Pixel Scroll 6/3/17 Hello Pixel My Old Friend, I’ve Come To Scroll With You Again

(1) SCORING WONDER WOMAN. Vox explains that Wonder Woman’s score/rating is 93% or 76%, depending on how you look at it, in “Why people are freaking out over Wonder Woman’s stellar Rotten Tomatoes score”

To be clear, a 97 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating doesn’t mean that critics scored the movie at 97 on a scale of 1 to 100, or that Wonder Woman is a perfect movie — rather, it signifies that an overwhelming majority of critics have given the movie a positive review. The average critical rating for the movie is around a 7.6 out of 10 according to Rotten Tomatoes, and a 76 according to Metacritic, both of which take into account any actual score, like a star rating or a letter grade, that a critic gave the movie.

(2) WORD PROBLEM. Or, for those of you who find a verbal response more helpful that a number, Gary Westfahl offers “A Working Model for Superhero Films: A Review of Wonder Woman” at Locus Online.

One important lesson to learn seems obvious enough: since the DC superheroes first became popular because of their appearances in comic books, filmmakers should generally remain faithful to the contents and spirit of their original adventures. One of the irksome aspects of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was his willingness to tinker with Superman’s and Batman’s back stories and ignore facets of their established characters, so that one watches these films regularly thinking, “Superman would never do that,” or “Batman would never do that.” In contrast, though Snyder is co-credited with Wonder Woman‘s story, its other writers — Allan Heinberg and Jason Fuchs — must be primarily credited with a film that, with minor changes to be noted, is remarkably faithful to the longstanding traditions of Wonder Woman (even though she is never called Wonder Woman in the film), projecting a strong awareness and respect for the three aspects of the heroine that make her almost unique (and her gender, though relevant, is not the most significant issue).

(3) OMNI FOR SALE — BUT SHOULD IT BE? The entire run of Omni magazine is available for purchase from Amazon for $2.99/issue (or free if you have Kindle Unlimited.) — see Omni archive.

But SFWA President Cat Rambo points out there are unanswered questions about the rights to market the fiction in these issues:

Be aware that there’s some questions about those runs of Omni. While the nonfiction seems to have been often work for hire, I don’t believe that’s true of the fiction, and I also don’t think they’re paying the writers of that fiction. At least, they have not replied to repeated and increasingly pointed queries on my part about it. I’ve asked affected fiction writers to mail me if they know their work has been stolen by these folk.

(4) GET OUT THE KLEENEX. The New York Times debuted its feature New York Stories by getting some artists (including Tom Gauld) to draw header illustrations for selected articles.

First one I read was the lost dog story — “World (or at Least Brooklyn) Stops for Lost Dog” by reporter Andy Newman. Big tearjerker.

Bailey, a 2½-year-old goldendoodle, lived a placid, largely uneventful life on a block of handsome brownstones in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, until 7:15 on the morning of Oct. 24.

That was when her owner leashed her to a metal chair outside Henry’s Local, a coffee shop on Henry Street, and went in for an iced latte.

Another customer entered the cafe. Bailey, startled, jumped to the side. The chair crashed to the sidewalk. The noise spooked Bailey further.

She bolted — down Henry Street, dragging the clattering chair behind her, with her owner, Orna Le Pape, in pursuit, yelling: “Bailey, stop! No! No!”

The NYT allows ten free articles before you a paywall. But there are ways around that, as you probably know.

(5) HARRY POTTER FAN FILM. ScienceFiction.com interestingly reports, “Warner Bros. Okays ‘Harry Potter’ Fan Film ‘Voldemort: Origins Of The Heir’”. The spectacular-looking trailer was linked in the Scroll the other day — now it looks like the makers will be allowed to do their feature.

