Okay, wow. First off, a few statements:

1. I am pro-copyright. (There’s a shocker.) I am pro-copyright both because I work VERY HARD to create the things I create, and because I enjoy having this mysterious ability I call “feeding my cats.” Exhibit A, a picture of my cats, is included on the right. Note that they are all the size of small yeti. If I don’t feed them, they will devour me.

2. Being pro-copyright is not the same thing as being pro-endless extensions of the initial copyright law, la la la, let’s keep this bitch in a box forever. While I wouldn’t necessarily be thrilled about going back to a twenty-one year copyright period for new books, I’d be perfectly happy with life of the author plus ten years for the estate to get itself in order. Saying that being pro-copyright means you’re in favor of every copyright extension forced through my corporate interests is a bit of a misnomer.

3. I do not think the word “incentive” means what my adversary thinks it does.

Let’s discuss.

Author Compensation, or, Feeding My Cats.

According to my adversary, one of the reasons that copyright doesn’t work is because it doesn’t pay out in a way which is matched to the effort put forth by the creator.

So here’s the thing. If I spend five years writing a book that is like removing a bone from my living flesh, leaving gaping wounds and lots of blood behind, and you spend three weeks writing a book that flows through you like a wind from Heaven, and the books are of equal quality, we will get paid roughly the same by traditional publishing for our books. My book represented a great deal more in the way of time and effort, but publishing, like the honey badger, doesn’t give a shit; publishing wants to see the pages.

In a way, writing is a lot like being on a reality show. I watch America’s Next Top Model pretty faithfully, and every cycle, there’s a girl who doesn’t really have to do anything. The judges call them “natural models,” and while they don’t usually win (they’re not dramatic enough to take home that brass ring), they almost always go on to healthy careers in the modeling industry. Other girls struggle and fight for every photo shoot. And if you don’t watch the episodes—if you just look at the pictures they post at the end, showing the “best shots” of the week—you can’t tell those girls apart. The amount of effort they put out is extraneous. The finished product is what matters.

My books are pretty straight-up genre fiction. I write urban fantasy and I write science fiction; they’re mass-market paperbacks; you can find them on the shelf at your local S-Mart. The first volume of my October Daye series, Rosemary and Rue, represented ten years of work. No, you didn’t read that wrong. TEN YEARS. Ten years is a very long time. And while I won’t say that I would have been sad if my publisher had gone “wow, ten years, here’s a million dollars,” I’m not upset that they didn’t do that, either. The fact that I had to learn how to write a good book does not mean they need to pay for my learning curve.

The most recent October Daye book, One Salt Sea, took about eight months to write; most of the reviews agree that it’s the best book in the series so far, which I find reassuring, since any creator wants to improve. But eight months is a lot less than ten years! Should I have received eighty cents for every ten dollars that I was paid for the first book? Would that be what’s fair here?

I write distressingly fast under any circumstances; sometimes this makes me do more work, since I overshoot my marks, but once I learn where those marks are, I get very good at hitting them every time, and I do so very, very quickly. Some of my best friends are the same way. Some of my other friends move more slowly, at everything from a stroll to a creep. They invest more time in their work. They invest more hours of their lives. Do they deserve to be better compensated, since I just “dashed it off,” while they really worked?

The question of effort-for-compensation is something which arises only in the creative fields. People don’t refuse to pay for their furniture because it was put together by a team of factory workers, none of whom put forth a huge amount of specific effort; they don’t refuse to buy toys because they were made by machines. Higher quality things will wind up being worth more, and there is no direct correlation between “took longer to make/took more effort” and “better end result.”

People Give Away Fanfic For Free, and That Means Copyright Is Useless

My path to becoming a professional author followed the path tread by so many before me: I wrote fan fiction. I wrote lots and lots and buckets and buckets of fan fiction, and I posted (or published—I overlapped the era of the paper ‘zine, even if only by a few years) my work for free. I was drunk on creation, and those were wonderful days. You can probably find my fanfic if you look, and you can still read it totally for free. Just please remember that you’re looking at a span of creative development that lasted about fifteen years, okay? Some of it is ass.

