Saturday Night Short

Over the past few months, we’ve discovered On Demand, the service on our Time-Warner Cable that gives us access to recent shows. (While we’ve had T-W for years, we only got the cable box hooked up once we got the big screen HD TV last year, and even then we didn’t pay much attention to it, focusing on our non-HD ReplayTV. I’d assumed that On Demand was just for paid material.)

So tonight, I went to watch this week’s Saturday Night Live, and found it a bit odd going. There was no monologue. Guest host Justin Beiber didn’t show up until midway through the second sketch. “Weekend Update” came very early in the show, and then I realized that we hadn’t gotten the musical performance that usually comes before the fake news. So I paused the show to see the rnning length… this eighty-five minute show was clocking in at 49 minutes. By the time I hit the end, I realized that not only were both of the usual two musical performances missing, but that the host thanked a special guest star who I had not seen.

I haven’t yet checked if this abridged edition is standard for SNL On Demand, or whether there was something special going on in this case (perhaps Bieber has some exclusive agreement for video of musical performances?) But frankly, with a lot of the episodes I’d be happy to get to “Weekend Update” faster.

The status on corporate comics

The discussion of Disney and its licensees treatment of Don Rosa, raised in Rosa’s discussion of why he left, has spread out to a larger discussion of non-creator-owned comics and how creators are treated. What I’m running down here is largely what is standard in the industry, at least as by my ability to perceive it through my limited experiences and from my discussion with other creators. All of these have exceptions, both to the advantage and disadvantage of creators, in some case due to the specific company involved, in some cases due to the negotiation strength of an individual creator.

Corporate-owned properties

By this, I mean work done on characters like Batman, where the company publishing the material also owns the copyright and trademarks to the character.

• The publisher claims copyright to the finished work.
• All sales of English-language editions count toward possible royalties to the creative team.
• Licenses of foreign-language edition do not generate money to the creative team.
• New characters/concepts do not generate money for creators when used in other comic book stories (i.e., if you give Mucuswoman a sidekick, Mucuslad, you don’t get money when Mucuslad spins off into his own series.)
• Payments are made to creators when new characters/concepts are used outside of comics – that Mucuslad action figure or his appearance in the Sidekick Crew animated series will make the creator some cash.

Licensed properties

These are characters where a licensor owns the property, and the publisher is a licensee, paying money for the right to use that property. Examples are Conan, GI Joe, Garfield.

• The licensor holds the copyright to the material.
• Publishers are split as to whether the material generates royalties for creators when reprinted by the original publisher in English during their original run of the license.
• Licenses of foreign-language edition do not generate money to the creative team.
• New characters/concepts do not generate money for creators when reused anywhere.
• No royalties are generated for the creators when the material is reprinted by a different publisher.

This isn’t to say that the Disney situation doesn’t go well outside of what is common. One is their insistence on owning up the original art. Return of the original art not only provides a potential additional income but also adjusts in value with the quality and popularity of the work. And the extensive use of Rosa to do signings promoting work, generating additional sales on works that he wasn’t getting additional money for.

There are some practical reasons why licensors want to work the way they do that go just beyond maximizing profits. Unlike with corporate comics, the licensor never has a direct relationship with the creative crew, which makes setting up ongoing interest harder. And with most licensed comics, comics are a minor sidelight to some more major product, and it isn’t worth the hassle of worrying whether some small character in a comic book story seems similar to one in the latest tentpole movie and thus some creator is expecting payment; that’s a different situation where comics are the primary or source product, and where it’s in the rightsholder’s interest to encourage originality.

But the net effect can be, well, Don Rosa – who is not a miserable man, who seems to have still surrounded himself with a life he loves, but whose work contributed enough to the licensor that he deserves appropriate forms of respect directly from them.

I am both a comics creator and publisher, and even before I entered that dual role, I was a bit more ethically comfortable with some aspects of work-for-hire than the more vocal of my creative brethren. But even setting ethics totally aside, as a practical business matter, it’s in a licensor’s best interest to find ways of ensuring that creators are rewarded for quality work, because in the long term that work is more licensable and thus more profitable. Few creators are Don Rosa, only willing to work on a single property. You don’t want a creator turning down work on a licensed book or leaving an acclaimed licensed run simply because the corporate comic will make him money if reprinted 20 years later while the licensed comic will not. If you want great work rather than bulk work, you should find some way to reward quality.