But considering that this borders on copyright infringement, this trend has caused studios much alarm and has even caused some to call in the lawyers. For example, CBS and Paramount went after a ’Star Trek’ fan film titled ‘Axanar’ and tied that production in litigation for over a year. Eventually, things settled down and the filmmakers were allowed to proceed with their project with certain conditions, but it set a precedent for studios and future fan films that have recently played out with Warner Bros. and a ‘Harry Potter’ fan film titled ‘Voldemort: Origins of the Heir’. Luckily, just as with the ‘Star Trek’ production, it would seem that the studio has given the fans their blessing to move forward with their labor of love.

While speaking with Polygon, ‘Origins of the Heir’ co-director Gianmaria Pezzato of Tryangle Films revealed that after WB had their Kickstarter campaign shut down in July 2016, the two parties came to some kind of agreement that would allow Pezzato, co-director Stefano Prestia, and the whole crew to continue their work. However, there were some conditions:

“We had a private and confidential discussion with Warner Bros who contacted us during the period of the crowdfunding campaign. The only thing we can say is that they let us proceed with the film, in a non profit way, obviously.”

With WB’s blessing, Tyrangle is back in business. It’s a good thing too because their film looks really awesome. I mean, when fans can create a House Elf as well as some of the best animators in the business, it would be a crime for a cease and desist to keep the movie from coming to fruition.

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • June 3, 1965 — Astronaut Edward H. White II was the first American to perform a “spacewalk” when he stepped outside of his spacecraft

(7) YESTERDAY IN HISTORY

  • June 2, 1950 Influential sci-fi film Rocketship X-M opens in theaters.
  • June 2, 1989 Nicolas Cage stars in horror comedy Vampire’s Kiss.

(8) YESTERDAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born June 2, 1915 — Lester del Rey

(9) WATCH FOR THE BLINK. Offering more participation than SETI@home: “Citizen Scientists Comb Images To Find An ‘Overexcited Planet'”.

“Maybe Mesklin is out there just waiting to be discovered,” comments Chip Hitchcock.

Professional astronomers have been turning to the public for help with their research. So far, these “citizen scientists” have helped characterize distant galaxies and discovered gravitation lenses.

Now you can add finding brown dwarfs to the list. An article just published in Astrophysical Journal Letters describes a brown dwarf discovered with the help of four volunteers through an online crowdsourced search.

The project is called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. When NPR reported on it in February, the focus was on finding the planet that astronomers predict exists at the farthest reaches of the solar system.

(10) EARTH, THE FINAL FRONTIER. “This is exactly what Captain Kirk was portrayed as trying to do in the beginning scenes of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier,” David Klaus points out. “I didn’t think it actually was physically possible to do, and the ability to make such a climb was part of the fictional Star Trek future.” — “‘Free solo’ climber conquers El Capitan without rope, safety gear”

Alex Honnold, a celebrated 31-year-old rock climber, on Saturday became the first person to scale Yosemite’s El Capitan, a nearly 3,000-foot granite wall, without using ropes or other safety gear, according to National Geographic

(11) DUFF DOINGS. Down Under Fan Fund delegate Paul Weimer tweets more highlights from the New Zealand leg of his trip.

(12) WISCON. In “That was Wiscon!”, Sigrid Ellis has both favorable things to say about the con, and some other specific observations bracketed by the following excerpts.

Wiscon still has room for improvement in areas of social justice, but this year was certainly better than five years ago. I think it helps that a number of people No Longer Feel Welcome at Wiscon and have decided to go to OddCon instead. Which, is sad for people who liked OddCon, but good for Wiscon.€¦

(A note on Not Feeling Welcome at Wiscon: If you no longer feel welcome at Wiscon because people criticize you and tell you you are saying and doing bigoted things, perhaps you should examine that in your heart. Listen. Read up on the topic. Challenge your views. Think on it a while. Perhaps, apologize. Perhaps grow as a person. Or, you know, clutch your bigotry to your chest and flounce away on a cloud of hurt privilege and drama. That’s a choice you can make, sure, why not.)

(12) TO SEE THE UNSEEN. The Washington Post’s Julie Zauzmer discusses how children’s book author Marissa Moss decided to make her memoir of her husband’s death, Last Things, a graphic novel in order to best convey her emotions about her husband’s death: “In graphic memoir, children’s author aims to show adults what they don’t see about death”.

