44 replies to this topic

[JCRendle]

http://davidnickle.b...james-bond.html
 
Looks like the Copyright expiration in Canada is already being exploited:-
 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

ChiZine Publications to Publish Unauthorized James Bond Anthology

 

TORONTO, Ontario (January 19, 2015) — Independent Toronto publisher ChiZine Publications announces they will be publishing a new anthology of short stories featuring James Bond now that Ian Fleming’s work has entered the public domain in Canada. The anthology, titled Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond, will be edited by Toronto authors Madeline Ashby (vN, iD; Company Town) and David Nickle (Knife Fight and Other Struggles,The ’Geisters, Eutopia).

 

“We want to feature original, transformative stories set in the world of Secret Agent 007,” says Nickle. “We're hoping our contributors will combine the guilty-pleasure excitement of the vintage Fleming experience with a modern critique of it.”

 

“This is an opportunity to comment on the Bond universe from within it,” adds Ashby. “We're specifically looking for writers and stories that would make Fleming roll in his grave.”

 

Since only Fleming’s Bond novels have entered the public domain, the stories won't reference the films, subsequent novels written by others, or any media tie-ins. However, within Fleming’s works are well-known villains Rosa Klebb, Oddjob, Dr. No, SMERSH, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE. Familiar allies include Moneypenny, Honey Rider, Pussy Galore, Felix Leiter and Quarrel. The story authors will be able to call on any of these characters and organizations along with the many others that have appeared in Fleming’s stories.

 

Authors who have confirmed their appearance in Licence Expired include:

• Tony Burgess
• Corey Redekop
• Robert J. Wiersema
• Laird Barron
• Nathan Ballingrud
• Kelly Robson
• A.M. Dellamonica
• Ian Rogers

 

Licence Expired is scheduled to be published inNovember 2015.

 

Contact

 

Sandra Kasturi, Co-Publisher

ChiZine Publications

 

 

[Jim]

..."that would make Ian Fleming roll in his grave".

 

Doesn't seem to address the trademark issue.

 

Doesn't seem wise.

 

Some of those names, characters and organisations appeared in works that are still in copyright. Most of them. Possibly all of them, if only by name. One sees the purpose of the continuation novels much more clearly now.

 

Ironically, the licence Danjaq allows IFP to use James Bond and 007, evidently hasn't "expired".

 

I suppose public domain means they can photocopy Moonraker without having to pay IFP a fee.

 

Steer clear, and watch from afar.

[Dustin]

Seconded.

[JCRendle]

The fact that they've publicly announced this, 10 months before it's supposed release, gives IFP, Danjaq, Eon and whoever else is concerned the time to have their lawyers look into this and, if need be, nip it in the bud before it goes too far, saving both parties time and possible legal fees.

[Jim]

Seems an odd way to go about it, but true.

[glidrose]

Legitimately published fan-fiction? Cue the inevitable and tiresome Raymond Benson jokes...

 

 

..."that would make Ian Fleming roll in his grave".

 

Doesn't seem to address the trademark issue.

 

Doesn't seem wise.

 

Some of those names, characters and organisations appeared in works that are still in copyright. Most of them. Possibly all of them, if only by name. One sees the purpose of the continuation novels much more clearly now.

 

Ironically, the licence Danjaq allows IFP to use James Bond and 007, evidently hasn't "expired".

 

I suppose public domain means they can photocopy Moonraker without having to pay IFP a fee.

 

Steer clear, and watch from afar.

 

I'm not so sure about this - which of course doesn't mean that I'm not wrong. But if your take were correct, trademark law would duplicate and supersede copyright law. If so, copyright law becomes meaningless. I may be wrong but I believe a precept of law is that if a narrow or broad interpretation of a law or rule renders another law meaningless, then said interpretation is incorrect.

 

Anybody with a law degree want to chime in?

 

Yes, EON & IFP may very well nip this in the bud. But as they have very expensive and experienced lawyers on their side and the fan-fiction writers likely do not, any success out-of-court on EON & IFP's part should not be seen as the final word on this thorny legal question.

[Dustin]

I do have a degree, sadly only law-related (taxes, don't ask) and not specifically concerned with copyright. Nonetheless, I'm sure Jim's assessment of the situation is spot-on. In another thread I wrote this:

Trademark signifies a commercial origin of a product or service. Insofar it's raison d'être is to protect this business and identify its brand and products. For example I cannot just import a hundred containers of jeans with 'Levi's' label if I haven't the right to do so.

