Re: copyright under stress

On Mon, Jun 12, 2000, Robert Cumbow <RCumbow[_at_]GrahamDunn.com> wrote:
>
> I'd be interested in seeing concrete examples of situations in which
> copyright causes denial of access.

The entire continent of Europe was denied access to Deborah Warner's interpretation of Beckett's "Footfalls":

    In 1994 Deborah Warner directed a production of Beckett's     Footfalls that departed from the stage directions and     changed which character spoke five lines of dialog. The     Beckett estate reacted by cancelling her planned European     tour, and, rumor has it, informed Warner that neither she     nor Fiona Shaw would be permitted to stage a play by     Beckett again.

        --Katie London, "Provocations: The Beckett Estate
        proudly presents...Waiting for Permission", The Guardian
        (London), May 3, 1997, p. 24.

Another reference to this incident can be found on-line at

   http://www.booksunlimited.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,96054,00.html

though this latter source reports as if fact what the article quoted above calls "rumor." The suppression of the European tour is agreed on by both sources, though.

Similarly the island of Britain was denied access to the original version of Schaufuss's ballet "The King", about Elvis Presley. The Presley syndicate denied permission for the use of several songs, and (apparently wielding something resembling the U.S. "right of publicity") also denied permission for the use of Elvis as a character in the story. The Edinburgh run of the ballet was cancelled, and the ballet was hastily rewritten and played in London as a story about an Elvis impersonator. See the following:

A review of the original version:

   http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3985051,00.html

A review of the rewritten version:

   http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4013253,00.html

The Austrian author Thomas Bernhard (died 1989) in his will "forbade the publication of his books or the performance of his plays in Austria until the copyright expired." (Charles Spencer, "The gripes of wrath. Alan Bates portrays a relentless grumbler", The Daily Telegraph, May 19, 1993, p. 15) I don't know if this ban is still in effect, or how effective it has been (perhaps Austrians can simply import the books). But it is what the author wanted, according to the Telegraph article.

According to this article

   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=002549632124328&rtmo=V6SJ38gK&atmo=7FPnovbt&pg=/et/99/9/11/bacopy11.html

Prof. John Richardson's "magisterial biography of Picasso ground to a halt because the prohibitive costs of illustration threatened him with bankruptcy." The article goes on to say that Richardson has resumed work on this book, but it's reasonable to suppose that we would have had the book sooner if Picasso's works were in the public domain, and that, in the alternative, Richardson might have given up altogether if the licensors had been even a little more unreasonable in their demands than they already were. The same article quotes author Hilary Spurling (biographer of Matisse) as saying, "As a result of this experience I'm certainly never going to write a book about an artist again."

Tim Phillips
<hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com> Received on Wed Jun 14 2000 - 00:07:08 GMT