…Part of the problem, Moss said, is that American culture isolates death from everyday life, cordoning off the messy experiences of illness and grief in hospital rooms and nursing homes. Most people don’t see the ill or bereaved until they become the mourner themselves.

With her memoir “Last Things,” published last month, Moss becomes one of a growing group of writers attempting to expose these hidden yet universal processes. From tell-all bloggers posting about every stage of sickness and death, to Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s “Option B” published after her husband’s untimely death, Moss joins in to illustrate grief — in her case, quite literally.

A prolific children’s book writer best known for her popular “Amelia’s Notebook” series, Moss has been telling stories through a mix of words and pictures for decades. But when she first sat down to create a memoir of Harvey’s illness, she only wrote prose.

Publishers balked. …

(13) CLUB MEETING. The Hugo Award Book Club takes up a popular sequel in “A Closed And Common Orbit — Book Club Review”.

Generic Space Setting

Becky Chambers’ strength is not world building. Both of her books so far feature fungible aliens from central casting, off-the-shelf worlds, and a feel-good interstellar society not dissimilar from the United Federation of Planets.

But this is actually not a bad thing, since digging into the world doesn’t detract from what’s important in the book: the relationships and the characters. Numerous novels in recent years have been marred by too much focus on the universe, and not enough focus on the characters.

(14) WE’RE HERE. At The Bearded Trio Paul Gibbs studies the only Name of the Game episode anybody still cares about: “L.A. 2017: A look back at Steven Spielberg’s Early Sci-Fi Time Travel Movie”.

When I first [heard] two years ago that Steven Spielberg had directed a science fiction TV movie called L.A. 2017, I was puzzled. How could I not know about this? I pride myself on my extensive knowledge of Spielberg’s work, and even on the relative completeness of my personal collection (when people try to catch me by asking if the collection includes Duel, I smirk and reply it even includes the far lesser known Something Evil.). How could i not be aware of this one?

(15) TOY TIME. Forbes writer Ollie Barder is excited: “Bandai Unveils Its Perfect Grade Millennium Falcon Model Kit And It Is No Hunk Of Junk”.

For Star Wars fans, Bandai is now the go to resource for the best toys and model kits for the entire franchise. Its latest offering though is all kinds of epic; a massive 1/72 scale Perfect Grade Millennium Falcon kit.

If you are not familiar with the term “Perfect Grade“ that comes from Bandai’s Gundam model kit, or gunpla, line. It’s the highest grade in terms of complexity, gimmicks, detailing, scale and price. The results are usually incredibly though and I have availed myself of a few of these kits over the years, so I speak from experience here.

In this instance, the Millennium Falcon matches the same 1/72 scale as its X-Wing and TIE Fighter kits, so you can totally do a huge nerdy diorama if you so wish.

The size thing is a big point here, as this kit is massive. It’s also gimmick ridden and full of lights and a removable cockpit cover.

 

[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus, Chip Hitchcock, Joe H., Cat Rambo, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

66 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/3/17 Hello Pixel My Old Friend, I’ve Come To Scroll With You Again

  1. June 3 is also the birthday of Marion Zimmer Bradley (1930), and actor Maurice Evans (1901, who played Zaius in the Planet of the Apes movie).

    (3) Good for Cat Rambo for looking out for authors, but if she doesn’t as yet know of any who were wronged, it seems early to be going public with concerns.

  2. @OGH re @5: the link text reproduces the website’s headline’s misspelling of Voldemort (as Voldermort). A delicate distinction: do you frank it through or fix the error?

    Fifth?!?

    @12: As a 16-time attendee who had to skip a year and has been uncertain about going back, I wish Ellis weren’t quite so certain about how people who don’t feel welcome at Wiscon should act and feel. Not all of us fit in her assumptions.

  3. The redhead and I went to see Wonder Woman yesterday. It was fantastic. I’d rank it up there with the best of the first generation Marvel movies like Iron Man and Captain America: The First Avenger.

