Even when writing “straight” material, for publication, I have a fairly distinct voice. So when a theater company I used to be involved with relaunched this past summer (and summarily threw me out in a fit of pent-up rage for daring to ask a question unrelated to this topic) and put my writing up on its Web site, I had no trouble recognizing it – despite the hack job done to it in the name of “updating.”
I don't know why this bothers me as much as it does. The work was unpaid and done for the organization; it's not like I gave it a byline.There's no way I have any sort of legal rights to it (work-for-hire, etc.). It's not even particularly good writing, though it's better than the “prose” bolted onto it (for the record, I wrote the third-person bits, and the woman who added to it wrote in first person plural).
What I've settled on is this: There's something galling about people or an organization not only piggybacking off of one's specialized knowledge, but not giving credit for any of it.
My friend Jessica had the same problem on a much grander scale over at her site, Artemis Eternal. She met with the producer of a documentary who was seeking assistance on how to raise funds for the completion of his project. Jess sat down with him over a lunch and laid out how she came up with the ideas that led to the Artemis web experience (which, if you haven't been to, you should check out – it's brilliant). A short while later, the documentary producer had a redesigned site up...but instead of making it an experience fit for that film, he lifted all sorts of idea from Jess – everything from the side-scrolling site design to the “project map” showing how the film went from creation to its current stage.
Setting aside the legal issues (and I don't have the knowledge to truly debate those, even after trying to research it all), there's this question: At a time where movie studios can and often do take already existing material and make millions off of repackaging it without contributing to all of the creators, where artists have to take record labels or producers to court to get royalty rights due to them and where “fans” have few qualms about devaluing all electronic forms of entertainment via piracy, shouldn't artists be the one class of people that an artist can trust?
Apologies, Robert. I actually came here to get your email address to invite you to our alumni party on the 7th. I didn't mean to bastardize it or take credit. It was 2 years ago. I will change it as soon as I can and in the meantime, get the web designer to correct the grammar. It actually was really just an oversight.
roy
Posted by: Royana Black | October 30, 2009 at 03:01 PM