---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Ben Finney bignose+hates-spam@benfinney.id.au Date: 2008/6/16 Subject: Ghost Works survey - Chilling effects of copyright To: discussion@fsfeurope.org

Howdy all,

The Question Copyright folks are launching a new effort around the chilling effect of copyright: specifically, the effect of works where the only thing stopping the work getting out is the cloud of copyright questions.

They use the term "Ghost Works" for these never-made or never-released works URL:http://questioncopyright.org/ghost_works_survey:

In the article "Seen Any Ghost Works Lately?", we defined a ghost work as a creative work that never got made, or was made but not released, because copyright concerns prevented it from being started or from being distributed. Since then, informal conversations with artists, publishers and others have made it very clear that such suppression is a common event, much more common than most people think. But the public rarely hears about it, because no one does publicity for a work that doesn't exist.

The purpose of the Ghost Works Survey is twofold: to demonstrate the scope and scale of this phenomenon by gathering and organizing as much data about it as we can, and to highlight compelling individual stories of artists and other creators who had their work thwarted by copyright restrictions. The survey will not attempt to catalogue every ghost work — there are likely far too many, given that almost every artist we've talked to so far has a story of a work they had to alter or lay aside due to copyright concerns. Rather, we'll focus on qualitative results: we want to collect enough stories to discern large-scale patterns, so we can understand and publicize the effects of copyright suppression. For more information, see the projects page.

-- \ "I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then | `\ I thought 'Why should I? He never reads any of mine.'" -- | _o__) Spike Milligan | Ben Finney

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