"Do your own homework"

screen shot, 12.45pm, 15th August

A number of news outlets have carried news of the lazy toad high school student who asked on Yahoo! Answers for someone to do a summary of DC Pierson’s novel The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To, and got a reply by the author, essentially saying "do your own homework". For example:

Student asking Yahoo Answers to summarise book he hasn't read for homework gets a response… from the author

A student has gained online notoriety after he tried to get away with not reading a book for a school assignment only to be caught out by the author himself.

The student took to Yahoo! Answers earlier this week, asking for a book summary of The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To by DC Pierson, admitting he had not finished the book.

By the next day the student, whose username was 'Idiot America', got a response from Pierson who was not impressed.

The author reprimanded the student posting: ‘I'm bummed out that you don't want to try and finish it, and not even because you think it's bad, but just because it seems like work instead of like fun.’

- Alex Ward, Daily Mail, 15th August 2012

Pierson's reply- click to enlarge

I'm more than a trifle suspicious that Pierson's reply to this Q&A - Can someone completely cover the book 'The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To' to me ? - is still extant on the Y!A site at the time of writing (12.45pm, 15th August).

There's a Y!A help section Is it okay to ask for help with homework? which is very explicit on this point:

Note: Responding to a homework help question with "Do your own homework" or "Read your textbook" is not okay.

Whatever one may think of the question and its lazy-toad asker, Pierson's reply (right) is clearly an extended "do your own homework". The question asked for a complete review of the book; it does not provide that, so it's a non-answer violation, and should have been deleted (along with the many other similar replies that made no attempt to answer the question).

It's hard to believe that it hasn't been reported, and if it was, as a first post by a new account, it would easily drop under normal circumstances. A suspicious person might conclude Y!A have flagged it as unreportable to preserve it for its publicity value.

Edit: as of some time this evening, the whole question has been deleted. It's unknown why.

- Ray

Arden v. Columbia Pictures

Last year - see Déjà view - I mentioned the contentious legal history surrounding Groundhog Day. Further to that, via the Paralegal Programs Blog, I've just been reading Arden v. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., 908 F. Supp. 1248 - Dist. Court, SD New York 1995, the summary of the case judgement arising when author Leon Arden brought a copyright infringement suit over the alleged plagiarism of his novel One Fine Day.

It's quite enlightening in explaining how a work may have close points of similarity without that constituting proof of copyright infringement. The details are complicated, but a key concept is that of Scenes a faire ...

- those elements of a work "that necessarily result from the choice of a setting or situation,"

For instance, if I set a story involving a man stranded on a desert island, scenes a faire might include his trying to catch fish, trying to break open a coconut, growing a long beard, trying to signal a passing ship, and building a raft. As they're highly likely developments from the scenario, I wouldn't be infringing the copyright of, say, Castaway. I suspected this would be how it worked, and I'm sure much the same applies if the core scenario is a person living the same day over and over: it's fairly predictable that any competent writer would have the protagonist trying to capitalise on the situation of having no consequences beyond the day (e.g. commit a crime, try to seduce someone, etc).

Given the existence of scenes a faire, the issue of plagiarism-or-not hinges on the differences between two works rather than the similarities, and the differences were what swung the decision in the Arden v. Columbia case.

- Ray

Déjà view

The Growlery currently has a very interesting post, Déjà vu, all over again, on the fictional theme of "trial and improvement", where characters must revisit the same scenario over and over (as in Groundhog Day) as a kind of Purgatory to learn from their mistakes. Go and read it; it's good.

Of related interest, I just dug out of the archives a blog piece I wrote in 2001 (but somehow managed to delete in blog housekeeping) that focused on a literary dispute hinged on the ubiquity of this theme.

June 28th 2001: I just read an article in The Author (Society of Authors house mag) Summer 2001 edition: Rights in Ideas: how not to sell a novel to Hollywood, by Leon Arden. Arden describes in some detail how he sued - and lost - in a case based on his claim that Columbia Pictures plagiarised his 1981 novel, The Devil's Trill (retitled One Fine Day) which they had read and rejected as a movie script. Arden's hero finds himself stuck in a time loop, he alone realising that he's repeating a single day over and over. He tries and fails to seduce the heroine, collects personal information about her to help him succeed, etc etc. You get the picture: sounds not a million miles from Groundhog Day.