    It will take a lot to knock this off of my Hugo nominations for next year.

  4. @Kip W: There’s always interesting stuff at The American Conservative, and poking around after reading Daniel Larison’s piece led me to this: Cyberpunk Is Now Reality.

    It amused me to find passages containing these two sentences (just to pick a couple) that resonated greatly with me, nestled up to sentences that pissed me the hell off:

    As rootlessness moves from exception to rule, obligations to others begin to look like hindrances.

    Consumerization of the body, reproduction and social relations lost their conspicuous ugliness when they were rebranded as “liberation.”

    Always a breath of fresh air to read conservatives during a time of right-radicalism.

  5. Chip Hitchcock: @OGH re @5: the link text reproduces the website’s headline’s misspelling of Voldemort (as Voldermort)

    Missed that. And I don’t even have the excuse of having a New Jersey accent…

  6. (14): I can safely say that is the only Name of the Game episode I remember, but I had no idea Spielberg directed it.

  7. (14) I occasionally watched The Name of the Game during its original run, starting when it aired 8:30 to 10 p.m., immediately preceding Star Trek season 3, Friday nights on NBC. Glad to see that “L.A. 2017” is finally on YouTube; I haven’t seen it since 1971, and last time I checked a few months ago, there was just a trailer.

  8. Los Angeles 2017 A.D. came up on a friend’s FB feed a bit ago, as he believes the end scene of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow with “Los Angeles 2017” appearing on the screen is a reference to the Name of the Game episode. As it happens, it was a Hugo Finalist in 1972, making it the first time works directed by Spielberg and George Lucas would go up against each other as Lucas was also on the ballot with THX-1138. They both lost to Stanley Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange.

  9. Tom Galloway: As it happens, it was a Hugo Finalist in 1972, making it the first time works directed by Spielberg and George Lucas would go up against each other as Lucas was also on the ballot with THX-1138. They both lost to Stanley Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange.

    That’s a great story!

  10. (12) Loved the flounce reference.

    (14) Am now feeling super-superior to that guy for not only knowing it, seeing it the first time around, but also having read the later novelization (Which has almost the same “Was it all a dream?” end, but a whole lot more sex that didn’t really add anything). Mom liked the series — pretty sure we started watching it when it lead into Star Trek.

    (15) So how big is it, exactly? “Massive” and 1/72 don’t tell me. Can I get inches? Centimeters? Cubits? A common object for scale?

  11. lurkertype: (15) So how big is it, exactly? “Massive” and 1/72 don’t tell me. Can I get inches? Centimeters? Cubits? A common object for scale?

    Remember, this is the ship that made the Kessel run in 13 parsecs. What would you estimate is the chance of getting a straight answer out of that crew?

  12. @Bill, it seems to me that the purpose of (3) Cat Rambo’s comment about Omni is not to stop people from buying issues or reading them on Kindle Unlimited, rather it is to publicize this with SF authors who wrote for Omni to see whether their works are being made available in electronic form without proper remuneration.

  13. @lurkertype

    According to Wikipedia, the Falcon is 34.75 meters/114 feet in length, so 1/72 scale would be 48.26 centimeters/19 inches long. I could probably find more complete dimensions elsewhere, but that should give some idea.

  14. 13) “Becky Chambers’ strength is not world building. Both of her books so far feature fungible aliens from central casting, off-the-shelf worlds, and a feel-good interstellar society not dissimilar from the United Federation of Planets.”

    Did they read the same books I did? The outstanding world-building was one of the things I liked best about both Chambers books. None of her cultures (except Mars, which is understandable) felt off-the-shelf to me. The aliens and their cultures are genuinely ALIEN, in a way that used to be rare* but in the last decade or so we’re seeing more and more often; I’m tired of books in which the aliens are clearly modeled after this or that non-white-European Earth culture and nothing much else is different. And while the GC has some things in common with the Federation, it has one very important difference: Earth and Humans are not the acknowledged leaders. To continue the Star Trek metaphor, we’re getting a “Below Decks” look at Federation-style politics here, and it’s fascinating.

