Hmm, an interesting debate, even if it's wandered off on many tangents. Me, I've happily disinterred the corpses of other people's creativity for a 70,000 Black Flame novel. These days so many people have had their dabs on Dredd, the ownership issue is not so vexed - besides, we all know Wagner does it best. For my Dante novels, Robbie Morrison gave his approval for each of the plotlines, so I felt that gave them some vestige of authenticity. As to Fiends, Alan Grant performed massive rewrites on the original GFD scripts at the time. Who's the true creator of the strip? Gerry, because it was his mad, mad, mad idea in the first place. But IMHO Alan deserves a lot of credit for honing that into a much loved serial for the weekly - not to mention Carlos for his stunning art.
One question about the Mills ring-fencing of creations concept: does the artist who co-created these characters also get the claimed power of veto?
To put another side of the argument, I had an experience recently where I found myself in exactly the same position of Pat. In 2003 I wrote a Doctor Who audio for Big Finish called Full Fathom Five. It introduced a new Doctor, one with a markedly different approach to life from what had been done before. As part of the contract, I allowed Big Finish to exploit that Doctor in subsequent productions - something for which I would receive no royalties and no recognition as the creator of the character. A year later, another emailed to say he'd been commissioned to write a short story for a Big Finish anthology featuring the Doctor I'd created, and would I be willing to read his story to check he'd nailed the characterisation.
It irked me that I hadn't even been invited to pitch for the short story anthology, let alone that somebody else was writing a character I'd created and that only I'd ever written before. But the writer in question didn't know that and wasn't responsible for choosing who got to write for the anthology. Rather than throw my rattle from the pram, I accepted the situation and offered the writer a few pointers of how to tweak his characterisation of my Doctor to get it nearer the mark. But it still irritated the hell out of me.
So, I've got sympathies with almost everybody in this debate...
davidbishop
One question about the Mills ring-fencing of creations concept: does the artist who co-created these characters also get the claimed power of veto?
To put another side of the argument, I had an experience recently where I found myself in exactly the same position of Pat. In 2003 I wrote a Doctor Who audio for Big Finish called Full Fathom Five. It introduced a new Doctor, one with a markedly different approach to life from what had been done before. As part of the contract, I allowed Big Finish to exploit that Doctor in subsequent productions - something for which I would receive no royalties and no recognition as the creator of the character. A year later, another emailed to say he'd been commissioned to write a short story for a Big Finish anthology featuring the Doctor I'd created, and would I be willing to read his story to check he'd nailed the characterisation.
It irked me that I hadn't even been invited to pitch for the short story anthology, let alone that somebody else was writing a character I'd created and that only I'd ever written before. But the writer in question didn't know that and wasn't responsible for choosing who got to write for the anthology. Rather than throw my rattle from the pram, I accepted the situation and offered the writer a few pointers of how to tweak his characterisation of my Doctor to get it nearer the mark. But it still irritated the hell out of me.
So, I've got sympathies with almost everybody in this debate...
davidbishop
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