More About Licenses

At the Frankfurt Book Fair a few years ago, I found myself talking to an editor from Iran. Her press was in Germany looking for materials to license, which I thought was interesting given the copyright situation in her country. Iranian composers, writers, and other artists were protected by Iranian copyright, but Iranian law offered no protection whatsoever for anything produced beyond the country's borders.

There are international treaties that protect copyright: the Berne Convention and the WIPO Copyright Treaty. There are copyright rules that govern members of the World Trade Organization. But Iran wasn't a signatory to any such treaties, was not a member of the WTO, and so was legally similar to the U.S.A. in the era of Charles Dickens. Poor Dickens. His books were enormously popular in the U.S., but American copyright law did not extend any protection to foreign writers. Every edition of every Dickens novel sold in America was a pirated edition. American pirates made their fortunes off him, but the only way the novelist found to profit from the popularity of his works was by giving an American lecture tour.

 

The only reason I knew anything about Iranian copyright law was that a few of my stories had been translated into Farsi. The translators didn't always contact me first to get permission. Instead, they would typically send me a contributor's copy of an Iranian magazine in which I had a story. I was flattered, but also a little irritated until one of them explained to me that they had the right to translate anything they pleased of mine without my permission or compensation. The fact that translators took the time to find my physical address and send me a magazine after the fact, usually at their own expense, was actually a very kind and collegial gesture. Legally, they owed me nothing.

 

Why, I asked the editor, was her company spending thousands of dollars to send her to Germany to buy reprint rights when, by Iranian law, she could just take whatever she wanted?

 

"But we have rights to sell as well," she explained. "It really doesn't matter what the laws are at home. If my company doesn't follow the rules of the rest of the world, then the world won't buy from us. We find that the best policy is to go along to get along."

In 2012, the Islamic Republic has finally indicated that it will begin to revise its copyright laws to conform to international standards.

 

 "We go along to get along." That is why, even in an era of rampant thievery, licensing will still be a model that compensates creators at least some of the time. As long as there are businesses that have intellectual content to sell --- textbook publishers, examination boards, movie studios --- there will be licensees willing to pay to include a story in a textbook, to write standardized test questions based on a story, or to make movies adapted from stories. Even if a story of mine is in wide, free distribution, someone whose business depends on their own intellectual property is going to treat my IP with respect, especially if failure to do so could jeopardize their entire operation. In film, for instance, the option to re-tell a writer's story is one of the cheapest expenditures. Why put the the entire expensive film at risk by avoiding a comparatively minor payment?

So although I have pretty much given up on licensing my work to large publishers, I haven't given up on licensing my work to specialized markets or creators in other media. That's one continuing trickle in my revenue stream. Unfortunately, it's a rather fickle trickle. It's a waste of time to seek out textbook writers, exam writers, or movie makers with my back list. Generally, they have to find me. So while selling such licenses has sometimes made a big difference in what sort of a year I've had financially, I can't really include such sales in a strategy for how I'm going to continue to earn my keep.