Arden's $15m lawsuit failed because, basically, you can't copyright an idea. You do have a case if the precise treatment of that idea matches closely, point for point. But the court, though sympathising with Arden to some extent, decided that the style and treatment of Groundhog Day and One Fine Day were sufficiently different. Arden disagrees with the view of Judge Denny Chin that the book was "dark and introspective": but whatever may be similar, the Detroit News, December 12 1995 account mentions details of One Fine Day that differ radically in style from the light comedy of Groundhog Day. For instance, it features "witchcraft, an encounter with God ... an aeroplane explosion that kills 192 people, a rape, and a woman's suicide".

But hang on a moment! If you look at SF Recollections by Richard Lupoff at the Timebinders SF fan website, you'll find veteran science fiction author Richard Lupoff making exactly the same claim. He suggests that "a major theatrical film" (identifiable as Groundhog Day) plagiarised his work. He and filmmaker Jonathan Heap "were outraged and tried very hard to go after the rascals who had robbed us, but alas, the Hollywood establishment closed ranks ... After half a year of lawyers' conferences and emotional stress, we agreed to put the matter behind us and get on with our lives."

What's going on? Surely both Arden and Lupoff can't be right? SF movie buffs will recall the Lupoff work in question, a 1993 TV movie called 12:01, which had a very similar plot to Groundhog Day, though with a hard-SF rationale. It was widely assumed that this was derivative of Groundhog Day, but in fact it was a scheduled remake (according to Lupoff, a "very loose" adaptation) of a 1990 Oscar-nominated short film, 12:01 PM, based on a short story by Lupoff published in Fantasy And Science Fiction magazine in 1973.

So who, if anyone, has been plagiarised? Clearly, one shouldn't dismiss the claim that producers recycle ideas, and quite closely. Since Groundhog Day, any number of programmes have reused the time-loop theme: for instance, a Xena episode, Been There, Done That; a 1992 Star Trek:TNG episode, Cause and Effect; an X-Files episode, Monday; and an early episode, Come Again, of the Seven Days time travel series. But Arden's One Fine Day and Lupoff's 12:01 PM appear to have been thought up independently.

Coincidences can happen. I was surprised recently at remarkable similarities between one of my published stories and one I encountered self-published on the Web; yet an e-mail chat confirmed that there was no connection. The other author and I had started from the same premise, and thought through the consequences nearly identically. This sort of coincidence applies especially to SF, where just about anything you can think of has been done before. As the Turkey City Lexicon comments, the worst offenders for reinventing SF wheels tend to be mainstream writers who "try to write an SF novel without actually reading any of the existing stuff". Such writers tend, in my view, to vastly overestimate the uniqueness of their ideas.

Discussion at Fiction-L Archives - 'Replay': Second Chance or Infinite Recurrence Novels shows that the idea of time-loop is quite common in SF. It seems well possible that the writers of One Fine Day and 12:01 PM, like many others before them, came up with the same scenario and developed it logically along the same lines.

Nevertheless, given the many other reworkings of the time-loop theme since Groundhog Day, I wouldn't be surprised if Columbia had, in turn, got the idea from elsewhere. But if they did, it's really anyone's guess what the exact contributions were from the work of Arden, Lupoff, and the many other previous explorers of the same theme.

Since writing this, I ran into yet another possible precursor: the blog post at Gutbrain Records for 2nd February 2005 mentions

On January 1, 1939, The Shadow's radio audience heard "The Man Who Murdered Time", about a mad scientist who uses a time machine to loop New Year's Eve. In anticipation of perpetually reliving these 24 hours, he's borrowed tons of money (which he won't have to pay back) and invited his hated cousin over so he can enjoy the pleasure of murdering him again and again and again. Lamont Cranston is aware of the time loop, thanks to the same mental powers that make him The Shadow, but his resistance is weakening. If he doesn't stop the madman soon, he will also succumb and the whole world will be stuck in the loop forever.

You can even find it on YouTube: Part 1 / 2 / 3. I'd also be interested to read the BFI imprint of the Groundhog Day screenplay (Groundhog Day, Ryan Gilbey, Danny Rubin, Harold Ramis, BFI, 2004, ISBN 1844570320) which contains an account by Danny Rubin of the its gestation...

