An attempt to crowd-fund a tribute to Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are – in which thirty-something Max returns to island of Wild Things with his daughter in tow – did not go over well with Sendak’s publisher, causing Kickstarter to suspend the campaign. Joe Mullin isn’t surprised:
It’s one of the great ironies of copyright in the digital age that it’s easier to express disdain than love for a work. If [writer Geoffrey] Todd and [illustrator Rich] Berner had written a scathing book review or a parody of Sendak’s book, HarperCollins wouldn’t have liked that, either–but there probably wouldn’t have been anything they could do about it. There would be substantially better legal protections.
The takedown of this project demonstrates that when push comes to shove, creators of “fan fiction” don’t have much support under current copyright law, and platforms like Kickstarter hardly want to have their back in a potentially complex dispute over fair use. Copyright has been used in many instances to control additional works in the “universe” in which a book or other work is set, even when the actual text and images in the new work are wholly original.
The Dish 