    * The best example I can think of offhand is Asimov’s The Gods Themselves.

  15. Chip Hitchcock: misspelling of Voldemort (as Voldermort)

    Mike Glyer: Missed that. And I don’t even have the excuse of having a New Jersey accent…

    That’s not Jersey, that’s them Commonwealthers. You should ask Camerstros Felarpton about that. 😉

  16. Mike Glyer: Remember, this is the ship that made the Kessel run in 13 parsecs.

    As I, and half the theatre at The Force Awakens, pointed out:
    IT’S TWELVE PARSECS!

  17. (3) Just to confirm that copies of Omni are also for sale on Amazon UK for £2.39-2.44 in Kindle format (which seems a rather unfair conversion of the dollar price).

    Off-topic I know, but this latest attack on London confirms how stupid terrorists are if they think this is somehow going to scare us.

  18. There seem to be two #12s today. (Wiscon and the Graphic Novel.) I thought we reserved that for #5! 😀

    Come on baby, don’t scroll the reaper!

  19. 13) Rather a short and superficial review… and considering the book’s main characters are both members of oppressed underclasses (clone labourer with no human rights, downloaded AI who faces an automatic death sentence for the crime of existence)… the society depicted isn’t entirely “feel-good”, now, is it?

  20. Bill says 3) Good for Cat Rambo for looking out for authors, but if she doesn’t as yet know of any who were wronged, it seems early to be going public with concerns.

    Unless the Omni contract signed with the author or their authorized agent specifically allowed for future use and stated that if would mean more money, the answer’s that Amazon is committing a copyright violation on a spectacular scale.

    I had a talk with a packager of a long running fantasy and horror anthology series as to why there wasn’t ebook versions of them. He said that early in the early 90s when it got started that no one thought of digital rights. When the publisher asked him to get rights to these so they could do ebook versions, he found many of the authors weren’t interested as they had found other venues, including published as ebooks via Amazon, to be profitable.

  21. Went to Wonder Woman on Friday, while I enjoyed it I wouldn’t say it didn’t have flaws. 76% or verging on four stars would be about right for me.

    Without reaching for ROT13 I will say an overuse of Bullet Time slow mo cost it some marks from me.

  22. second 12:

    Haven’t seen this graphic novel, but having just been through a home hospice experience (we buried Karen yesterday) and the same for my father four years ago, I’d like to offer this:

    Home hospice was easier in NH than it was in FL…we had much more control over Karen’s medications and nursing response was faster/better than it had been in FL. (Point of fact: my father needed more pain medication, inaccessible to us, and my mother, myself and the in-home nurses aide were all on the phone screaming at call-takers to get someone to the house when my father passed.)

    Even though NH was better, it still had its glitches, and there was one evening when we couldn’t convince anyone to come out and had to resort to a family member, who graciously gave of her time.

    I’ve not been through hospice in a facility, so can’t really compare the two, but if the deal is that you’re supposed to be made comfortable and pain-free (or nearly as much as is physically possible) it strikes me that being IN a medical facility eliminates all of the waiting associated with having to call the service, get a call back from the covering nurse, discuss what’s going on and wait for them to decide if they should dispatch someone.

    For me, those calls always had the shadow of possible denial of service (for whatever reason – all the nurses are on call, there’s a snowstorm, whatever) attached to them and were never pleasant (even tho the folks I dealt with in NH were, for the most part, very professional and responsive.)

    I find that, as a patient’s advocate (did it for Karen’s mom, my Dad, Karen, myself, have a bit of experience…) the tension arises around this dynamic: I have one patient, they have many. MY patient is THE NUMBER ONE PRIORITY for me, but not necessarily for them.

    Put another way: if my wife is uncomfortable for some reason that I can’t address, I want the nurse/doctor there immediately. The poor woman is dying and that’s more than enough for her to have to handle. I don’t want to have to say, “tomorrow we’ll take care of it”, or “the nurse may be here in a few hours”.