Originally I'd thought about this guy repeating the same day over and over again. But it didn't have a heart; I didn't know who the character was, or what to do with it. A couple of years later, I bought one of the Anne Rice Vampire novels ... I started thinking about what it would be like to like for a really long time. Would you change, or are you stuck as yourself no matter what? The idea of repeating one day is just a two-dimensional comedy idea. But when you think of it in terms of immortality, then all of a sudden it's about something. After that, the ideas came together very quickly.

...which very much fits my view of the script arising from logical development of a basic idea not in itself unique.
- Ray

Like rabbits

Click on images to see larger version.

Interesting bibliographic observation via Lily: I've just been looking at two books about the English countryside. One is Through the Woods, The English Woodland April-April (Gollancz, 1936); this is an extended essay by HE Bates celebrating a year in an English wood, illustrated by Agnes Miller Parker. The other is Fifteen Rabbits (Pilot Press, 1945) by Felix Salten (creator of Bambi, who makes a cameo appearance in this book); illustrated by one Sheila Dunn, it's a simply-told but very dark (of which more later) sentient-rabbits story in a not-very-defined setting (alongside a cast of distinctly English animals, it features elk, i.e. Alces alces a.k.a. moose).

A particular point of interest is the artwork. Stylistically, there's nothing to compare. The Bates book has an exquisite series of 72 wood engravings in the style for which Agnes Miller Parker is rightly considered one of the finest wood engravers of the 20th century (see the British Library for the Ian Rogerson book, and Scran for a selection of image thumbnails). The Salten has line drawings, competent but of a rather lower artistic order; Sheila Dunn isn't well known but the Dictionary of Twentieth-century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists (Mark Bryant, Ashgate, 2000, ISBN 1840142863) finds she was a cartoonist and commercial illustrator who contributed fashion drawings to Vogue, cartoons to Punch, worked for a children's magazine, and drew advertising art for Quality Street, Cadbury's and Morley Silk Stockings, as well as illustrating books that also include Compton Mackenzie's Unpleasant Visitors (1928) and Renni the Rescuer (1944, also by Salten, about a battlefield rescue dog).

Style apart, however, several of the illustrations have remarkable similarity of composition (Parker left, Dunn right, if it isn't obvious) and given the respective dates and vast artistic superiority of the older, there's no doubt in which direction the influence flowed.

Bambi, by the way, is so inextricably associated with Disney that I'd never realised that its origins are entirely non-American, which does explain something about Fifteen Rabbits. As Bambi, an Austrian deer tells, the 1923 Bambi. Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde was the pseudonymous work of Siegmund Salzmann, a prominent Jewish Austrian writer born in 1869 who spent most of his life in that country apart from his final years in Switzerland, to which he escaped on the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938. A European setting, then, is why there are elk in Fifteen Rabbits, which was first published in Vienna as Fünfzehn Hasen: Schicksale in Wald und Feld. The background also explains the darkness of the 1929 story, which has been read as an allegory of Fascism (the fate of one of its rabbit protagonists is imprisonment and death).

Salzmann/Salten was a versatile writer whose work went well beyond children's fiction; nowadays he is generally viewed to be the anonymous author of the infamous 1906 Josephine Mutzenbacher - The Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself. Google Books has preview access to the work itself here - not safe for work or minors, I guess, but as it was written a century ago it comes across as more quaint than shocking. I doubt Disney will ever take up the option on that title, but they did extremely well out of his other works posthumously; he died in 1945, and the 1950s saw Bambi, the 1957 squirrel movie Perri (based on his Die Jugend des Eichhornchens Perri) and the 1959 The Shaggy Dog (a shape-shifting story based on his Der Hund von Florenz). There's a good biographical sketch of Salten here inside The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890-1938, Harold B. Segel, Purdue University Press, 1993, ISBN 1557530335.

PS: Another detail to add to the rather dark backstory to Salten's books: they were translated into English by Whittaker Chambers, the American writer, editor, Communist party member and Soviet spy, whose testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee led to the conviction of Alger Hiss. As to Bambi, perhaps surprisingly even he isn't entirely uncontroversial: see The Trouble with Bambi: Walt Disney's Bambi and the American Vision of Nature (Ralph H. Lutts, Forest and Conservation History 36, October 1992: 160-171) argues for the damaging effect of the Disney icon in its failure to foster an understanding of ecology.

