Harry Potter and the Unauthorized Sequel
I don’t mean to clog up our blog with a debate over copyright law, but Gordon’s contribution to the debate Ed and I were having on derivative works is fantastic, and I’d like to do it justice with a long-ish reply. I’m familiar with Looking Backward, having read it in grad school, but I was not familiar with all of the spin-off literature that resulted. Certainly it seems like the debate among rival sequel authors was a good thing that probably decreased Bellamy’s incentives or ability to profit from his work not at all.
But Bellamy’s case is also an atypical case. As I said, I’ve read Looking Backward, and the actual fiction in it seems almost beside the point; even more than most science fiction, it’s really a political tract in novel’s clothing. That makes it more prone to criticism and commentary in the form of follow-on works than most other novels would be. In other words, I think cases like Looking Backward should be handled by an exception to the general rule against unauthorized sequels (fair use), not by abolishing the general rule altogether.