The crucial thing here is, a copyright runs out sooner or later. Trademark use is basically unlimited until the rightful owner doesn't use it for a period, usually five years.

The line of argument here is obviously that 'James Bond - 007' is now no longer a literary figure but a trademarked asset and as such cannot just be claimed by anybody else but the holders. As long as they use this trademark. And they obviously intend to.

http://en.m.wikipedi.../wiki/Trademark
Edited by Dustin, 13 January 2015 - 09:23 PM.

I expect Danjaq and/or IFP to act on this announcement. We shall see the outcome of that.

[Jim]

As I understand it, and equally I accept this may be wrong, the limits of registering something as a trademark are quite restrictive but as soon as you have created something, and if it falls into some very, very broad copyright categories, it is copyrighted . You don't have to register a copyright and the test for protection is very different. The limits of my understanding are those of the British system.

 

i.e. the following sentence (and I don't think I have taken it from anywhere) "My badgerdom of mischief goes minkly-monkly-moo" is automatically copyright me, as a literary work within the test for that. If I wanted to trademark it, or any of it, I'd need to take active steps (although I can leave a trademarked unregistered it's better to register it) and any such element would have to be of "distinctive" character. This is why "bond", an ordinary word, is not distinctive enough, nor the name "James", but "James Bond" together is. Likewise the combination "007". If "Bond" were graphically represented in a particular way, that graphic representation could gain trademark protection if sufficiently distinctive, if not the word itself.

 

Although there will be some crossover, because everything that is trademarked must have been created, it's not massive because of the limits and processes of trademarks. The two are not the same, but may have the same "thing" subject to their different protective regimes. Evidently both protections can exist because...they both exist. The one is not cancelling the purpose of the other.  

It's only James Bond and 007 that have been trademarked by Danjaq in this context. All the rest of it may well be out of copyright, but then they do appear in works that are still copyrighted and were original literary works by people who are either still alive or more recently dead. If the perpetrators of this enterprise take the view "well, you can't copyright the character of M anyway", why wait until now to try this?

Trademark doesn't duplicate copyright - it's not the same, has a different basis and (for most protection) requires registration, and not everything that is copyrighted can be trademarked. Copyright is there to protect originality of creation of work and having the creator recognised as the creator; trademarking is about protecting an economic value that a distinctive representation of a thing may have, and to indicate that it has come from a particular source, and obviously not everything that will have been created will be capable of meeting the test to be trademarked. For example, the character M appears in copyright works, but they'll never be able to trademark the letter M. Bet they will have tried, though.

 

Breach is also different - if you claimed the sentence I wrote above as yours and without acknowledging me as the creator, you would be breaching my copyright although there are statutory permissions enabling some limited use by you. For breach of trademark law there does, I understand, need to be some aspect of the infringer trying to trade from it, i.e. interfering with the mark-holder's right to exploit it exclusively for themselves.

 

Set-up might be different for Canada (that I really don't know).

[Major Tallon]

I'm also a member of the brotherhood, though American copyright law has been comprehensively recodified since my day (Hammurabi was one of my classmates), and there are some international conventions on such matters that I don't begin to understand.  I suspect that Jim's explanation is pretty spot-on in countries whose legal precepts developed out of English law, even though there will be many technical differences, especially regarding exceptions such as the concept of fair use. 

 

One way to think of it is that the text of the Bond stories can't be trademarked, but are subject to copyright.  Also, you can't in most instances copyright a name.  I had a biology professor named James Bond, and my last case as an advocate was James Bond v. Secretary of Health and Human Services.  However, although the text of, say Goldfinger, cannot be trademarked, nor can words in common usage (the article "the" or the number "7," for example), a unique combination of words or names can in most instances be trademarked (and there's a fair amount of litigation on this).  Danjaq has apparently registered "James Bond" and "007" as trademarks and will no doubt vigorously enforce its rights.

 

I suspect they'll be able to retitle this project "License Enjoined."

[glidrose]

Came across this.

 

"As 2013 came to an end, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois handed down a ruling about copyright protection, not for the stories themselves, but for the characters of Holmes and Watson. The defendant in the case was the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. The plaintiff was well-known Sherlockian editor, and Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, Leslie S. Klinger. In the case of Klinger vs. Conan Doyle Estate Ltd., the court ruled that the Holmes and Watson characters as described in the "story elements" that stem from most of the stories—those published before 1923—are in the public domain."

