Over at Making Light, Theresa Nielsen Hayden brings to light one of those fleeting internet phenomena, a piece of self published Star Wars Fanfic. For sale on Amazon. Another Hope, is being sold by it’s frighteningly clueless author, Lori Jareo. In her “Author Interview” (which I suspect is her asking herself questions) we find this little gem:
Q: Having set Another Hope in an already existing universe, I find myself wondering if there was any concern on your part regarding copyrights?
No, because I wrote this book for myself. This is a self-published story and is not a commercial book. Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it’s there.
My jaw has gone all slack at the gaping stupidity. Luckily, John Scalzi has all the salient criticism about how some one, especially someone purportedly an editor for their very own poetry publishing house should know better than to think this is just peachy and won’t George Lucas just get a kick out of it:
This would be bad enough if this woman were just some clueless person letting off some Mary Sue steam and then getting the idea that, gosh, this could be a real live book, but in fact Ms. Jareo purports to be a professional editor — which is to say she really has no excuse. In her interview Ms. Jareo mentions something along the line of “George Lucas says as long as no one is making a profit, tributes are wonderful,” but I think she rather seriously misapprehends what Lucas almost certainly means here. Leaving aside the fact that even if Lucas tolerates a little geekery on the down-low, he’s still fully invested in his copyrights and can enforce them at will and at whim, there’s the issue of scale. Geeking out with little stories of Yoda and Chewbacca on the Wookiee Planet on a personal Web site that’s visited by your friends is one thing. Publishing an unauthorized Star Wars novel via your publishing company and putting it up for sale on Amazon (not to mention Barnesandnoble.com and Powells.com) is really quite another.
I’ve said before I think fanfic is generally a positive thing for any science fiction universe, but I don’t think being a fan means you suddenly have a license to be stupid. Publishing your fanfic novel and selling it online is just plain stupid, and publishing your fanfic novel and selling it online when you’re theoretically a professional editor is just about as stupid as you can get without actually receiving head trauma from a tauntaun. If Ms. Jareo is lucky, she’ll only get smacked with a Cease and Desist order from Lucas. If she’s not lucky — say, Lucas wants to provide a cautionary example to ambitious-to-the-point-of-oblivious fanficcers everywhere — she and her company are going to get their asses sued, and given the blatant and obvious and self-incriminating copyright violations here, she should be thankful if she gets out of it without all of her assets, and the assets of her publishing company, encased in carbonite.
As it stands I think it’s worth it to start a pool on how long it takes for Ms. Jareo’s book to get pulled from Amazon. I’ll say this next Monday by 3pm Pacific. Any one else want to bet?
Originally, I was ging to bet this book would be pulled by Saturday night (still there). But, according to John M. Ford in comments at Making Light, the book has been up since july, 2005. So, we’ll see…
I don’t see that Lucas has much choice if he’s going to protect his copyright. His corporation will have kittens, even if he personally doesn’t care.
There are a lot of things that you can do, until someone notices.
Oh, he’ll defintiely do something. Since the Amazon link has been up for a while, most likely it’ll just be a cease and Decist order with veiled threats of leavng a garrison of Storm troopers on her front lawn if she does anything else this dumb. But no real damage has been done in the ten onthes she’s been peddling her book, so I doubt there will be any major damage to this woman and her poetry publishing racket.
Today, Amazon shut the AH page down.
I was disappointed. I wanted a copy of AH for two reasons:
(1) I wanted to have in my hands a tangible example of stupidity. I talk to high schools often, and I really wanted to have it as a prop in order to show students everywhere “This is what you DON’T do!”
(2) I wanted to see who shot first in AH — Han or Greedo.
I did manage to get Lori into my podcast (and if you’re curious — http://www.teemorris.com/blog) as a topic of discussion. So, if I do meet her at a con, I intend to thank her for prime material. (Then ask her “What the —- were you thinking?”)
LucasFilm wasted no time, though. The Amazon page went live last week (so I was told, even though AH was published in 2005), and by Saturday her websites were shut down. But I’m surprised on two fronts:
(1) This didn’t make the news. I was impressed she managed to keep it off the media RADAR.
(2) She is still a featured guest (and yeah, she lists AH in her bio) at a college writing conference. Her topic of discussion: Putting Together Your First Manuscript.
Anyone else find this funny? Not to mention a little spooky?
Just a correction…seems that ol’ Lori didn’t didge that media bullet completely. Along with various blogs, one media outlet broke the story…
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=4&id=35767
SciFi Wire reported that the page was pulled down on the 25th, but it was actually listed as out of stock. On the 26, I was getting the 404. Still, SciFi was on it.
I’ll defintiely check out the podcast, thanks.
Yeah, I flirted briefly with the idea of shelling out for the book, if only to have an artifact of pure ignorance on hand. It would have been a tangible reminder when I get in the creative dumps: even if no one wants to ever publish one of my stories, I’ve never done anything that dumb.