Today I saw a thread on Google+ about an author that was called “shitty” because they decided to stop publishing a work of theirs. I don’t want to get into that thread because I don’t know what went down, exactly, and I don’t want to talk about this specific situation. I do want to talk about the general act of no longer publishing something, however.
To me, the rights of the author are granted by copyright. Copyright is a deal we make, society and authors: protection for a limited amount of time, and then it’s the public domain and *we all get to benefit*. So, stopping to publish something is a right you have as human. You’re exercising your right to not do a thing. Nobody should call you shitty for exercising that right.
Preventing others from publishing your work is also a right but it’s limited in scope. That, I think, explains the *expectation* that all creative works will be available for free, eventually. And so, by extension: if you want to cut it loose, remove your name from the work, dedicated it to the public domain, and be done with it. Preventing others from publishing something you made until you die and then a few decades more, something that other people will enjoy, something that’s cool – that seems spiteful.
Then again, if it was something you regret, be it sexist, racist, supremacist or otherwise idiotic, then I think preventing others from publishing it seems to be a moral imperative. Of course you want to see less moronic stuff out in the world and if it’s *something moronic you made* then that’s one of the few situations where you can actually *do something* about it. Copyright allows you to do that.
So now the discussion is different: What if there is something you regret having published, something sexist, for example, and you stop publishing it, and a now a sexist person comes along and likes it, and wants to copy it. Hell no! It’s your *right to say no*.
I sort of like this part about copyright. I just don’t think that we need this protection until we die and for even more decades to come. A few years would suffice. Ten years, twenty years perhaps. Or fourteen years, for example.
#Copyright