Re: Academics and coursepacks

Jeremy G. Byrne <jeremy[_at_]iz.org> wrote:
>
> On 9/07/98, Randy Nieuwsma <nieuwr[_at_]legacy.calvin.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Put yourself in (editor) Wells' position: You have spent many hours
> > collecting, comparing, evaluating (with experience based-upon a
> > lifetime of study), editing; someone else designed your product and
> > typeset it. Now, they sell one copy; you get the royalty for one
> > copy; and the purchaser gets the intellectual benefit of 200 copies.
> >
> > Is this fair to you?
>
> Perfectly.
>
> It would seem to me that our basic disagreement is over whether the
> editorial work of Wells and others merits recognition as creativity, and
> justifies their gaining rights over public domain material. Randy seems
> to believe that it does and should. I do not.
>
> I am a professional editor; I have worked as an editor in various
> amateur and professional capacities for more than a decade. The job of
> an editor is not to create but to facilitate the creativity of others.
> We apply consistent, often quite mechanistic standards to generalise
> meaning and to moderate authors' wilder instincts, and we apply our
> experience to suggest ways in which authors might restructure their
> writing to help them better reach their audiences. The work of an
> editor does not merit copyright protection.

I am in accord with Jeremy; I am a dramaturg (among other things), and am most distressed at the recent spate of authorship claims by people regarding plays on which they served as dramaturgs; they are not playwrights, or if they are, they were not functioning as playwrights in regard to the plays whose authorship they are claiming. (The highest-profile case I know of revolves around the musical Rent; there are others). They functioned as researchers/editors, and their job as such was to facilitate the creativity of the playwright. I feel precisely the same way about directors who wish to claim authorship based on the dramaturgical aspect of their jobs.

On a tangential matter: I wish that more publishers would hire more editors who really were editors in the sense that Jeremy describes; or allow the good editors they have to do their jobs properly. I see in the New York Times that canny authors are hiring independent editors to aid them; it's the uncanny ones <g> who need their services most, of course, not to mention the long-suffering readers. But I digress...

Amy Stoller

ghoti
<redherring[_at_]tuna.net>
<:)))>><( Received on Sat Jul 11 1998 - 19:25:32 GMT