 

http://www.sherlocki.../copyright.html

 

https://freesherlock...t-opinion-c.pdf

[Major Tallon]

Judge Posner of the Seventh Circuit, who wrote the Klinger decision, is an interesting, and occasionally frustrating, judge, and he certainly laid into the Conan Doyle Estate in this litigation.  There's a followup decision to the principle Klinger decision in which Klinger asked the court to award a substantial amount of attorney's fees against the Conan Doyle Estate for pursuing the litigation, and the court, also in an opinion by Posner, scolded the Estate severely in the course of awarding the fees.

[glidrose]

http://www.amazon.ca...d/dp/1771483741

An anthology of collected stories from various Canadian authors, based on Ian Fleming's fourteen published Bond novels, edited by Canadian genre authors Madeline Ashby and David Nickle. To be published in Canada only.

400 pages. Trade paperback. November 17 2015.

Amazon already has it at #95 in their top-selling 100 books.

[Mendalla007]

Leaving aside IP issues, what I as a Canadian find most interesting is that the editors and many of the authors come from the horror and s-f genres (e.g. Laird Barron is best known as a modern Lovecraftian writer). Is this a "straight" Bond anthology or a speculative fiction Bond anthology? If it is a straight Bond anthology, then the mix of authors is definitely a bit odd to my eye. We have some good thriller writers in Canada who could probably do some interesting things with Bond but none of them seem to be in here.

[Single-O-Seven]

Leaving aside IP issues, what I as a Canadian find most interesting is that the editors and many of the authors come from the horror and s-f genres (e.g. Laird Barron is best known as a modern Lovecraftian writer). Is this a "straight" Bond anthology or a speculative fiction Bond anthology? If it is a straight Bond anthology, then the mix of authors is definitely a bit odd to my eye. We have some good thriller writers in Canada who could probably do some interesting things with Bond but none of them seem to be in here.

 

From what I heard when this book was first announced none of these authors will be taking Bond too seriously, and will be putting very different spins on the character/genre.

[GodwulfAZ]

First, I'm happy to have found my way back - it has been about four years since I posted here, and I had to create a new account because I'd completely forgotten my old username!

 

Today, in Canada, the book in the thread title was published, and I must confess to some curiosity about it.  I attempted to order a copy from Amazon.ca, but they won't ship it to me in the States, so I'm going to have to find an alternative method of getting hold of a copy.

 

I suspect that most of you have already read about the "controversy", but in a nutshell, Canada and a few other countries only recognize copyright renewal for fifty years after an author's death - meaning that James Bond is in the public domain there as of last January.  There is talk of Canada's adopting the 70-year rule that most other countries have, sometime next year, so this may be one of the few works like this to see the light of day.

 

As someone who loves the character, regardless of who is writing the story, and who has read all of the continuation novels - except for the "Young Bond" stuff - I'm certainly not of the "Fleming only" school.  Amis' 'Colonel Sun' and Gardner's 'License Renewed' are two of my all-time favorites, and the one I'm reading currently - 'Trigger Mortis' - is first rate, in my opinion.  I'm willing to give this short story anthology a chance.  Do you feel the same...or are you bothered by the "unauthorized" (although legal) status of the book?

[glidrose]

We already have a thread on this subject:

http://debrief.comma...zed-james-bond/

Thanks to any mod who merges them.

I seem to recall there's another one as well, but can't immediately locate it.

[GodwulfAZ]

We already have a thread on this subject:

http://debrief.comma...zed-james-bond/

Thanks to any mod who merges them.

I seem to recall there's another one as well, but can't immediately locate it.

 

Yes, that would be lovely - thanks for the link.  I've just read that thread and I think it pretty well answered my question; the membership is not amused.

[Dustin]

Done (the merger, obviously)

[glidrose]

British sci-fi/fantasy author Charles Stross wrote a story for the collection. "No Mr. Bond". (Is it a prequel to "No Deals, Mr Bond"?) Jeffrey Ford studied under the late American author John C. Gardner ("Grendel", "The Sunlight Dialogues"). Most of the other names mean nothing to me.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction by Matt Sherman
• Foreword: The Bitch is Dead Now by David Nickle
• “One Is Sorrow” by Jacqueline Baker
• “The Gale of the World” by Robert J. Wiersema
• “Red Indians” by Richard Lee Byers
• “The Gladiator Lie” by Kelly Robson
• “Half the Sky” by E.L. Chen
• “In Havana” by Jeffrey Ford
• “Mastering the Art of French Killing” by Michael Skeet
• “A Dirty Business” by Iain McLaughlin
• “Sorrow’s Spy” by Catherine McLeod
• “Mosaic” by Karl Schroeder
• “The Spy Who Remembered Me” by James Alan Gardner
• “Daedelus” by Jamie Mason
• “Through Your Eyes Only” by A.M. Dellamonica
• “Two Graves” by Ian Rogers
• “No Mr. Bond” by Charles Stross
• “The Man with the Beholden Gun: an e-pistol-ary story by some other Ian Fleming” by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
• “The Cyclorama” by Laird Barron
• “You Never Love Once” by Claude Lalumière
• “Not an Honourable Disease” by Corey Redekop
• Afterword by Madeline Ashby

