On 10/12/98, Peter Hirtle <pbh6[_at_]cornell.edu> quoted from a New
York Times article:
>
> October 10, 1998
>
> Nabokov's Son Files Suit to Block a Retold `Lolita' By RALPH
> BLUMENTHAL..Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
>
> [W]hat if Lolita didn't die at the end? What if she kept a diary
> and had her own story to tell?
She'd make lots of money.
> Long before Shakespeare, writers appropriated each other's historical
> themes, plots and characters, refashioning them into new works. At
> issue here, apparently for the first time, is whether a work fresh
> enough to be still covered by copyright can be used as extensively as
> "Lolita" has been.
The only works that *aren't* fresh enough to be covered by copyright have long since decomposed.
> "It is, in a word, a rip-off," according to court documents filed
> by the estate's lawyer, Peter L. Skolnik, of Roseland, N.J.
"Rip-off" is a term of art, but, unfortunately, undefined in copyright law.
> Leon Friedman, a Manhattan lawyer representing Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
> said the way "Lo's Diary" grew out of "Lolita" fell within "fair use"
> standards set by the United States Supreme Court, and that Pera's novel
> was "transformative," supplanting the original work with "a further
> purpose" and "new expression."
A, uh, novel argument. The Times printed two excerpts, one from each novel, which Peter has omitted (no doubt in the interest of not reprinting the entire article). Based on those two excerpts it seems a better argument could be made that the new book, although borrowing (and extending or distorting) the ideas in Nabakov's work, is not substantially similar to the original. Transformative could get Mr. Friedman in trouble as it nicely leads to the question of whether the new work is a derivative of the old one.
> Both Skolnik and Friedman said they could think of no litigation that
> quite matched the issues in this case.
Sounds like the right thing for lawyers to say.
The article also said:
"The protection of intellectual property through copyright was written into the Constitution, but the terms have been amended over the years. The copyright on "Lolita" runs 75 years from its first publication by Olympia Press in France in 1955, until 2030."
I'm assuming this would be 2057 now, no? In 2037 the work would still be too "fresh."
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