1 Feb
2007

















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     the thin lady sings?

A final decision in the moral rights dispute about a sequel to Les Miserables and a checklist of recent US litigation against video-sharing sites.

     Les Glums

Pierre Hugo, great-great-grandson of Victor Hugo (1802-1885), appears to lost a six year effort to ban a modern sequel to Les Miserables (1862) on the basis of what he asserted were the author's "moral rights".

He had sought a ban on Francois Ceresa's Cosette, ou le Temps des Illusions, which features the return of the villainous Inspector Javert - this time as a hero, a change of character perhaps induced by a spell in the Seine. (Having written Sherlock Holmes out of the picture at Reichenbach Falls - what is it about crime fighters and running water? - Arthur Conan Doyle at least refrained from turning him into a baddie).

Some Hugo heirs have been agitating for protection under France's moral rights regime, with a prohibition on contemporary sequels - irrespective of whether Javert is good, bad, indifferent or in drag. Pierre is reported as explaining

I believed we were fighting the good cause but the court decided otherwise. It is very, very disappointing.

I am not just fighting for myself, my family and for Victor Hugo but for the descendants of all writers, painters and composers who should be protected from people who want to use a famous name and work just for money.

Hugo enthusiasts, apparently horrified that Cosette's publishers had betrayed the immortal's spirit "to make money" (a commodity of which the Victorian author was inconveniently fond), have asked

Can one imagine commissioning the 10th symphony of Beethoven?

The answer is presumably no, although a sequel to Fidelio (same characters, new story) is not inconceivable, and 'reconstructions' or performing editions of partly-fully completed musical works abound. Krenek, Cooke and others for example filled in gaps in Mahler's incomplete 10th symphony; Mahler himself buffed Weber's Oberon and other works.

Copyright protection under French intellectual property law currently ceases 70 years after the death of the author. Les Miserables is thus in the public domain. It has been the subject of a Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical and a Disney cartoon, both royalty-free.

France, however, offers moral rights in perpetuity. Those rights are transmissible to the author's descendents, although not to unrelated individuals and organisations. The French regime is more restrictive than that of Australia, which now provides rights of attribution and integrity, discussed here and in Maree Sainsbury's Moral Rights & their Application in Australia (Leichhardt: Federation Press 2003).

Australia does not protect moral rights in perpetuity and so far there have not been judicial decisions similar to a French court's 1992 punishment of a director for violating Samuel Beckett's moral rights by staging Waiting for Godot with two women as the leads, contrary to the playwright's stage directions.

Pierre Hugo argued that the sequel violated the "respect of the integrity" of Les Miserables. The first court hearing dismissed his claims, indicating that he had not proved he was related to the author. In 2004 an appeal court overturned that verdict, ruling that the rights were transmissible to Victor Hugo's heirs on an indefinite basis. Characterising Les Miserables as "a veritable monument of world literature", the court agreed that Hugo would not have agreed to authorise a sequel by another author. It ordered Plon, Cosette's publishers, to pay symbolic damages.

Plon appealed, with expressions of support from authors, literary critics and film makers critical of the notion that there could never be a sequel to a French literary work and that adaptations might be prohibited as debasing the original work.

Other nations have been unpersuaded by bans in perpetuity, discussed in Copyright and Free Speech: Comparative & International Analyses (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2005) by Jonathan Griffiths & Uma Suthersanen. One example is debate in the US about Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, a reworking of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 Gone with the Wind, and lack of fuss about Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (revisiting Dickens' Great Expectations).

France's highest appeals court has now ruled that decided Cosette did not "betray the spirit" of Les Miserables or otherwise breach Victor Hugo's moral rights.

     filesharing

The culture wars continue online. The excellent Martin Schwimmer blog has pointed to Reel Pop's Brief guide to Online Video Lawsuits.

The guide is a collection of information on US litigation against major video-sharing sites, including lawsuits against MySpace, Veoh, Bolt, Grouper and YouTube.

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