Saturday, February 18, 2023

Roald Dahl is in the public domain

Roald Dahl was a sh!t in life who, at its end, did not stand against censorship when that stance would have supported Salman Rushdie. I have not bought a book of his since 1990. (Not that this hurt Dahl any, who buggered off to Sheol that very year.) Now the Dahl estate and Puffin have between them given to the old Norseman the medicine he concocted.

I own no dog in this particular fight.

I do submit, instead, that a publisher's decision to "fix" older works, suggests that those older works are public-domain as far as downloads. You say your new version is better to which end you're charging us, not for distributing Dahl's vision, but for your corrections. Fine! The originals are hereby depublished; they're first-draughts. They're Project Gutenberg.

The law, I submit further, needs to keep up. As for the corrected version of an older text, this needs the coauthor's name on the front, like when Silverberg redid Nightfall - no fine-print! The concession I'll grant to the fat ugly bird, as long as they hold the rights to dump on Dahl's car, is that other publishers cannot sell derivative works in parallel. So: no "heckin' based" versions of (say) Chocolate Factory (already plenty based enough).

As least with Dahl I am not about to read him either way and I don't suggest reading him to my readers, either. But there exist better men (and better authors). As a higher level of principle than any level Dahl himself stood for: Puffin's precedent should not stand.

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