Re: copyright expiration as a spur to creativity

Bob Cumbow <cumbr[_at_]perkinscoie.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Aug 10, 1998, Albert Henderson <noblestation[_at_]compuserve.com> wrote:
> >
> > The Hubbard estate waited for years to negotiate a satisfactory
> > deal for the Conan series in the U.S. It was in paperback in
> > Britain. The Hubbard estate opposed specilized sci-fi book dealers'
> > unauthorized importing. Conan ended up not only in print but in the
> > movies.
> >
> > With an authorized investor, the series enjoyed far more marketing
> > and distribution than it had with bootleggers and pirates.
>
> This doesn't sound right to me. The Conan stories and books were
> created by Robert E. Howard, who lived and died in Texas, and to the
> best of my knowledge were ALWAYS in print in the US. I remember seeing
> them on the stands in paperback when I was a kid---and believe me that
> is a long time ago.

I know that this is going way off topic, but it is something that is near and dear to my heart and so I felt I must jump in to set the record straight. I have been involved in Conan and Robert E. Howard (Hubbard wrote the Dianetics crap) fandom for about 15 years and have helped out the estate on copyright and other matters.

In fact, the copyright aspects of the whole Conan situation are extremely complicated, but would make at great introduction to the complexities of copyright law and how screwed up everything can get with someone is not guarding the outpost. The full story would also be very intersting to this thread because it shows how copyrights can also be used to stifle creativity and keep works out of the publics sight

But I won't bore you with e massive intrigues, deceptions, underhanded dealing and outright boondoggles that accompany the story. If any of you want that, I would be happy to provide it in private. Instead I will give you the short version.

Howard was a pulp writer in the 1930's. He created Conan, who was a very popular character at the time, in the early 30's and continued to produce stories until Howard's tragic suicide in June of 1936. At that time the copyrights were owned by one of the variuos publishing companies, who later transfered the rights back to the estate. But the stories languished until the mid fifties when a publishing house wanted to reprint the stories. So they got the rights, and hired an editor who made some changes to the stories, rewrote some non-conan stories into new ones, and then wrote several pastiches, then put them all together to try to create a comprhensive story line. These hardback books were eventually reprinted in paperback in th eearly sixties with some fantastic cover art that made the books sell very well and created a mini-revival in the heroic fantasy genre.

In the seventies though, there was a lot of talk about making a movie, but a dispute arose among the estate and the editor, who claimed rights in the stories based upon his editing. There were a number of threats made and potential lawsuits, but a compromise (if one can call it that) was worked out so that a new company was formed, Conan Properties, Inc. and both parties contributed their rights to this organization with a number of restriction on the estate upon what it can and cannot do with even the original unedited material. (BTW my reasearch into this has turned up what I feel to be highly unethical conduct by a few attornies. They ended up with majority control of the entitiy. It looks like they saw a potential money making opportunity and wiggled their way into controling it)

The results of this whole situation are this: The estate has been prevented from publishing or producing unedited materials for the very vocal fan base out there. CPI, who is dominated by the attornies and the family of the editors won't allow the unedited material wo be published because they don't want material out there without the editors "contribution to the story and concept of the character". The fighting has result in only pastiches being available to the public (many of which have no business ever being published) anf the original material is unavaialbe. In fact the disputes have result in the original Conan, NOT being in print.

Like I said, the sotry is a long and complicated one and if anyone is interested I can get into greater depths privately. It is actually fasciating from a copyright point of view.

Sorry to digress.

Rob Jones
Barbarian Lawyer
<rjones[_at_]robjob.com> Received on Thu Aug 13 1998 - 14:49:00 GMT