If A Book Editor Drastically Changes A Book, Would Publishing The Originals Be Fair Use?
Sometimes it’s fun to dig into the nonsensical conundrums created by today’s copyright law. Michael Scott points us to an academic paper exploring the copyright conundrum facing the widow of famed American author Raymond Carver. Apparently, the widow would like to publish a collection of 17 “original” Carver stories. The stories have all been published previously, but in highly edited forms. The Carver estate does not hold the copyrights on those published stories, which belong to the publisher. So now that the widow wants to publish the original version of the stories, the publisher is threatening to sue for copyright infringement. This isn’t a case of just minor editing either. The paper shows how Carver’s original editor, Gordon Lish, didn’t just “edit” Carver’s stories, but seem to have practically rewritten large parts of some of them, often totally removing sections, and frequently changing endings. The paper shows this comparative example of the original Carver ending and the Li
