Scott,
Which side of this fight are you on?
13 years ago
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Our family in April 2006
A home for all things Bosworth! Pictures, comments, recipes, or whatever else might be of interest to the rest of the family!
In the Fetching Tomatoes, less the latest arrivals
Our family in April 2006
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What are we telling our children?
- Alison: Use your BRAKES!!! You can't run people over on your bike!
- Ian: I'm tired of being your leader.
- Scott: You're not allowed to go near any of your cousins.
- Mom: Do you need to run down to the stop sign?
- April: Don't pour water in my shoes!
- Alison: Please don't put that in your mouth!
- April: Don't throw hammers at your sister
- Ryan: There is no need to smash cereal with a pencil
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3 comments:
I never thought about Ender and Harry being similar. I've been a little disappointed with J K Rowling since the last book came out - nothing to do with her incredible imagination and books. I agree with Card! I've now finished two of the three sequels about Bean. I highly recommend them.
Mom
I actually got into a fairly lengthy debate with a lawyer friend of mine out here about this article. I was defending JKR initially simply because I thought anyone who resorts to vitriol to make their point (like OSC employed in that article) is bound to make all kinds of logical/factual errors. Turns out, I think I was right. A few points:
1. OSC’s opinion on the legal merits of JKR’s claim is irrelevant. A court will decide whether she’s right or wrong, so any discussion of those elements is a wasted effort.
2. I agree that JKR is being kind of mean-spirited. I think that being mean-spirited, while lame, is nevertheless well within her legal rights, and I defend it. Rich people are no more morally obligated to surrender their property rights than poor people.
3. OSC is very inaccurate in some of his allegations against JKR. Some simple fact checking I did on Wikipedia completely discredited several of his arguments. This alone made me very suspicious of the rest of his article.
4. If Harry is based on Ender, then Ender is based on Luke Skywalker.
5. OSC claims that JKR announced DD was gay to appear "progressive" or up-to-date, and that she should have done it in the context of the novels. This is very poor logic based on dubious assumptions:
--JKR didn't exactly call a press conference to tell everyone DD was gay--she was boxed into a corner during a Q&A session after a public reading, and people kept asking why DD never had a girlfriend, got married, etc...
--I think the reason JKR didn't mention DD's sexual preference is because, when the character was created (assuming she created him "gay" from the outset, as she claimed), the books were about 10-11 year olds, and discussion of sexual preference would have been completely inappropriate. After ignoring it in the early books, it would have made no sense whatsoever to drop such a bomb in the 6th or 7th books. Thus, what started out as an inappropriate topic became an irrelevant topic.
6. OSC severely overstates the value of the rags-to-riches story for JKR. I seriously doubt that anyone has ever purchased a copy of her writing as result of this story. Her personal history didn’t become widely known until after the first 4 or 5 books, by which point it was irrelevant in terms of attracting new readers.
7. OSC claims that if JKR was so upset by the lexicon, then she should have shut it down immediately. Last time I checked, a person has a right to enforce their property rights when they feel like it—most likely when they perceive a threat. If I were JKR, I would view an online dictionary and a proprietary printed text as two very different things. One is revenue generating, one is not. Several hymns in the LDS hymnbook are usable for noncommercial purposes—many books, musical works, speeches, and research reports are published in a similar fashion. The website may have generated revenue for the owner through advertising, but the material itself was not for sale. I may have thought differently about this earlier, but my recent work in intellectual property law forces me to conclude that there’s not a court on the planet that would fail to see this distinction. I might lend you my journals and old photographs and allow you to compile it into a convenient database, but if you try to write a commercial screenplay based on my life, you had better ask for my permission.
I like OSC and I think his factual arguments are important. The problem I have is that his use of vitriol and hyperbole hides factual errors and makes clever comparisons/analogies seem more relevant than they really are.
That said, Ender rules.
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