Novelist Jonathan Lethem is trying to walk his talk about culture as a freely circulating gift. Lethem, you may recall, wrote a terrific cover story for Harper’s magazine in February describing how “borrowing” is an intrinsic part of creativity. He cited dozens of examples of artists and authors “stealing” from identifiable predecessors. The essay itself was a string of paraphrased paragraphs culled from the works of 40 or 50 authors, to whom he gave credit in several pages of endnotes.
Now Lethem has announced that he will give away a free option on the film rights to his latest novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, provided the selected filmmaker pays 2% of the budget for the film if and when he gets a distribution deal. The filmmaker also has to agree to release all ancillary rights to the film five years after its debut, so that further derivative works could be made. The idea is directly inspired by the General Public License for free software and the Share-Alike license of the Creative Commons.
Lethem wants to invite anyone – after a five-year waiting period – to be able to use his characters and story in any number of derivative types of artwork – a play, TV series, comic book, theme park ride, an opera or a sequel novel or another film. Working with his literary agent, Lethem has produced a license that would put all ancillary rights into the public domain.
On his blog, Lethem explains why he’s doing this:
Lately I’ve become fitful about some of the typical ways art is commodified. Despite making my living (mostly) by licensing my own copyrights, I found myself questioning some of the particular ways such rights are transacted, and even some of the premises underlying what’s called intellectual property. I read a lot of Lawrence Lessig and Siva Vaidhyanathan, who convinced me that technological progress – and globalization – made this a particularly contemporary issue. I also read Lewis Hyde’s _The Gift, which persuaded me, paradoxically, that these issues are eternal ones, deeply embedded in the impulse to make any kind of art in the first place. I came away with the sense that artists ought to engage these questions directly, rather than leaving it entirely for corporations (on one side) and public advocates (on the other) to hash out. I also realized that sometimes giving things away – things that are usually seen to have an important and intrinsic “value,” like a film option – already felt like a meaningful part of what I do. I wanted to do more of it._
Besides his Harper’s essay, Lethem started a project that he calls the Promiscuous Materials Project, which is his experimental attempt to generate “open-source” stories that can be adapted by filmmakers or dramatists on a non-exclusive basis. You pay a dollar, sign the agreement that contains a few restrictions, and the work is free to adapt as you like.
At this point, it’s unclear if Lethem’s experiments in starting a renewable cycle of his works will succeed. A skeptic could regard it as a promotional stunt. But if you read his works about creative appropriation and transformation, and how those themes animate even his new novel, it’s clear that Lethem’s ancillary rights giveaway and Promiscuous Materials Project are sincere attempts to live the very questions he is writing about. Bravo to the artist-as-l’homme engage!