- Ray

Romeo and Juliet attribution trail

A friend regularly drops us in the puzzle page from the weekend Telegraph, which as a by-product comes with Kate Weinberg's "Culture Clinic" column (a celebrity answers standard questions and is then prescribed a film, a book and a musical work). More often than not, this produces interesting literary snippets; this week's, featuring Jerry Hall, mentioned the origin of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in a work 50 years previously by Luigi da Porto, a Vicenzan nobleman.

This is slightly oversimplifying; the attribution trail for Romeo and Juliet is fascinating. Luigi da Porto became a writer after being invalided out of his career as a soldier, and in 1524 wrote Istoria novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (Newly discovered story of two noble lovers). As to how Shakespeare encountered the story, the usual version - see Da Porto, Luigi at MSN Encarta - is that the primary influence was a third-hand translation, the 1562 The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke (also spelt Broke). The full text is on Google Books Shakespeare's Library: A Collection of the Ancient Romances, Novels, Legends, Poems, and Histories, Used by Shakespeare as the Foundation of His Dramas, John Payne Collier, T. Rodd, 1850 - which is overall extremely interesting (see the contents page) as a compendium of little-known precursors. How Romeus became Romeo discusses the texts in comparison; it's hard to disagree with its conclusion that the Brooke is pretty dull and poorly paced. For instance, Shakespeare's intro

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean

is masterful in its condensation of the Brooke equivalent text

THERE is beyonde the Alps, a towne of auncient fame,
Whose bright renoune yet shineth cleare, Verona men it name ;
Bylt in an happy time, bylt on a fertile soyle :
Maynteined by the heavenly fates, and by the townish toyle.
The fruitefull hilles above, the pleasant vales belowe,
The silver streame with chanel depe, that through the towne doth flow ;
The store of springes that serve for use, and eke for ease :
And other moe commodities, which profite may and please;
Eke many certayne signes of thinges betyde of olde,
To fyll the houngry eyes of those that curiously beholde ;
Doe make this towne to be preferde above the rest
Of Lumbard townes, or at the least compared with the best.
In which whyle Escalus as prince alone did raigne,
To reache rewarde unto the good, to paye the lewde with payne,
Alas (I rewe to thinke) an heavy happe befell :
Which Boccace skant (not my rude tonge) were able forth to tell.
Within my trembling hande, my penne doth shake for feare,
And, on my colde amased head, upright doth stand my heare.
But sith shee doth commaunde, whose hest I must obaye,
In moorning verse, a woful chaunce to tell I will assaye.
Helpe, learned Pallas, helpe, ye Muses with your art,
Helpe, all ye damned feends to tell of joyes retournd to smart.
Help eke ye sisters three, my skillesse pen tindyte :
For you it causd which I (alas) unable am to wryte.
There were two auncient stockes, which Fortune high did place
Above the rest, indewd with welth, and nobler of their race,
Loved of the common sort, loved of the prince alike,
And like unhappy were they both, when Fortune list to strike.
Whose prayse with equal blast, Fame in her trumpet blew ;
The one was cliped Capelet, and thother Montagew.
A wonted use it is, that men of likely sorte, (
I wot not by what furye forsd) envye eche others porte
So these, whose egall state bred envye pale of hew,
And then of grudging envyes roote, blacke hate and rancor grewe.
As of a little sparke, oft ryseth mighty fyre,
So of a kvndled sparke of grudge, in flames flashe oute theyr yre :
And then theyr deadly foode, first hatchd of trifling stryfe,
Did bathe in bloud of smarting woundes ; it reved breth and lyfe.