Trademarks aren’t stealing language

There’s some hullabaloo turning up these days regarding the two biggest US comic book publishers, Marvel and DC, defending ownership to the term “superhero” (and variations thereof) as it applies to comic books. Let me make it clear right now that I think that Marvel and DC should not manage to hold that trademark, that it clearly has become a generic term. If you were to show average people issues of Nexus or Madman or Justice Machine or Spawn, they would identify them as “superhero comics” and would do so even if informed of the publisher’s identity. It’s just as generic as calling an apple red. Having said that, most of the arguments I’m seeing placed against Marvel and DC on this are poppycock

People are acting as though using some pre-existing term as a trademark is inherently “stealing language”, but they are only applying it to “superhero”. They make an argument that it’s a pre-existing word, but that is true of most comic book-related trademarks. If I were to publish a comic entitled MARVEL SUPERHEROES: SPIDER-MAN VERSUS DAREDEVIL, there are very few in comics circles who would not perceive me as trying to exploit the reputation built up by the company that is now a branch of Disney, and really only the break-Marvel-in-any-way folks  and the all-intellectual-property-is-evil folks would suggest that I’m doing nothing that should be legally wrong. And yet, while four of the five words of that title are trademarked for comics, none of the words are ones that were invented by/for Marvel. (I probably see one or two blinks out there over the word spider-man, but here it is in 1876, and you can find the term in everything from a Hardy Boys book to the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

There is nothing illegitimate about the use of preexisting and common words for trademarks. Not everything needs to be Electrolux and Unisys. The consumer is protected by knowing that if they buy Tide detergent, Brawny paper towels, Saturn cars or Trojan prophylactics, they are being produced or approved by the companies that built the reputation behind those names, and its hard to say that it is particularly unfair that competitors cannot name their detergent Tide, as putting Tide on a detergent makes basically no sense except if you’re trying to exploit that reputation. That’s different from being barred from putting “orange” on your brand of juice, where it is a legitimate and understood descriptor for the nature of the content rather than for the producer… and “superhero” seems (to my non-lawyer eyes) to fall into that category as well.

That Healthy But on the Jonathan Coulton/Glee situation

Talented song humorist Jonathan Coulton is raising a fuss because the TV show Glee is using using his interpretation of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s anthemic “Baby Got Back”, including using his alteration to the lyrics, without any recognition to its source. They appear to have a legal right to do so, as by covering the song without reaching a special agreement, Coulton cedes any claim to copyright in his arrangement, and thus all Glee had to do was license the rights to the original song. (There’s a separate and vital question of whether Glee used any of the actual audio from Coulton’s version, which would seem to be his copyright, but that seems of lesser concern to Coulton.) So really, Coulton’s complaint is that they reused his material without proper concern for his ethical (rather than legal) rights and recognition of his contribution, a strong lack of respect

But if .

But as best as I can tell, Coulton is guilty of much the same thing in this matter. Please correct me if I’ve gotten facts wrong, but it seems to me that he never asked Mix-A-Lot’s permission to make this variant version of the song (certainly, his failure to get permission for copyright on his arrangement suggests that), but just exploited an ugly section of the copyright law called compulsory licensing, where the copyright owner of a song that has been commercially released is forced to license it to anyone else who would record it, under government-dictated commercial terms. In doing so, Coulton messed severely without Mix-A-Lot’s work of art (and it is a work of art; one might quite legitimately take it to task for its message, but it does a gorgeous job of delivering the message, with fine wordplay, good musical structure, and solid construction all around.) He strongly changed the tone of the work, presenting it as a ballad rather than a hip-hop work. He removed the artist’s name from the work, taking out a reference to Mix-A-Lot and replacing it with a representation of his own name (“Johnny C.”) It’s hard to say that he was showing any respect to the musician whose work he was covering.

I’m really not trying to come down too hard on Coulton (and in fact I will happily recommend to you a couple of his original works, the supervillain-themed “Skullcrusher Mountain” and the programming-oriented “Code Monkey”, both at heart songs about being capable of desire yet incompetent at expressing it, themes which I can recognize myself – particularly my past self – in), but really its to come down on compulsory licensing, which while it addresses the concern about monopoly in the player piano business (really, that’s what it was invented for), is ugly on all sorts of levels. It is based on an assumption that an artist can have no other appropriate protectiveness for his work than to make sure he makes money off of whatever is done to it… and it treats music licensing as something that requires government price controls, which I can see zero reason for (its not as though the right to be able to afford to cover The Devil Went Down To Georgia is as vital a thing in people’s lives as being able to get milk for one’s children, if I might compare it to something where there’s at least an argument to be made for government involvement in pricing.)

But the damages done by compulsory licensing are ones that primarily hit the artists, who are not the ones seen as having power in convincing Congress to change the laws. As such, I doubt we’ll see a change any time soon. But at least we can rest assured that the player piano business is  protected!

