Spoilers, Authorial intention and Copyrights

[pegkerr]

I've been thinking about this stuff all week, since the spoilers started coming out. I'd done a lot of thinking about this in advance, since I got spoiled on the last book, and I was determined not to get spoiled on this one.

There are several issues here which need to be separated: spoilers and copyright violation. I haven't commented much on this directly, because I didn't want to start mudslinging, but behind the scenes, I've experienced the abrupt ending of a friendship with a long-time reader on my friends list over these issues.

I had expected trolls to come out with spoilers, and I'd taken steps to protect myself. I'd already worked through the emotional stuff on this when I got spoiled on the last book. ("Those meanies! How dare they!") Yes, yes, we've all heard about this. I'd expected all this, and it all played out pretty much as I anticipated. On the other hand . . .

Call me naive (I know that minnehaha B. will), but I really did not anticipate that the entire book would be leaked and people would be reading it--and posting scans of it--onto the internet days before the official release date. Someone on my friends list posted a link to the scan. I protested to her, and she replied, entirely reasonably from her point of view, that she was putting it behind a cut-tag so no one would get spoiled who didn't want to be, and she didn't think that she was doing anything wrong. As long as she protects people from being spoiled, what possible objection could I have to her getting a jump on the book? I could hardly believe that she would say this to me, a holder of copyrights myself.

I couldn't make her understand my objection at all. We went back and forth a bit, neither of us budging, and she finally said that she was sorry that our friendship would end over this, and she would delete the entry because it upset me so much.

Which was a total lie. The entry is still there. She has just locked it so that I can't see it, but I am absolutely sure that others can. (When I tried to reply to her again, I get the message "You are not authorized to view this protected entry" rather than "No such entry exists.")

So here's my objection again: I am a published writer. I hold copyrights which say that I have the right to decide to do what I wish with work that I have created. If someone else other than the author assists in disseminating a copyrighted work in electronic form, a work in a form to which he or she has no legal right, in advance of the publication date, against the clearly expressed wishes of the author and in violation of that author's legal copyright that is wrong, wrong, wrong.

I know that I'm naive, perhaps, for wanting to have the experience that Rowling intended: that all over the world, we would be reading the story for the first time and experiencing it as a surprise together. Maybe it's because, since I'm an author, I give extra weight to authorial intention. I thought Rowling's intention was so extremely cool: the world coming together for one magical night, discovering the ending for this marvelous story, and nobody spoiling it for anyone else. That would be a remarkable world event, something never seen before. And we had waited so many years for this night to come! So yeah, I feel a little bitter toward those who are reading the story ahead of when Rowling intended, that they are cheating somehow. [Edited to add: And I do know that it includes some here on my friends list. I'm disappointed in you, but I won't defriend you over it. I'll just point out that you failed to choose what was right over what was easy.)

But I don't feel nearly as bitter toward them as I do toward the people who blew the book open ahead of time. The spoiler trolls are scum, but the others who made it possible to publish spoilers by disseminating the scan are contemptible, too.

They have no right.

Comments

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

For the record, I didn't read the online scans and I'm not going to buy the book; not a Potter fan. However, I don't think that Rowling's intention about how people ought to read the book has, or should have, any moral or legal force.

The purpose of copyright law is to encourage authors to profit from (and thus share) their works, not to enforce authorial intent. People who have read the scans have not supported Rowling's wishes for the reading experience, but that doesn't mean what they've done is morally wrong, assuming they then go on and buy. If I wrote a book and asked that nobody read it except on Saturdays, you'd agree that that was unreasonable; would you also agree that readers do nothing wrong in ignoring that wish? How, except in degree, does that differ?

IMHO the polite thing to do is to have the Potter parties and read the books then. However, somebody who reads the scans and then immediately buys the books has done Rowlings no wrong. The only thing they have done, it seems to me, is to omit "courtesy, at least, to living authors".

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I should add that people who *posted* the scans are both morally and legally wrong.