The Brooke version tracks back to da Porto, being a loose translation of Matteo Bandello's 1554 version (based on da Porto's). Opinion is divided over whether Brooke got it direct from the Bandello version or the 1559 French translation by Pierre Boaistuau. To make things even more complicated, da Porto's Istoria novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti is itself derived from an earlier text by Masuccio Salernitano (1410-1480) whose Il Novellino No. XXXIII is a short story about a doomed pair of lovers in Siena. The Salernitano, da Porto, Bandello and Shakespeare texts are conveniently bundled together in Romeo and Juliet, compiled Adolph Caso, trans. Percy Pinkerton, Branden Books, 1992, ISBN 0937832324 (Google Books allows extensive preview). In all this, however, da Porto comes out as the chief innovator in bringing the plot into its Shakespearean form; da Porto moved the setting from Siena to Verona and introduced many recognisable characters: Romeo and Giulietta from the feuding families Montecchi and Capelletti, along with a Marcuccio, Thebaldo and Friar Lorenz.

It'd be surprising if this were the end of the story. For instance, Nicholas A Patricca - see "Shakespeare in Love"—The Supressed Italian Connection - argues convincingly that Shakespeare didn't necessarily work from Brooke and could have had access to Italian sources. Patricca mentions that the Elizabethan court had strong links with the Italian Renaissance arts/literary circuit, and that Shakespeare had particular connections with John Florio and the Bassano family. Other relevant names as possible sources include François de Belleforest (whose Histoires tragiques came from Bandello) and William Painter (whose 1566/75 The Palace of Pleasure includes Romeo and Juliet.

Understanding Romeo and Juliet: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (Alan Hager, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999, ISBN 0313296162, 9780313296161) goes deeper still, summarising possible narrative backgrounds in even older parted-lover stories such as Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe (which of course Shakespeare knew, and which has the motif of one lover's suicide on mistakenly thinking the other dead) and Xenophon's complicated story of the Ephesian lovers Anthea and Habrocomes (which has the motif of feigned-death-by-potion to avoid marriage to a Perilaos - "so close in sound to Paris"). In short, Shakespeare was swimming in a sea of influences.
- Ray

Law and the Potter mythos

Specialist critique of literature is often extremely interesting for revealing possibilities of what the author intended (or raising ones not intended). In this light I've just been enjoying some scholarly papers I found via the Social Science Research Network. Harry Potter and the Unforgivable Curses: Norm-formation, Inconsistency, and the Rule of Law in the Wizarding World (Aaron Schwabach, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, TJSL Legal Studies Research Paper No. 05-13, Roger Williams University Law Review, 2005) and Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy (Benjamin Barton, University of Tennessee College of Law, Michigan Law Review, Vol. 104, May 2006) both look at the legal system within the Harry Potter mythos.

The Schwabach paper focuses on the law, and application of it, relating to the Unforgivable Curses, comparing this with British and international law on equivalent issues such as torture and the death penalty. Schwabach concludes that legal framework within the Potter mythos can be interpreted as that of a society which has made imperfect laws in the confused aftermath of a war. He argues, furthermore, that the Potter books will raise a generation tuned into the analysis of legal/moral quandaries. I'd like to think so, but unless such difficulties are explicitly highlighted in the narrative, I think it's likely that many such problems will slip by under the usual action story convention that a hero's violent actions against villains are rarely questioned. An example of this was raised a while back by Shami Chakrabarti: see Harry Potter is a war criminal (Paul Rodgers, The Independent, 26 August 2007), which discusses the considerable problem of Harry being allowed to get away with using the supposedly unforgivable Crucio curse on Amycus, a minor baddie, for the pretty trivial reason of his spitting on a teacher Harry likes.*

The Barton paper, on the other hand, leads with

What would you think of a government that engaged in this list of tyrannical activities: tortured children for lying;1 designed its prison specifically to suck all life and hope out of the inmates; placed citizens in that prison without a hearing; ordered the death penalty without a trial; allowed the powerful, rich, or famous to control policy; selectively prosecuted crimes (the powerful go unpunished and the unpopular face trumped-up charges); conducted criminal trials without defense counsel; used truth serum to force confessions; maintained constant surveillance over all citizens; offered no elections and no democratic lawmaking process; and controlled the press? You might assume that the above list is the work of some despotic central African nation, but it is actually the product of the Ministry of Magic, the magicians' government in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.

and reads Rowling's portrayal of the Ministry of Magic as an intentional indictment of government, finding in it a libertarian message.

