When I’m not teaching at the University, or scratching my cat’s fuzzy orange ears, or indulging in dangerous adventures in exotic places, I’m also a fantasy novelist. In that capacity I had to make a rather odd decision last year.
I was being urged by a friend to apply for a job writing a tie-in novel — one of those books based on a game, or movie, or TV show.
After wrestling with the angel for a while, I decided to not do it.
Who knows if I would have gotten the job anyway, but it’s usually a mistake to apply for work you don’t actually want to do.
If you’re turned down, that’s a rejection, which is bad. If you’re accepted, that’s worse. What’s the upside?
It’s not that I look down on tie-in fiction. I used to read a lot of it in my ill-spent youth — mostly Star Trek™ novels, and I am not ashamed to admit it (because I have no shame). And I wouldn’t necessarily be averse to reading (or writing) a story set in the Diablo™ world, or the Zelda™ world, or the World of Warcraft™ world.
Storytellers with bigger reputations than mine have written gaming fiction and cashed their checks with proud smiles on their faces. (The thought, “Hey, I get to eat this month!” is always a cheerful one.)
The reason I decided all that wasn’t for me is this: I wouldn’t own the work that I did. I’d get some money (which sounds appealing, certainly) and I’d get the experience of telling that particular story (which would be interesting), but I wouldn’t own the book afterwards.
Under the work-for-hire rules that govern that type of contract, the book would belong to my employers, because they own the world. I would only be using it for a while.
But who owns the work I do in my day job, as a university teacher? Who owns the syllabi, the academic papers, the online course materials — the stuff I and other university teachers produce in the course of doing what we’re paid to do?
Traditionally, all that stuff has belonged to the person doing the work.
It’s an inducement to promote creativity, right? People are more likely to write scholarly books, invent course materials and invest creative effort into the things they do if they have some control over the work they produce.
Take a part-time academic teaching an online course on, say, “Tusks of Glory: The Walrus in 19th Century Art and Poetry.” She could create interactive slide shows to help her students navigate the great literary works about walruses, interview experts on the love life of the walrus and post the videos to a YouTube channel, make a storyboard-version of Puccini’s infamous opera “Il Tricheco Magnifico” or she could create virtual tours of online museums that feature walrus art.
She might be doing this with an eye to publishing a book about walruses.
She could do all that — but would she? Maybe not.
If she knew the work she did, including the book she wrote, would become the property of her employer under a “work-for-hire” clause in her contract, she would probably do much less. She would save her efforts for a more amenable work situation.
After all, the copyright holder of a book gets to say what goes in the book. If the writer of the book holds the copyright, that’s not a problem. But if universities own the books that professors write, they would get to control the content of those books.
That creates a problem for academic freedom — or for ordinary freedom of speech.
Could a university put something in a professor’s book that the professor disagrees with — that might even harm the professor’s academic or personal reputation? If they own the book as a work-for-hire: yes.
It’s not in the interests of the university, or the students, or (of course) the faculty if the university attempts to make a grab for the intellectual property rights of the people who work here.
But grabs like that are becoming more common in an era where universities are corporations, and corporations are people, and people are frequently jerks.
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