Writing in the free world

Jonathan Lethem explains why copyright laws stifle creativity and why he's giving away the film option to his new novel.

By Amy Benfer

Read more: Books, Amy Benfer, Copyright, Jonathan Lethem, Books Features

March 25, 2007 | Jonathan Lethem's seventh novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet," is a parable of sorts about the ways in which art is created and commodified by a process of borrowing, stealing and transformation. Set in Los Angeles, the novel concerns four indie rock musicians closer to their 30th birthdays than they are to success. The fetching bass player, Lucinda, strikes up a friendship with an anonymous caller to her day job, a complaint line funded by an art gallery. The man, appropriately dubbed the Complainer, happens to have a genius for words. Lucinda passes the Complainer's musings on to Bedwin, the band's lyricist, who transforms them into songs that finally get the band some attention. Things get tricky when the Complainer demands a different sort of compensation for his work: Rather than cash payment, he wants to join the band.

Last week, Lethem, author of the best-selling "Motherless Brooklyn" and "The Fortress of Solitude," proposed an equally inventive, though much more generous, approach to releasing the film rights to his novel. On his Web site, he offered an option on the film rights free to the filmmaker who presents him with the best proposal by May 15. In return, the filmmaker will agree to pay Lethem 2 percent of the film's budget when the film receives a distribution deal, and allow the rights to the novel to return to the public domain -- for the free use of anyone, including other filmmakers -- within five years of the film's release.

Lethem also wrote an essay for the February issue of Harper's called "The Ecstasy of Influence," in which he argues for a new approach to copyright law, based on the recognition that "appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act." It's based on the recognition that all works of art are, in a sense, a collaboration between artists and the culture at large. I spoke to Lethem about the copyright theme in his new novel and essay at his home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

"You Don't Love Me Yet" is about low-rent indie musicians with day jobs. Musicians like that often have little or no label support behind them and find themselves on a perpetual tour wagon, earning most of their cash through selling T-shirts -- that is, selling the byproducts of their lovely songs. When I jump on my pro-copyright horse, I have to say these musicians may be wrecking their personal relationships by touring all the time, and then when they enter their elderly years, which for an indie band may be their 30s...

Yes, yes, they have no intellectual property to help them out in the old age home. The first thing I want to say is that it's entirely a fiction of what I'll call, for the sake of this argument, the opposition -- corporate, copyright absolutists -- that to question the present privatization craze in any way is to vote for some anarchic abolition of copyright.

I make my living by licensing my copyright. Everything I've tried to say, in the Harper's essay and elsewhere, is that there is an enormous middle ground. It becomes one of those issues like, "If you don't favor wiretapping in the U.S., you must be for the terrorists." What I'm seeking to explore is that incredibly fertile middle ground where people control some rights and gain meaningful benefits from those controls, and yet contribute to a healthy public domain and systematically relinquish, or have relinquished for them, meaningless controls on culture that impoverish the public domain.

Having said that, there's no simple description. There's an enormously intricate series of judgments, given technological variations and the differences between different mediums. There's no simple standard to apply. It's a matter of understanding the needs of a healthy public domain and a healthy creative incentive in every field in deep and intricate specifics.

But I will say this: Problems of artists, musicians, writers, anyone getting paid for doing their most free and creative and independent kind of work, are not new ones. The present realm of corporate-instigated maximization of the intellectual property concept doesn't seem to have kept indie bands from touring.

I'm a very lucky artist. I make my living from it. I didn't know if I ever would. I'm very persuaded by the image that Lewis Hyde offers of an artist who is, by definition, in whatever medium, or whatever level of success or whatever culture, in the practice of culture-making; participating in culture by making stuff is inherently a gift transaction and a commodity transaction. And it always will be. The question is how do we affirm and clarify this relationship? Because it's a very weird one -- making commodities that are also gifts.

Presumably one is in a better position to make gifts of one's work later in one's career.

Ironically, yes! I'm in a better position than I was before. But the truth is, the agitation for it is mostly left to artists at the outset of their careers, or artists who have discovered the futility or frustration of hoping to make a living. It's left to people who are mostly doing it as a kind of volunteer impulse from the margins.

We've seen in our recent lifetimes examples of people making some pretty commercially viable work who had the legs knocked out from under them, like Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy, almost the inventor of a new musical language, who saw it essentially outlawed -- or made so impossible through the application of licensing laws that it might as well have become outlaw art. I feel that artists can't stand by and watch that happen in good faith.

I do speak from a weirdly princely position. I don't mean that in terms of my personal finances, which go up and down. I mean that in terms of a novelist being largely immune to these issues. I've expressed irritation when I've tried to quote a Brian Wilson lyric in a novel and it turned out that I couldn't afford to do it. Or when some copy editor goes and systematically capitalizes the word "band-aid" in my pages, and it seems to me objectionable, because I've used it, and my characters have used it, as a noun. It just is. I'm sorry, but that word has become a noun.

But the truth is, I could write a whole book detailing the plot of a "Simpsons" episode, describing Homer's yellow skin and protuberant eyes, and no one would ever be able to block my choice as an artist there, or make it too expensive for me to do it. But if a visual artist or a filmmaker or a digital montage maker tried to capture that image, which is just part of a visual language that is floating around, they don't have my freedom.

What if you were to transcribe the script from the episode? Wouldn't that be the equivalent of taking the language without alteration?

You'd probably reach an aesthetic point of diminishing returns before you'd get anyone excited about your copyright violation. But the point is: Are any of these things rivalrous with an episode of "The Simpsons" on television? Probably not. Why have we gotten so mystical about certain corporate holdings, which is what we are really talking about. Or certain business models? People speak of these rights as if they have this tangible moral power, comparable to the Ten Commandments. But they are very local and convenient corporate notions. All sorts of things can't be moved from one location to another freely by people wanting to talk about them, or depict them, or make fun of them, or smash them together with other things.

This is high and low. Talk to scholars of James Joyce, who have seen themselves tied in horrific knots by excessively zealous literary executors who won't let them quote from the works. There's an epidemic of this kind of control. Everyone can get up in arms, saying Samuel Beckett shouldn't have to see "Waiting for Godot" staged with Samurai costumes in his lifetime. It feels quite appropriate that he squashed things like that because he was such a severe and intense fellow. But for his heirs to make it seem as though there's an eternal injunction against recontexualizing the things he offered into our culture, well, all we have to do is apply the same standard to Shakespeare to see how impoverishing that would be.

You received a $6,000 advance for three years of work on your first novel, which is, sadly, pretty typical. Clearly, if you were still making that kind of money, it would be pretty tough to continue making art at all, much less conduct this kind of social experiment.

Sure, but it wasn't strengthening of copyright control that allowed me to make more money after that; it was because I found some readers. Even if my rights were Kryptonite and lasted 1,000 years, if no one read my books, they wouldn't be worth a penny. The economy of human attention is a very precious one, much scarcer than any other. I'm lucky to be in the position of having anyone notice that I've given something away in the first place.

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