When I was working in other people’s worlds I, like everyone else in my community, knew that I didn’t own these characters. I didn’t own these settings. What I owned was my own unique approach to them, and that was the “product” I had to “sell.” I sold it! I had a wonderful time selling it. And never once did I think “oh, wow, the quality of this piece of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic is so great that the original work is no longer owned by Joss Whedon.”

Fanfic is successful for the same reason that works like Shakespeare in Love or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are successful: because it gives us something familiar to hold onto the second we walk through the door. When I sit down to write a piece of fanfic, I don’t have to capture or entice my audience. I already have them. I say “this is a piece of Barry Ween fic,” and lead off with “Boy, eighteen, hair in spikes, eyes like holes,” and they already know that I’m writing a story set after the original series. They know that Barry is still going crazy. They know so much, because it was handed to them by our shared cultural base in the original series.

Very few of the people I know go out and read fic based on series they don’t already follow, unless they are following the author of that fic. In that way, fanfic writers become a weird sort of ad exec, selling other people’s dreams by showing them through the prisms of their own.

I am not going to claim that fic requires no work: I wrote it, I know it requires work. I am not going to claim that it’s the easy way out: I dare anyone to read some of the truly transformative, introspective material that’s out there and say that anything about it is “easy.” But I am going to say that, because we have a pre-existing relationship with the settings, we are more willing to walk through that door, and that saves the fanfic author a certain level of work in trying to lure us in.

A better example of people giving something creative away online for free, while also getting buy-in for a universe that requires that lure, would be the web comic. Web comics are very rarely derivative (anymore—many early web comics were basically fanfic with pictures), and are often based around very complicated, original worlds. While there have been, and continue to be, pay sites, web comics continue to proliferate, and even to thrive. Isn’t that a ringing condemnation of copyright?

Nope. Most really successful web comics have healthy merchandise lines of T-shirts, books, mouse pads, even jewelry and plush toys. They make back their time investment on sales and in-page advertising. Even the “big kids” of the web comic world have figured out how to monetize their landscape, and have, in so doing, really recreated the TV advertising and merchandising model. They’re not books. They’re shows that move very, very slowly.

Thirty Minutes or It’s Free
One huge freedom of fanfic that I no longer have was partial posting. When I was working on a really long story, I could put it up one chapter at a time, essentially serializing it. I was able to share my work slowly, and people were always grateful for the next piece. Try doing that with something that’s been paid for. No, really. I dare you. Unless you’re working in an inherently serial medium, like television or web comics (both graphic, rather than purely textual), you’re going to have issues.

“Crowd-funded novels” often follow the one chapter at a time model, not releasing the next piece until it’s been paid for. This is about the only way you’re going to see the piecemeal approach working in original fiction. Which takes us back to the “fanfic is free, why isn’t your novel?” My novel isn’t free because I had to write all fifty chapters before I was allowed to publish it, and that took time and effort and editing and sleepless nights and anxiety and a lot of other things.

When I take the money, I take the deadlines. When I take the deadlines, I take the copyright protection, too. I am a protected investment, and I am okay with that.

Pathogen Party!

You may not know this, but I study infectious diseases for fun. So when I was reading my adversary’s initial argument, and hit this piece, I choked on my soda. To whit:

“My favorite example of the stupidity of the incentive argument is that almost all of the people who actually create medical breakthroughs receive no money for them.”

I…uh…WHAT?!

Those people are being paid for their work. They are doing the scientific equivalent of “work for hire,” like when a good friend of mine gets paid to write Star Wars novels, the copyrights on which she does not own. I want to write media tie-in novels for a show called Haven someday, just because I love it, and if I do that, I will not own those copyrights.

Disney animators don’t own the characters they’re paid to help design. Chris Saunders is one of my personal heroes, and he doesn’t own Stitch, the little blue alien that he created. Why? Because they were on salary to create. If you want to pay me eighty thousand dollars a year to create something for you, I’ll create it, and the fact that I won’t own that copyright is not proof that the system doesn’t work.