Another paper by Schwabach, The Harry Potter Lexicon and the World of Fandom: Fan Fiction, Outsider Works, and Copyright (Aaron Schwabach, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, University of Pittsburgh Law Review, Vol. 70, 2009, TJSL Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1274293) is an up-to-the-minute exploration of copyright and intellectual property issues of derivative fiction. Its case studies are the dispute between Larry Niven and Elf Sternberg over the latter's use of Niven's kzinti in "slash" fan fiction; Marion Zimmer Bradley's change of heart over fan use of settings in her Darkover mythos; and the recent legal dispute concerning JK Rowling and The Harry Potter Lexicon. The last piece provides an extensive overview of Harry Potter clones and parodies, and I was delighted to see it cites a JSBlog posting about Tanya Grotter in a footnote.

Addendum: * I've just been informed that within the HP mythos, during the first Voldemort crisis, Unforgivable Curses were authorised by Crouch for use against Voldemort and his followers, and so this technically still applies to Harry's use of Crucio on Amycus. However, this doesn't make the problem go away; given the extent to which the wrongness of the curses is stressed, it's reasonable to assume very strict "rules of engagement". The subsequent exchange between McGonagall and Harry makes it clear he has majorly overstepped those rules

"... Potter, that was foolish!"
"He spat at you," said Harry.
"Potter, I – that was very – very gallant of you – but don't you realise –?"
"Yeah, I do," Harry assured her.

Realise what? That unless she keeps quiet about it, he's at the very least up for the equivalent of a court martial? That the incident passes without further analysis suggests that Harry, as postulated by Shami Chakrabarti, has indeed got away with a war crime.

- Ray

More Russification / Wind Done Gone

I recently mentioned Tanya Grotter, Dmitri Yemets' Russian "cultural reply" to Harry Potter. I've been reading Wikipedia on the subject, and was interested to find behind this a long-running story of Russian adaptations of classic Western literature - not mere translations but Russification to adapt to local cultural flavour. We have Tolstoy's Buratino (based on Pinocchio); The Wizard of Emerald City, Alexander Volkov's adaptation of L. Frank Baum's Oz mythos; Nabokov's Anya in Wonderland (see Nabokov as Translator for background); and Boriz Zahoder's adaptation of Winnie the Pooh (see the Zahoder page at the Russian State Children's Library). These works have acquired classic status within their genre: the Volkov adaptations have even come back into English and inspired the works of March Laumer (brother of SF author Keith Laumer - more about him soon). I find it hard to conclude JK Rowling's successful litigation to prevent Western publication of Tanya Grotter to be of long-term benefit to literature; Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass looks an interesting book that could enlighten Western readers about Russian mythology and life in modern Russia.

You can, incidentally, with a little Google-Fu, find a detailed English-language analysis of the the first three Grotter books in Tanya Grotter: a Russian Harry Potter Knock-Off or Parody?, Mark Hooker's conference address reprinted in Selected Papers from Nimbus-2003 Compendium. If you go to the link above and search the book internally for "Tanya Grotter" (use the Google Books "search in this book", in the right-hand sidebar) you can track through the article page by page (ie pp75-104).

Hooker ultimately concludes that the relationship between Harry Potter and Tanya Grotter is akin to that of Gone with the Wind and Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, a retelling from a slave perspective (marketed and legally defended as a parody, though it obviously isn't one in the usual comic sense of the word). A legal dispute on very similar grounds to that of Emets vs Rowling concluded as an out-of-court settlement - Settlement reached over 'Wind Done Gone' - enabling the book to be published. The US climate and scenario is, however, rather different, in that The Wind Done Gone was "home-grown" and had strong expert support for its cultural perspective; also, a block on publication raised First Amendment issues of "unlawful prior restraint".

Addendum, 12 Oct 2008: I just ran into another example of a retelling of a novel still in copyright, Pia Pera's Lo's Diary 2001 , Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita retold from the point of Lolita herself, portraying her as a sadistic monster: see Salon Books' The Nymphet Strikes Back and Nerve.com's On a Book Entitled Lo's Diary (Dmitri Nabokov's commentary). Despite considerable legal wrangling, a settlement was reached between Pera and Nabokov's estate - Pact Reached on U.S. Edition of 'Lolita' Retelling (Peter Applebone, New York Times, June 17, 1999). It shows that such accommodations are perfectly feasible.

- Ray