Planetary Copyright

Here’s an interesting wrinkle about international copyright protections:

The classic novella “The Little Prince” fell into the public domain this year in much of the world but remains under copyright in France because of an exception that grants a 30-year extension to authors who died during military service in World War I and II.

There’s a logic to that provision, I suppose. If a society bases copyright terms on an author’s life, but an author dies before his or her time while fighting for the society, then the society extends the copyright term to about what it would otherwise have been. Still, I wonder what specific cases gave rise to this exception.

That passage comes from a New York Times story on a dispute over the copyright of Anne Frank’s diary as originally published. That copyright is the main asset of a foundation, which wishes to extend its term by calling Anne’s father a coauthor of the text. Other institutions, hoping to make the diary more widely accessible and/or mindful of Holocaust deniers’ claims that Otto Frank invented the story to begin with, are resisting that move.

By the logic of the French law, the term of Anne Frank’s copyright could be extended based on what her natural lifespan would have been—meaning even longer protection than basing the term on her father’s lifespan. Of course, few countries follow France’s example.

Meanwhile, the foundation already authorized the editing and publication of a more complete version of Anne Frank’s diary, which has its own copyright term based on the life of the scholarly editor.

She's a Galaxy Girl

Francesco Marciuliano of Sally Forth and Medium Large got to do a guest comic in Bizarro this month, and this is what he came up with. In response, an Ontario reader complained:

At best, it elicits a sigh of disgust. At worst, it mocks The Little Prince, the wartime masterpiece by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. This runaway world best seller may be understood on several levels. It captivates as a children's tale. It symbolically tells the story of creation. At its peak, it is the autobiography of a sensitive and lost soul dedicating his work to a dear friend in need of consolation. The friend is cold and hungry in Nazi-occupied France, while the author is safe in New York. . . . Writing like that deserves better treatment than an ill-considered distortion.

Meanwhile, webcomic readers who commented were almost entirely interested in identifying the interplanetary objects in the background. Okay, I know that Marciuliano (bio here) invited us to do so, but that still seems to say something about different community priorities.

Near Earth

The Atlantic's June issue also contains an alarming story by Gregg Easterbrook on the threat of large asteroids and comets striking Earth in ways that could end human civilization or even the human species.

The most alarming part for me wasn't the science that suggests the probability of such an event is higher than people have thought, but the complacent comments from the Bush-Cheney administration's NASA head. He manages both to blame Congress for leaving "near-Earth objects" off NASA's priorities and to say that those priorities are exactly right, "the finest policy framework...in 40 years."

There are a couple of fantasy-literature connections in the article. I suspect that because an approaching space object was the premise of two "big summer blockbuster movies" a few years ago (Deep Impact and Armaggedon), lots of people have mentally filed this threat in the area of science fiction. The Atlantic and Easterbrook have their own, low-budget movie to watch on the web, which makes the same point.

The astronaut Rusty Schweikart, one of the most visionary people to have flown in space, leads the B612 Foundation with the goal "To significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid, in a controlled manner, by 2015." The article explains that deflecting an asteroid seems feasible with current technology (comets are another matter), and being ready to do so might be the difference between life as we know it and, well, not.

And the other children's literature connection? The name B612 alludes to the Little Prince's near-Earth asteroid, pictured in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's book. (Image above from the fan site B612.net.)