    So I strongly recommend that, if you or someone close to you is wrestling with home or hospice center, you take these concerns into consideration.

    Physically, towards the end, I was unable to handle Karen by myself. Aspects of her illness made it nearly impossible to lift or turn her in conventional ways Due to utter exhaustion, I was also unable to keep up with the daily schedule of things that needed doing. (I won’t go into messy detail, but there was a string of three nights where it was necessary for Karen to get out of bed every hour and ten minutes…)

    Fortunately, I was able to get family help. The last week or so, one or another of her boys stayed the night, which we broke into shifts.

    The dying process is absolutely something we hide in this country, and that makes it all that much more difficult to deal with. We need to do more and better.

  23. Steve Davidson, sincere condolences, and thank you for sharing your experiences; they’re sure to help others in similar circumstances.

  24. Steve:

    I’m sorry for your loss.

    From what I’ve seen, which I should note wasn’t close up as your experiences were, there’s a trade-off between the issues you mention, and ways that being at home instead of in even a good hospice facility will give a person some psychological comfort. I suspect the decision should depend on the patient’s specific medical condition(s) as well as on things like how their home is set up.

  25. (2) WORD PROBLEM

    Just back from seeing it, and I think this review is pretty much on point. It was a movie that wasn’t afraid to go big on its theme and play it out in a (mostly) coherent way.
    I really (really really) hope this shows DC how to get good versions of their characters on the big screen rather than just letting Zack Snyder loose on them.

    (3) OMNI FOR SALE — BUT SHOULD IT BE?

    I ask this question from a position of total ignorance – at what point do you stop being able to sell the magazine issue in which you’ve paid an author for a story unless you pay them again?

  26. (15) So how big is it, exactly?

    Their 1/72 Y-fighter is 9 inches long. FWIW.

  27. (4) Mike, your mention of “header illustrations” is seriously underselling this project. They’re full-on comics adaptations; the “headers” are just for the table of contents. I mean, I know you know that, but someone reading your post wouldn’t know that.

  28. Mark asks I ask this question from a position of total ignorance – at what point do you stop being able to sell the magazine issue in which you’ve paid an author for a story unless you pay them again?

    It’s not a question where the possibility of running afoul of copyright issue this way until the net became what it is. A magazine generally exist in print just one time. That’s why there are collector markets for early Rolling Stones and pretty whatever else you can think of.

    Complacating this is that publishers, or least some of sleazy ones IMHO, are claiming that the lack of digital rights in a contract means the publisher has the right to do so. Cat Rambo knows a lot more about this then I do — I’m more familiar with the mess that’s artist compensation for music played in coffeeshops, bookstores and pretty much everywhere else. We used to have two collecting agencies, ASCAP and BMI, but SOCAN, the Candian artist collection agency, has stepped up dramatically their efforts here in the States.

    I don’t think that I’ve heard of a similar agency collecting what writers are owed. I know SWFA does a lot of this but I’m thinking of organisations that just do this.

  29. @Mark, I believe the catch for Omni is the same as it was during the transition from paper books to ebooks. When ebooks started becoming prevalent, if the contract with the author did not include ebook rights, the publisher was did not have the right to sell an ebook version. Since most contract written before about 2006 or so did not mention ebook rights, they had to be negotiated separately. If Omni fiction was not works for hire, and the contracts did not include electronic editions, then the Kindle publisher doesn’t have the right to republish without a new contract with the authors. This is also why you see very few older anthologies get ebook editions. It can be very hard to track down authors or their estates to get the new contracts.

  30. I know this covfefe-thing has run its course, but this SF-related tweet made me laugh.

    Like a scroll over trioubled pixels, I will tick me now.

  31. Eli: (4) Mike, your mention of “header illustrations” is seriously underselling this project. They’re full-on comics adaptations; the “headers” are just for the table of contents. I mean, I know you know that, but someone reading your post wouldn’t know that.

    Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt, but I had honestly missed the whole point. I thought there were only the headers because I never clicked on the art, only on the links to the articles….! :$

    I’m glad you explained for everyone’s benefit.

  32. I scrolled my eyes
    Drew back the pixels
    To see for certain
    What I thought I’d ticked

    (Quite how my brain went off down that track…)

  33. @Mark

    Snyder has a writing credit so it’s not entirely free from his influence. Hopefully it is a clear sign that DC are starting to get their act together though. I was hoping for another Mark Kermode rant on Snyder in the Radio 5 Live review but he must be on holiday or something.

  34. John A. Arkansawyer
    I often enjoy reading The American Conservative, and commenting there. Some of their writers are often sensible, and they have called out some glaring flaws on their own side.

    Steve Davidson’s comment reminds me that Mark Evanier at newsfromme.com wrote a valuable article (prompted by the loss of a loved one) on being The Advocate for someone who’s in a hospital or hospice situation. I don’t recall if he mentions it in the article, but her father was Walt Kelly, and I bring it up because he illustrated it with some of her journal sketches, which are very Kelly.

  35. Bruce A comments If Omni fiction was not works for hire, and the contracts did not include electronic editions, then the Kindle publisher doesn’t have the right to republish without a new contract with the authors. This is also why you see very few older anthologies get ebook editions. It can be very hard to track down authors or their estates to get the new contracts.

    Same thing holds true for musicians who were active in the early days of the 20th Century. Music is divided into the words and the music, and a separate copyright on each recorded version. these are valid for seventy years after the death of the musician provided it was after 1978 and 95 years for works copyrighted before that date. There’s lots of other legalese involved such as the limitation on how a group of investors can hold on to a work.

    ASCAP, BMI and SOCAN must by law tract down the musician or their heirs to pay what they’re owed. For some folks now in their old age now, these payments can be substantial if the agencies had a hard time figuring out who exactly they were to pay.

  36. Taupo is a fun place: it’s the caldera of a volcano that rather explosively erupted, so there’s a lot pumice in the lake. You can stand there and throw stones and watch them float back…

    Here’s a pic of one from Mary and my honeymoon: https://flic.kr/p/8HHMp

  37. @Cat/Bruce

    Thanks for the explanation – that now makes more sense to me.

    @IanP

    Snyder seems to be at his worst when he’s given overall control and starts….indulging….himself, so writing involvement doesn’t seem too detrimental. That said, I see that there are 3 people inc Snyder listed as “Story by” and I definitely detected a bit of too-many-cooks going on at the end – there was a sense at one point that they couldn’t quite decide on what the finale was meant to be. (This was a fairly mild issue by the usual standards of Hollywood rewrite hell though.)

    I love a good Kermode rant, but I’m not sure I could stand listening to him say “Zack Snyder” in that squeeky voice he does for him yet again, so maybe this is a dodged bullet.

  38. @Bruce A
    @Bill, it seems to me that the purpose of (3) Cat Rambo’s comment about Omni is not to stop people from buying issues or reading them on Kindle Unlimited, rather it is to publicize this with SF authors who wrote for Omni to see whether their works are being made available in electronic form without proper remuneration.

    Oh, I agree that is what she seems to be doing. But as head of SFWA, it would seem she would be in a position to ask the authors of fiction published in Omni directly (and discreetly), rather than publicly like this.

    In other words, if she knows (that is, has direct and specific knowledge) that Omni is infringing, then she wouldn’t need to be trawling like this. If she doesn’t know, then it seems premature to use the word “stole” like she did.

    @Cat Eldridge
    Unless the Omni contract signed with the author or their authorized agent specifically allowed for future use and stated that if would mean more money, the answer’s that Amazon is committing a copyright violation on a spectacular scale.

    1. I don’t see how Amazon is committing the copyright violation — if one exists, it would be the entity who is currently publishing the digital magazines that is committing it.
    2. Since e-rights weren’t an issue when Omni started, it may be that the contracts are ambiguous on the matter. I haven’t seen them, you haven’t seen them, so none of us are in a position to say that Omni is or isn’t the bad guy here.