[Major Tallon]

This is the most definitive information I've been able to obtain regarding the book.  So far, my Canadian sources have been unable to obtain copies.

[Dustin]

This will likely remain an extremely obscure venture and it's far from sure 'publishing' it in Canada will be the end of the story...

[Single-O-Seven]

I'm growing more curious about this, so may pick it up just to see what the stories are about. Would be neat to have as a curiosity in any case, even if the stories amount to nothing.

[casinoroyale75]

garbage

[Major Tallon]

I'm informed that Amazon.ca will now ship this book to Canadian addresses, with delivery next week. 

[clinkeroo]

One of the great thing about living in Michigan is our proximity to our great Northern Neighbor (Or Southern, if you are a Detroiter like yours truly).  Reading it now.  If it is pure poop, I will not be shy in reporting.

[Single-O-Seven]

One of the great thing about living in Michigan is our proximity to our great Northern Neighbor (Or Southern, if you are a Detroiter like yours truly).  Reading it now.  If it is pure poop, I will not be shy in reporting.

 

Yes, please do. I have it in my Amazon cart but am not so sure about cashing out yet. I understand some of the stories are just spoofs, but I'd be pleased if even a handful took the character seriously and added something to the wealth of Bond stories out there.

[GodwulfAZ]

Having a copy shipped from Russell Books in B.C.  Nothing came up when I did a direct search on ABE Books, but when I went to the book's review page on Goodreads.com and clicked on "Buy a Copy" and "Other Online Stores" and "ABE Books", I got a link to purchase it, and I see today that it's in the mail.   

[ggl]

But... what about this?? http://blogs.indiewi...ontent=Netvibes

 

Is that legal too...??

[Single-O-Seven]

But... what about this?? http://blogs.indiewi...ontent=Netvibes

 

Is that legal too...??

 

I think this is awful. Just because, legally, it can be done doesn't mean it should be. Especially since the goal seems to be to do it just for the sake of doing it, and re-inventing the character in the process. Not good reasons to rival the "original" Bond series, which is still going strong. If the EON franchise had died off years ago and Bond was stagnant, I would be all for seeing something, someone, bring the character to life again but, in my opinion, Bond doesn't need it just yet.

[IainMcLaughlin]

 

One of the great thing about living in Michigan is our proximity to our great Northern Neighbor (Or Southern, if you are a Detroiter like yours truly).  Reading it now.  If it is pure poop, I will not be shy in reporting.

 

Yes, please do. I have it in my Amazon cart but am not so sure about cashing out yet. I understand some of the stories are just spoofs, but I'd be pleased if even a handful took the character seriously and added something to the wealth of Bond stories out there.

 

I don't have a copy of the book yet, but I did write one of the stories in it.  I certainly treated the character of Bond and Ian Fleming's work with the utmost respect when I wrote 'A Dirty Business'. I went back though Fleming's short stories to get a reminder of the way Fleming handled Bond shorts (I avoided Raymond Benson's because I wanted Fleming's voice in my head when I was writing). I certainly tried to remain as true to Fleming's work as I could.

 

Bond has been a favourite of mine since I was a child and I've read all of Fleming's novels a number of times. I doubt if anyone involved has anything but affection and respect for the character. I believe some of the stories do look at some of Bond's less pleasant character traits but that's a good thing. Fleming made Bond more interesting by giving him character flaws. I certainly mention Bond's drinking early in my story and his treatment of women is an important part of how the plot develops. Those flaws make him more interesting and more enjoyable to write. I've written for a number of classic heroes, and for me it's their flaws that make them more interesting than the average hero. I'm hugely looking forward to reading the other stories in the book to see what the other authors have come up with.

Edited by IainMcLaughlin, 02 December 2015 - 09:49 PM.