Deej Thoughts: Ephemeral
He gots opinions.
[This is something I first wrote on my Locals back in February, but it bears repeating. This sort of general situation is why I’m against Digital Rights Management, against “everything you buy is licensed, you don’t actually own it”, for the right to own and the right to repair, and strongly for Free Culture licenses. These positions, to be absolutely clear, are mine personally, and don’t necessarily reflect those of anybody else at RacPress.]
In August 2024, a new video game was released called Concord. Two weeks later, due to disastrous numbers, Playstation announced the game would be taken down, and all players would be fully refunded.
Why and how the game sucked, which it clearly did, is not important here. What is important is that it is, as far as I can tell, going to vanish from all human knowledge. The game, being an online sort of a thing, will cease to be; or at least, playing it will never be an option for anyone.
Something similar happened a year or two ago when Disney+ cancelled, then removed, the Willow series from its service. They did it for a tax write-off, but what they are doing is removing a creation, however awful, from the sum total of human endeavor.
This is not remotely Disney's first memory hole rodeo. The Song of the South has been locked away in their archives, the copyright renewed for the sole purpose of denying its availability to the public.
This deliberate vanishing of creations bothers me deeply.
Heck, I get grouchy about some pulp magazines from the 1900s, like (for example) issues of Railroad Man's Magazine, apparently not being extant, meaning the world is missing out on early short stories by Johnston McCulley (and possibly even a serialized novel or two by him) and others. I still retain hope that Lon Chaney's film London after Midnight will turn up in an attic somewhere, because all we have are still images, and a loose remake from some years later. The fact that it was apparently not good is beside the point. It existed, and should be preserved.
But the deliberate removal of a creation from human knowledge is another thing again. Those old pulps, and films, disappeared because of neglect. The idea that something can be disappeared by intention is haunting to me.
And not only to me. There are at least two novels about this idea.
Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions is an excellent book (don't hold Auster's NPR fan club, or his being an Important Author, against it) about a man who becomes obsessed with the life and work of a silent film comedian, Hector Mann, whose work disappeared for decades, until copies of his two-reel comedies began appearing anonymously in the mail to various university archives in the 1980s. His obsession leads him to discover what happened to Mann after his disappearance in 1928, and to learn of the existence of a list of films made, but never released, with tantalizing titles. He even gets to view one of them before... well, before what happens.
I've not read The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, and I should correct that. It's another "literary" book that may overcome its pretensions by sheer force of premise. A boy whose father owns a book shop takes him one day to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where he discovers a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax, and takes it home. It turns out to be the very last copy of that novel that is known to exist, and the author disappeared under mysterious circumstances. (And the implication, which might be wrong, is that the author made the books disappear when he did.)
Clearly, the idea of creative works being destroyed haunts the minds of creators, and not just me.
There's a bit of a fine line I am willing to draw. I made attempts at being a screenwriter, years ago, and none of my screenplays remains extant. J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, destroys his notes and outlines so that all that remains available for anybody is the final, completed work. (He explicitly does this to make it difficult for academics to be able to impose their theories on his work after he is gone.) So: if there is a single creator, and they are destroying something never released to the world... it still makes me itchy (despite me being guilty of it myself), but I can sort of accept that.
But for a company like Disney to take completed work, released to the world (no matter how disastrously) and then vanish it for a tax write-off, of all things... that I cannot accept.
It would be better to allow the tax write-off, but instead of disappearance or destruction, encourage the company to release the unprofitable creation to the public domain. Would it not be better to release the Willow series on a Blu Ray set (without DRM), marked with a Creative Commons Zero license, and include the score on companion CDs within the set, also marked with the CC0 license, give them the write off, and let anyone who wants to make use of any and all of the assets as they see fit? I say it would. It goes against everything Disney currently stands for, but the law could be rewritten to encourage such an action.
And Concord? There I'm less sure how to go about it, since I'm less well versed in video games and how online, multiplayer games could be preserved and/or released to fans to remix. But I should think a similar thing could be done. Upload the source files to the Archive, maybe, and make the game engine public domain, too. Look at what's been done with the Unreal Engine, for example.
But there has to be a better path than destroying that which has been created. Has to be.
I've thought about doing a piece on this myself, or a short story... Officially, the electronic version of the SCOTUS decisions are the official record. (this is current fact on the ground.) It's also legal for the SCOTUS to edit a decision after, sometimes well after it is made. (For the record, this is SUPOSED to be just for editorial clarification, however there is no law saying that they can not substantially change the wording.) Put those two together, and I see real problems lying in wait.
My former agent once told me, "A good book dies every day," after my publisher declined to print the 2nd edition of my book, simply saying, "That's not the direction we want to go." Never mind that the first edition sold out.