  39. There’s good reason to be suspicious about the current digital editions of Omni. This article: http://boingboing.net/2013/07/09/who-owns-omni.html for example, quotes one of the editors:

    Omni only contracted for “first North American serial rights,” a common term at one point in writers’ contracts before the Internet existed. I signed a couple that mentioned these rights in the 1990s. These rights gave a publication a limited period of exclusivity in print. After that, all rights reverted to the author (or artist or whichever creative person), and a publication would have to negotiate new rights to use again. “We fought very hard for that for our writers,” said Weintraub. The same was apparently true for artists and other freelance contributors.

  40. The assets were, according to several sources on the web, acquired from the estate of the Penthouse founder Bob Guiccone. The only comment on Amazon about them was this:

    Are you kidding? This magazine looks like the pages were photographed and then saved as a pdf file. This is different than if a word file is saved as a pdf. The upshot is that the text is barely readable. If you try to zoom in on the kindle the text becomes completely unreadable. Save your money.

    It’s quite likely that there were no digital copies given the decades old nature of the magazine. And it had the clay coated paper which gave the bright shiny look that was difficult to photograph unlike centuries old just paper that photographs much better even though it has its own problems.

  41. Bill: Since e-rights weren’t an issue when Omni started, it may be that the contracts are ambiguous on the matter. I haven’t seen them, you haven’t seen them, so none of us are in a position to say that Omni is or isn’t the bad guy here.

    Omni lock, stock and barrel was acquired by Jerrick Enterprises. So any copyright violation would on their heads, not Amazon. The only thing that might happen to Amazon would be if they got a DMCA take down request by a party claiming they didn’t agree to this second publishing.

  42. Steve
    I’m so sorry for your loss. I just experienced the loss of my sister who was assisted by hospice in California. The last few days necessitated three caregivers around the clock, with morphine administered every hour. It is truly an exhausting experience, both emotionally and physically.

  43. @Bill: Since e-rights weren’t an issue when Omni started, it may be that the contracts are ambiguous on the matter. I haven’t seen them, you haven’t seen them, so none of us are in a position to say that Omni is or isn’t the bad guy here.

    1. Bruce’s follow-up comment addressed this.

    2. Literally no one is saying that Omni is the bad guy. Omni has ceased to exist. The possible bad guy here is Jerrick Media, which describes itself as “a technology and digital media company focused on the development and marketing of branded digital content and e-commerce.” Jerrick doesn’t seem to have any publishing experience except in the sense of running several blogs (their earlier “relaunch” of Omni didn’t have much of an editorial hand, they were basically trying to get “the community” to provide their content) so I find it extremely easy to imagine that they didn’t think too hard about the contractual issues attached to this material.

    3. Since the potential for such issues is very obvious to anyone who’s had the slightest involvement with a publisher, anyone who was careful and reputable would be expected to say something about how they handled it. The time to do that would be when they announced the material for sale, or earlier. I don’t think Cat Rambo is overreacting or being premature at all. It’s kind of like if you see someone selling a bunch of car stereos on the sidewalk, it’s not really a stretch to wonder whether they might be stolen— if you have some legitimately acquired car stereos and you decide to sell them on the sidewalk with no packaging, people are going to assume they’re stolen unless you give them some reason not to think so.

  44. Cat Eldridge: Omni lock, stock and barrel was acquired by Jerrick Enterprises. So any copyright violation would on their heads, not Amazon. The only thing that might happen to Amazon would be if they got a DMCA take down request by a party claiming they didn’t agree to this second publishing.

    Eli: their earlier “relaunch” of Omni didn’t have much of an editorial hand, they were basically trying to get “the community” to provide their content

    Ah, yes, it’s one of the Omni guys who keeps spamming the Hugo Recommended SFF threads with links to ineligible stories written by himself. Copyright violation would not be terribly surprising with this bunch. And the fact that they’ve refused to respond to SFWA’s repeated enquiries is pretty telling. 🙄

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