Dave Bell@98: Oh, I never meant to suggest crediting *Alan* for the screenplay! Good god, that would be a gaffe of monumental proportions. Your description of the situation with him, while indeed over-simplified, is not inaccurate.
Generally speaking, IMDB is not a reliable source, just a good first approximation. The Warner Bros Site for the film shows the film credits as including "Screenplay by THE WACHOWSKI BROTHERS [some other credits] Based on the Graphic Novel Illustrated by David Lloyd".
Why on earth is David Lloyd being credited for the screenplay of V For Vendetta? The Wachowskis wrote that screenplay, and I don't think Lloyd had any input besides having been part of the team that did the graphic novel it was 'based on'.
More about gorilla covers:
When Mort Weisinger was editing the Superman line of comics at DC, he spent a lot of time examining which issues sold and which didn't, with the basic premise that the cover image was responsible. Things that seemed to be associated with sales spikes got a lot of repeat uses. Notable elements include: Gorillas, People Crying, Weddings, Dinosaurs, Spaceships, and Anything Purple. Every so often people who are aware of this history will create a comic book cover that combines most or all of these elements. The most recent high-profile appearance of this meme is probably the "Weeping Gorilla" character in Alan Moore's Promethea.
OG wrote: Retelling from the original source material is not lifting entire paragraphs, or entire chapters, and doing a search/replace on the names.
What's your opinion on Andre Norton's _Huon of the Horn_? It's essentially a search/replace on grammar for a centuries-old legend. That's acknowledged in small print on the inside of the book. But on the front cover, it says "Andre Norton" in big letters, and she got the royalty checks.
Charles Stross wrote (in response to Greg London):
Cutting the revenue stream further isn't exactly going to encourage me to keep going ...
So, Greg's talking about 40 year terms, right? Your first book came out in 2002, if Amazon is to be trusted. So he's not proposing to cut your revenue stream at all until 36 years from now. Personally, I have trouble planning what I'm doing with my income properly a *year* in avance...
You're also forgetting the demographic thing. Most authors don't start publishing books until they're over 30 years old. Their life expectancy these days is probably in the 80-100 year region. So, assuming they're still in print, a 40 year copyright is going to hit them right around the time their medical bills are going up, and their ability to earn a living is right down. Bring in such a system now and you're going to have to deal with the existing authors for whom their life-plus-X rights were their pension scheme.
So if a writer *stopped* writing when they were in their 30's -- and yet somehow managed to keep those early books in print for forty more years anyways, and popular enough to earn a living on -- that hypothetical writer might be in some trouble. But I don't think such a writer exists at all, and I'm certain that such writers are extremely rare at best. Most writers who get as far as being professional full-time writers in the first place seem to keep on writing until they are forcibly stopped by senescence or death, as far as I can tell (anecdotal, I know).
But that is all besides the main point I want to make. Practically everyone I know *except* writers has to make (or fail to make) their own plans for how to survive in their old age. We put money aside in the bank or investments (possibly with some match from our employers, but far more often not), and we find a way to squeeze that money-for-the-future out of our day-to-day income stream. The vast majority of people in the world make the vast majority of their money in one-time transactions with no lasting economic value. The boss pays me for what I did last fortnight -- he doesn't pay me for the fact that I did a good job 20 years ago. Some few businesses (mostly in the entertainment industries) have managed to create models whereby work done at one time will continue to generate income several years, or even decades, into the future. Yay for them. But it's something that most of us have to live without; about as far from a natural right as you can get.
Finally, I think that if you plot the number of writers working per capita over time, I think you'll find it's way higher today than it was back in 1790. I don't think post-mortem copyrights have much to do with that ... but pre-mortem copyright periods are a whole 'nother matter.
I suspect that it has a lot more to do with the general increase in real wealth in the world. More people can now *afford* to pursue such a marginal career than could previously. As Cory Doctorow mentioned in a number of contexts over Boskone, the reason writers generally get paid so poorly is that they aren't (as a class) rational economic actors -- they are willing to put up with poor pay without changing careers. You yourself, who I would rate as one of the most rational writers I know, acknowledge that you could get significantly more money in another career. But you get more pleasure out of writing, and the world is wealthy enough to support you in that. I think this is a good thing, because I greatly enjoy your writing! Indeed, I help support it by buying your books, often in hardcover.
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