covered with a white cotton cloth, and on that are spread my notes—a pad of paper with my scrawl all over it, a number of note cards with clues, lines of dialogue, and descriptions of characters I want to remember to add at points marked on my note pad. I also have a lovely pink gladiola in a white vase and a candle in a candle holder, with a box of matches nearby, for when the power goes off. I have no television and no phone, but I do have WiFi access to the internet, most of the time. I have a fan overhead that seems to get louder the more trouble I have figuring out what comes next in the story. I’ve stared up at it so often that I finally put it into a story, as the hiding place for an important clue.

The trouble with fantasies is that they never include the rest of the story. We picture ourselves in a certain location, but we’re unlikely to think beyond that. If your fantasy is a boat on a lagoon in Florida, you might imagine the gentle rocking from the waves of a passing motorboat. But what happens then? For writers, the rest of the story is work. I do have breakfast on a terrace at seven-thirty every morning, brought over from the hotel kitchen next door (coffee and toast and fruit), but I’m at my desk every morning at nine o’clock at the latest. That’s exactly what I do at home, in the States, when it’s ten degrees below zero or ninety degrees and muggy.

Yesterday afternoon I went into the city to take a walk, visit friends, do errands, and get to know more of Trivandrum, which is expanding so rapidly that after nearly a dozen visits, some as long as a year, I still don’t know half of the city. I read in the afternoon or evenings, write book reviews or make notes for my current work in progress. At home, I do exactly the same—I walk, visit friends, and on and on.

I’m not sure if this little essay is about discovering that the fantasy of every writer has a very short lifespan, that it’s fragile and can’t hold up to close examination, or the other cliché that wherever we go we take ourselves. I’ve taken myself to South India, to Kerala, a place that I love. I’ve learned to tolerate the heat, the power blackouts, the erratic inflation, the incredible traffic and suicidal taxi drivers, and not knowing what’s happening in my story, what’s wrong with my characters, why won’t they behave? But some of this happens at home too.

The danger with any fantasy is that the dreamer will forget that it’s a dream. Writing is work wherever you do it. But that palm tree by my terrace and the warm breeze do console me when my characters won’t behave.

Do you have a favorite imagined place of escape?

What sort of traveler are you?

When anyone of us takes off to travel in another city or state or country, we may not think a lot about how we're traveling beyond the literal. Do we take a plane or train or drive? But whenever I'm in India, as I am right now, I am reminded of how different each of us enters a new world. We travel differently.

Right now I'm visiting my favorite part of India: Trivandrum, Kerala, where I used to live. I visit friends, explore areas of the city I don't know well, and meet other tourists as well as locals.

I'm staying in a hotel with a number of tourists, students learning about palliative care in India, and business men and women. This is a good variety of perspectives on the country. Among the tourists are individuals with a variety of goals. Some set off each morning to see the "sights," the topics and places that are supposed to draw people from other parts of India or the world. They go off to see the local museum, which holds a fine collection of South Indian bronze sculptures, or the art gallery, which has a well-cared for collection of paintings, or the zoo, which has a lot of animals and is in the process of upgrading their accommodations (better cages, etc.). I've seen all these places but even when I first came to Kerala, I wanted to see the neighborhoods, how people lived. 

It's easy to meet people here because the locals are quick to ask me where I'm from. Sometimes this is followed by the news that the questioner has a cousin in Alaska (the temperature never falls below 70 degrees here, so how the cousin picked Alaska is beyond me), or has been to New York, or something to get the conversation going. Sometimes I'm the one to start the conversation with a quick question about a child playing or a small temple nearby.

The highlight of my now annual trip is always the unexpected. Every evening for the first week or so I attend a concert of Carnatic music. These can be enormous fun if the performers work together and interact. Carnatic music involves a lot of play and response parts, and good performers play off and with each other with great enthusiasm and imagination.

On the lane leading to the concert area we pass the enclosure for the royal elephant. Darshini is 47 years old and a sweet girl. Another tourist, Bob, and his wife, Anne, have made friends with the mahout, who lets us feed the elephant. She loves carrots, apples, and cucumbers, and takes them gently from us. She lets us put the food into her mouth, and it disappears at once. I never hear a crunch, though she has teeth, so I don't know how she eats it. Her trunk is gently, and she welcomes a tender pat.

I suppose I could focus on the more typical sights. This week is the deepa festival, during which the great Shree Padmanabhaswami Temple will be lit up for several days. The display is magnificence, and i wanted to just stand in front of the gorgeous lighting and stare up at it, but I was with friends, it was late, and the crowd moved in and out of my view.

Seeing the temple lit up was a lovely experience, but being eye to eye with Darshini was a moving experience. She watched me while I fed her, looked me in the eye, and seemed to be memorizing my appearance. Getting that close to an elephant outside a zoo will be the high point of my trip this year.

What sort of traveler are you? What do you look for? What are you drawn to?

Note: This post was supposed to include three photographs, but I'm in India and can't seem to upload them. Maybe next time.

Review: N. Gopinathan Nair--His Life and Times

I like to think that when I sit down to write a story I have done enough research to give the novel a feel of authenticity—the scene, characters, and problems ring true to the reader. Getting to that point isn’t always easy. I can and have asked odd questions of elected officials, local police men and women, social workers, and nurses. These questions help me get at the facts of a situation, but every writer knows you need more than that. You need the “feel” of a situation, the atmosphere of a neighborhood, or the sense of a community.

The last time I was in India, just a year ago, a friend gave me a copy of her father’s collected essays, which she had helped her mother compile. As I started to read through the essays in English I felt an entire age opening up for me. N. Gopinathan Nair was one of those men who live fully in their time, and in their own way participate in shaping their country’s future.

All of my characters in both series, the Mellingham series and the Anita Ray series, have a back story, and this is the kind of work that I turn to, to get a sense of the world some of them might have known.

The scribe Remembered: N. Gopinathan Nair—His Life and Times, edited by K. Saradamoni with biographical preface by Saradamoni and visual essay by G. Asha. (2012)

The early years of a new nation are heady exciting times. The reports and articles by journalist N. Gopinathan Nair are a record of these crucial early days and issues in the history of Kerala and India. Gopi, as he was generally known, was best known as the founder editor of Janayogam, the first weekly and later daily newspaper of the undivided Communist party in Travancore, before it merged with two other areas to become Kerala.

Born in 1923 outside Kollam and educated in Kuala Lumpur, where his father worked, and the Government Boy's High School in Kollam, he later attended the American College in Madurai. Gopi was profoundly influenced by Nehru’s writings. He turned from an early interest in science to journalism for his career.

Gopi wrote for many newspapers and publications over the years on a wide range of topics. He was especially attentive to legislation that would address the ancient and onerous burdens on landless farmers and other laborers, the lack of education for those outside the elite groups, developing technology in the new India, and creating a stable government to benefit the many castes trying to move into the modern world. His articles often included carefully researched data for skeptical readers and historical background information to flesh out a discussion of contemporary problems and proposed solutions.

The book comprises essays and articles in both Malayalam and English, depending on the original publication, as well as several tributes and reminiscences. There are numerous photographs of Gopi and his family throughout the years.

Gopi’s wife, Dr. Saradamoni, prepared an extensive introduction and his daughter Asha collected and arranged a number of photographs that add another rick layer to Gopi’s biography.

To purchase the book go here: www.facebook.com/NGopinathanNair