Kickstarter Pulls Plug on Book Campaign Over Copyright Issue

As the once hard-and-fast rules of publishing fall by the wayside thanks to the digital revolution and the exponential growth of valid self-publishing opportunities, some things will not change, namely, some of the issues around copyright. There are creative liberties that self-published authors can get by with, but then there are others that legality still prevents. Last week, crowd-funding site Kickstarter had to pull the plug on a project that it had previously lent its support to as its featured publishing project. Two authors, Geoffrey O. Todd and Rich Berner, launched a 25,000-pound campaign to produce print editions of their illustrated children’s poem, Back to the Wild. The problem arose when HarperCollins discovered that Back to the Wild is a sequel to Maurice Sendak’s bestselling and much-loved children’s title, Where the Wild Things Are. According to the DMCA notice filed by HarperCollins, “The infringing material is a proposal to create a ‘sequel’ to WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, entitled “Back to the Wild,” using the characters, scenes and copyrightable elements of the original work. Any such unauthorized “sequel” would clearly violate the Estate’s right to create derivative works.” At stake here is both the proposed use of characters, settings, and art work that are the property of the author’s estate and the publisher, since the sequel project involves the daughter of Sendak’s original character returning to the island where the young boy Max first encounters the wild things. There is further concern in the notice that, should Todd and Berner proceed with their sequel, it would infringe on the estate’s right to write and publish their own sequel, despite vehement assurances from Sendak in interviews that he would never write a sequel to his beloved book. Where these concerns were once the domain of publishing houses and their legal teams, self-publishing has opened the door to new creative projects that are not receiving the benefits of this type of guidance where unauthorized sequels are concerned. And while it could be argued that this project could be seen as not much more than well-thought out fan fiction, the fact remains that Max and his wild things are protected under copyright law. Kickstarter Pulls Plug on Book Campaign Over Copyright Issue is a post from: E-Reader News

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