note on copyright

my impression is that a lot of people’s resistance to criticisms of intellectual property and copyright law rests on the assumption that book publishing — or the work of individual artists — is the standard or default case of intellectual property: an author writes a book and they retain the copyright of their book, delegating the right to print and sell it to a publishing company for a fee. from that perspective, of course intellectual property is good, because it ensures that artists get paid for their work.

even if published books represented the majority of intellectual property (I don’t have numbers, but I doubt this is the case), books are, with a handful of exceptions, definitely not the most valuable intellectual properties^[1] — those would be visual media owned by large corporations, where the artists who produce the media in question generally retain few — if any — rights to the art they created; and
even in book publishing, it’s not uncommon (though it may be a minority situation) for authors to cede their copyright to publishers — this is especially common with tie-in media, but it’s also a predatory practice by smaller publishers — and it’s also quite common in academic publishing: Duke University Press, for example, is literally copyrighting Indigenous knowledge and scholarship on a regular basis.

the latter situation can create issues if, for example, the small press that owns the rights to your work goes out of business, as rights may not always revert back to the creator (the top answer here has a run-down of what happens to copyright in this situation, although written from a republisher’s perspective rather than a writer’s).

other kinds of art often have substantially more complicated intellectual property situations, and it’s precisely the concept of intellectual property that makes situations like the ZA/UM one possible: in order to facilitate the production and release of a collaboratively-developed game, it’s legally beneficial to create a legal entity that can own the game in its entirety so you don’t have to worry about competing intellectual property claims getting in the way of making money. but that legal entity makes possible exactly the kind of legal finagling that has gone on in this case: if the company owns the intellectual property, then none of the people who actually, you know, created it can directly control (read, especially: benefit financially from, or prevent others from benefiting financially from) their own work anymore.

the fact of the matter is that the whole system of intellectual property, including book publishing, serves first and foremost to protect the interests of the powerful and especially of corporations, small and large — it’s about transforming human creativity into clearly delineated properties that can be bought and sold. the art (or the scholarship) becomes irrelevant: what matters is the money.^[2]

artists of all kinds deserve to be able to live, like anyone else — and the solution to this is to organize and fight for a system where intellectual property, like all other forms of private property, is irrelevant because people won’t be relying on selling their art in order to survive. it’s disingenuous to reduce the criticism of intellectual property laws to a dismissal of “entitled” consumers who don’t want to have to pay for things: intellectual property exists in the form it does because capitalism has made it profitable; to the extent that it benefits or “protects” artists (and it can just as easily be a tool leveraged against them, including by other artists), it does so only as a side effect of that profitability.

^[1] as far as I can tell there’s not a good way to calculate this, but taking Wikipedia’s List of highest-grossing media franchises as, I think, a reasonable approximation, we find the following (as of 17 March, 2023):

94 total franchises
10 books or picture books (10.6%)
5 comic book or comic strips (5.3%), of which only one was originally produced as a single-author work that would resemble traditional book publishing
11 manga (11.7%), of which all the ones that give numbers breakdowns made substantially more money from visual media adaptation and from merchandise than from manga sales

the remaining 68 franchises (72.3%), including three of the top four (all but Winnie the Pooh) and seven of the top ten (the other two books-first franchises being Harry Potter and Anpanman) originated as audiovisual media — video games, films, television series, cartoons, etc. — or as toy lines (e.g., Barbie — which, notably, also kicked its original creator, Ruth Handler, out of the company). many of the book-based franchises (Winnie the Pooh, e.g.) have made more money from tie-in media like movies than from book sales (I suspect this is true even of some of the wild bestsellers like Twilight, but I can’t find book sales value estimates, only numbers). [back]

^[2] this is to say, the corporations that deal primarily in “intellectual property” — publishing, film production, music labels, podcast networks, etc. — are as corporations interested in the intellectual property they manage only in terms of whether or not they believe it will make them money, as immediately as possible. individual people within these corporations may care about the books they edit (and the authors who wrote them), or the films they produce (much less likely the artists working on the films they produce), as works of art, but the companies as a whole do not — they matter only as products. [back]