Arts and sciences are connected, but they have never been identical. Saying that someone will work toward a cure for cancer without compensation is not the same thing as saying that I should finish my series without a guarantee of compensation. As my adversary says, curing cancer is more important. If I cure cancer, I have a lifetime of paid speaking engagements and Nobel Prizes ahead of me. If I finish this book, I have the hope that I will get to write another book. That’s it.

Oh, and Theft is Theft is Theft

Again to quote:

“To go back to fan fiction: though you might concede that people write without financial incentive you might also suggest they would be mortified if their work was copied and passed off as being someone else’.”

You want to see vicious? Watch a fanfic community where someone has just used someone else’s OC (original character) without permission. Fanfic is not plagiarism. Plagiarism is not fanfic. Attempting to conflate the two at this stage just muddies the waters—and every fanfic author I’ve ever met who was plagiarized has brought the hammer of censure down hard. Maybe they didn’t get monetary compensation the way that they would have if they’d been working for pay, but their grievances were heard.

Why the Successful Sue?

My adversary very accurately states that if you believe your rights have been violated, you’d better get prepared to go to court. He then asks why the really successful people—the ones who can win—bother, since what, do they need another mansion? The answer is simple: they bother because they can win. They bother because I, as a relatively new author, can’t win. They are acting to protect the industry as a whole, and yeah, they’re probably a little upset, since nobody likes to be stolen from.

(I am aware that not every illegal download is the equivalent of a sale. I am also, sadly, aware that my speaking out on the pro-copyright side means that a great many people will probably go “yay, let’s torrent her work, that’ll show her.” To those people I say: please don’t. Please stop, and consider that I have cats to feed, I have a mortgage to pay, and I don’t come into your home or office and steal the value of your work. Just because I would never have let you clean my teeth, style my hair, or fix my car if I couldn’t make you do it for free, that won’t make it less of a theft.)

People who stand a chance in hell of winning these suits bring them because they want to make it clear that things have consequences. Maybe you violate my copyrights a thousand times and not get caught. Maybe you’ll get caught the thousand and first time…and maybe that will be the time when I’m in a position to sue. Do you really want to roll those dice?

Stealing From Artists

My adversary says, again, quoting, “The single group of people most responsible for stealing from artists are publishers, be they book publishers, record companies or whoever.”

He follows this up with, “When I found out about the two zombie books written by my adversary, the first thing I did was go to a torrent site and download them.”

Um. Gee, thanks?

My publishers do not steal from me. My publishers pay me to do the thing I love. My publishers are also a business, and they have associated operating costs. Let’s look at what it costs to make a book appear on a torrent site, shall we?

Advance to author.
Editorial review.
Copyediting.
Commission of artwork.
Cover design.
Printing.
Shipping and storage.
Advertising.

All these things make the book not suck. What other costs does my publisher have?

Rent.
Salaries.
Health insurance.
Internet and phones.
Electricity.

I am happy to have my publisher use me to make money to keep the lights on so that they can keep printing the books I love to write. It’s an ecological balance, and no, I am not stolen from or screwed. And none of my editors have coke habits, despite my adversary’s implication.

How much did I make when he finally bought those books of mine legitimately? About seventy-five cents a copy. Not a huge amount, I admit. But I got an advance from my publisher, and I sell a lot of books because I have a publisher. My first book—the one where I had no name recognition at all—sold more copies in its first week than my most popular fanfic ever had hits. The scale is very different.

Would Radiohead have made all that money for In Rainbows if they hadn’t started out in traditional music publishing? No. I don’t think so.

Copyright can be abused. Copyright should not be used to punish fanfic authors or to beat people like a club. But it should be used to protect creators, and it should keep my work mine until my death, if not after. The arguments used to justify violation of copyright have a lot in common with the arguments I used to get from the kids I went to school with when they wanted my lunch—“I want it, you have it, it should be mine, it’s not fair.” I worked for that lunch. I worked for my copyrights.

Please stop arguing that I shouldn’t be allowed to feed my cats just because you’ve decided this is a brave new world.

-- Seanan McGuire

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