Goodbye, Emily Owens

My slowing on the reviews even for things I wish to praise means that I didn’t get around to reviewing Emily Owens, M.D. before its cancellation was announced (although there are a number of episodes in teh can which will air). Here’s the nickel version: if the idea of Dr. Ally McBeal sounds at least interesting, then this show was well worth trying. Not perfect, not ground-breaking, but watchable and enjoyable and it deserved a longer run than it’s getting.

Maryland! Maine! Washington!

What more needs be said?

the elusive Animal Practice

If anyone out there is a fan of Animal Practice (I’m not), it’s cancellation seems to have been moved up a week, due to some Monday stuff being rescheduled for tonight in the wake of Sandy. However, it looks like the episode which was supposed to air tonight is available online here.

Movies I’ve seen recently

Pitch Perfect and Argo… liked them both.

Pitch Perfect wasn’t perfect, but it was fun. It’s a comedy set in the world of college a capella… not, it seems, a particularly accurate depiction, but it doesn’t pretend to be the sort of film where you can take such things seriously. This is more in the tradition of films like Revenge of the Nerds than in some more serious format. There’s a couple things I find interesting. One is how hard the film feels the need to explain to you that performance A is good and B bad, because they’re all slick enough that you may not agree with what they’re saying. The other is… well, have you seen the ads for this film? So you know what it’s about, right, this brassy overweight girl who sings, right? Only that’s not true. She’s only a supporting character; the central character is a conspicuously attractive, svelte movie. That’s right, they’re pitching it as a film about an unattractive outsider rather than a sexy gal. I think that really says something interesting about the cultural moment we’re in.

Argo was good, quite good, but not perfect. My little hope for good treatment of Jack Kirby as a character in this film was dashed; the Kirby character appears in one scene, seems unlikely Kirby, and doesn’t match quite the truth of Kirby’s involvement in the true story. I understand that he wasn’t that important to the story they were telling… but hey, if you’re trying to show how wild a scene you’re involved in is, wouldn’t the inclusion of the co-creator of the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Captain America, Hulk, and so forth be worth a mention?

One thing that hit me was one of the difficulties in doing a “based on true events” stories. There were a couple times… one in particular (folks who have seen the film will know what I mean when I say “trying to get to the phone”) where an attempt to build conflict which would seem merely a little silly in a fiction film seems like a stupid bit of desperation to add drama where none existed.

But overall, it’s well worthwhile. All the actors do a good job. And while John Goodman may not inherently be able to rescue a film (see The Babe, Blues Brothers 2000, or Born Yesterday for proof), there is no film that is not improved by his presence.

I may have to rent some of Mr. Affleck’s other films as a director.

A major change in review policy

A while back, I stated that it was no longer my goal to review every new primetime network fiction show… although I’ve kept pretty close to that at times. Now, I’m going to switch my policy more radically:

No more bad reviews.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to start giving bad shows good reviews. And if I see a bad show and see something insightful to say, I shall. But for a number of reasons, this blog won’t be the home for such depression and snark in the future. I do hope to keep recommending good shows, as they appear.

The questionable joy of home refinancing

We went through the process of refinancing our mortgage this year, bringing our already low rate down by more than 1%. In the long term, this will save us much money over the next 30 years. The process was relatively painless, and it all got done in relatively short order. Sometime in July, our new mortgage company – we’ll call them “Mort” – called the deal done, and we’d owe them the first payment of $X on September 1st.

Only they let us know that it may not be them we’d owe; they specialized in setting up mortgages and selling them off to other institutions. So it came as no surprise in mid-August when we got a letter form a bank – we’ll call them Ba – whom I’ve dealt with for decades. They let us know they’d bought the mortgage. And they billed us for our September 1st payment… but they billed us for $X+Y.

So we call them, an they look at the figures, and seem to realize they’ve miscalculated our mortgage insurance cost.. they said it would take a few days to straighten out, but they arranged to take a payment over the phone for $x, and all would be good for now, as they figure things out.

Of course, two weeks later, we get a dunning phone call from Ba – why haven’t we paid the $Y yet? Apparently, they had figured out that they’d misbilled our mortgage insurance, but hadn’t actually, y’know, changed the numbers in their database… they think. They’re still trying to figure it out. So that’s where we sit… with Ba.

But that’s not all! For tonight, we got another dunning call… from Mort! They clearly wanted to know why we haven’t paid them $X yet. “Ummm… because you sold the mortgage to Ba.” “No, we didn’t.” Not trusting anyone who called me, I called them, and they said “we don’t think we sold your mortgage… but the right person isn’t here tonight, here, leave a message on their answering machine.”

So that’s where we stand. So far, we’ve paid every cent we owed, and between two companies we are somehow perceived as being even more than that behind on payments on mortgages that total close to twice the value of our house.

So fun!