gwern comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 14, chapter 82 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (790)
Which is precisely why I am asking these questions, because there are many ways Eliezer could conclude it's a good idea:
he has non-public information
the rules favor MoR in some way I am unaware of
etc.
My theory is that Eliezer is overestimating his chances of winning best novel.
5) is not a believable option, since the legalities of fanfic prohibit any conventional sort of publication, and just slapping "Book 1"/"Book 2"/etc. on top of chapter headings does very little.
The rest is good analysis, though.
No, they don't. They just mean it takes a publisher with a little guts, willing to defend it under fair use grounds (in MoR's case, parody).
They would lose, and probably correctly so. If that defense worked for MoR, it could be applied to any situation where someone just made up their own story using someone else's characters, and the whole concept of copyright would be effectively abolished.
(Not that abolishing copyright wouldn't be a policy worth considering...)
Actually, in fact, it seems obvious to me that any publication at all -- "conventional" or not -- of fanfiction is blatantly illegal, just like distributing your own modified version of Microsoft Windows would be.
(Note that "is illegal" is not the same thing as "should be illegal".)
Are you under the impression that fair use has never worked before or parody in particular? Because otherwise I don't understand why you are so certain of what you are saying.
I think it's clear that MoR is not (merely) parody, but a literary work in its own right that happens to be derived from an existing work by someone else.
It's a kind of thing that I think ought to be allowed, but which I don't think actually is.
Something that could be said with equal justice of The Wind Done Gone.
But see Dr. Suess Enterprises v. Penguin Books.
In brief, someone used elements of Dr. Seuss to criticize the OJ verdict. Held: not parody fair use because the target of the parody was not the infringed work.
So, how reasonable is it to say that MoR is a parody of canon!Potterverse? I honestly don't know the answer, but I suspect it would be dispositive of the fair use analysis.
How reasonable? I think pretty reasonable; MoR directly criticizes canon on numerous occasions, from the exchange rate to Hermione being Sorted into Gryffindor to Harry using random curses on Slytherins and on and on. Reading through one link on that, I see nothing about the Seuss parody parodizing Seuss, and plenty that fits MoR, eg.:
or
There's surely some kind of sliding scale. My HP fanfic:
is critical of something - but if it isn't the Potterverse, then it isn't parody. That doesn't mean that the work is not fair use (I think the third and fourth factors weigh heavily in my favor).
In short, I don't think that an interpretation of fair use (of which parody is the relevant type) that protects all fanfic is likely to be adopted, even if MoR was fair use of the Potterverse.
Thanks for the data, that's very helpful.
But imagine you had to defend MoR as parody. What would you say is MoR's discernable direct comment on the original? Would you say that this comment is leveled specifically at JKR's world? Is this comment the central aim of MoR?
...and sure enough, there was a lawsuit.
Which they won, paying nothing to the plaintiffs and continuing to publish The Wind Done Gone. Which is why I am using it as an example!
No, it says they settled:
...thus in effect purchasing the right to publish, which is what they were supposed to have done all along.
EY originally wrote the thing while (on record) attributing the characters and context to JKR, and then (on record) mentioned that JKR said she is fine with fan works and doesn't require attribution, after which he stopped.
I'm no lawyer, but I expect this means that EY is on record acknowledging his creative debt to JKR, and doing so because he thought he was legally obligated to. It seems like it would be hard to argue that MoR is fair use. This shows that the intent of the work was something the author thought was in range of her copyright, and thus not something like parody.
This makes no sense to me.
EDIT: and specifically, acknowledging the debt is more of a good thing; from one discussion:
I just looked up JKR's statements on fan fiction, and I got the impression that she would sue in case something were published for profit, or just published in some print medium (I suppose a book or magazine).
I don't think you could defend MoR as a parody with JKR's original books as the target. Some MoR chapters point out absurdities in JKR's work, but EY doesn't make it his business to lampoon the original series. Judging from the wiki page on fair use, this makes MoR a 'satire', and these fare much worse in fair use cases.
The point about acknowledging debt is just that EY apparently went in with the intention of publishing something within range of JKR's copyright. This would speak against an argument that the intention was parody: if the original intention were fair use parody, then why the legal disclaimers at the heading of each chapter? If that was out of respect only, then why the word 'disclaimer', and why stop doing it after JKR had given legal permission to FF writers?
It wouldn't abolish the whole concept of copyright - just characters-and-scenarios copyright, of which I am not sure what the actual legal basis it originates in is, or to what extent it has been tested in court.
Yes, I meant for the word "whole" to modify the word "concept", not the word "copyright". That is, my sentence was meant to be read as:
Distinguish between the scope of copyright (i.e. what kinds of items it applies to) and the force of the same (how much activity it prohibits within its scope). The emphasis of my claim was on the force rather than the scope.
All you need to vote is a supporting membership, cost $60 or so. You don't have to attend.
As soon as HPMOR is finished (hopefully not soon), I will buy a supporting membership to the next year's worldcon. On that note, let me urge Eliezer to finish HPMOR in the summer of some year, so enough supporting memberships can nominate it by January 1.
I'm not sure that materially increases the number of votes one could expect. Gee, only $60...
You only need 100 votes to get nominated, and then the nomination itself will get more people reading it.
That page is old, as I noted in my other comment, and if you read the Constitution (article 3) which governs the Hugo award, the nomination is not so numeric; for example:
and
Going back to the 2011 data (and being mindful the vote counts have set records frequently in the 2000s as the convention apparently grows), we see the last place novel is 306 ballots. pg17 gives us the original nomination votes: last place novel there was 78 ballots.
So, yes, MoR could probably get on the ballot if >78 people all remember to register by 31 January of that year (good thing MoR isn't finished yet because it's too late for 2012) so they are eligible to vote on nominations, and actually put MoR #1 on their ballots; see the Constitution again:
I also think this is a good idea, and hereby vow to buy a membership when HPMoR is finished for this purpose of voting it for Best Novel. As pointed out, even being nominated would get it a lot more attention.
I'm hoping for something like Neil Gaiman had when he won and then they banned comics/graphic novels afterwards.
I think the main thing you're missing is that nothing bad happens to me if I don't win. This could serve as a mantra for a whole lot of things in life that are worth trying.
'Nothing bad happens to' two-boxers either. Do I really need to explain that loss of a gain is as bad as a gain of a loss?
Dumbledore would say that is why you go for multiple gains in parallel.
I didn't understand what you meant so I asked on IRC and you seem to be referring to multiple plots.
Yes, that is the story reference. As it applies here, is there any reason that Eliezer could not attempt to win multiple awards?
Yes. First, the Constitution specifies that if a work is ever successfully nominated, it cannot be nominated again, so MoR can only be done once. (Examining the categories carefully, pg 6-7, it may or may not be technically possible that MoR could be nominated in one year for Best Novel and then Eliezer himself - on the strength of fandom arising from MoR - nominated for 'Best Fan Writer'.)
Second, the rules get very complex on pg 8 about multiple categories, which is why I did not bring it up before:
I... don't actually know what all that means. Clause 3.8.4 seems to indicate that putting MoR up into multiple award categories would have the effect of splitting and diluting all votes, which seems like a bad thing.
Actually I'm pretty sure that's not what Clause 3.8.4 is saying. I think it means that you can't have two entries on the ballot for MoR under the same category just like you can't have two entries for "Obama" for president.
That would be kind of funny though. Would you like to vote for:
"Have you got anything without spam?"
Why, so you did. Careless reading of me... my apologies.