{"id":913,"date":"2020-01-28T10:34:51","date_gmt":"2020-01-28T10:34:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/waughandwords\/?p=913"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:22:17","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:22:17","slug":"markle-vs-mail-the-end-of-copyright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/waughandwords\/2020\/01\/28\/markle-vs-mail-the-end-of-copyright\/","title":{"rendered":"Markle vs Mail: the end of copyright?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an upcoming court case<\/a> you might just have heard of, the Daily Mail will defend its printing of Meghan Markle\u2019s personal letter to her father Thomas. If the paper\u2019s arguments are accepted, the ruling could have a huge impact on who we think owns what \u2013 and on the work of biographers everywhere.<\/h3>\n
\"\"<\/a>

The Sussexes photographed by Karwai Tang (via BBC)<\/p><\/div>\n

Markle\u2019s principal complaint against the Mail<\/em> is that it has breached her copyright. Anyone working on collected letters, or biography, can understand this: under UK law, as it\u2019s currently applied, Meghan would have to be dead for seventy years before anything she wrote in a private capacity could be published without the express permission of her estate. It\u2019s the same law for everyone, rich or poor, artists and accountants. It causes numerous headaches for the likes of us. On the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh we are lucky enough to work closely with the Waugh estate. Evelyn\u2019s grandson, Alexander, is our General Editor and is working on his grandfather\u2019s letters himself. We can quote as much as we like from any of Waugh\u2019s words across the edition. But this is a rare privilege, and it doesn\u2019t extend to letters Waugh received. While he, like Thomas Markle, might have owned the physical paper and ink of a letter, its contents reman the copyright of whoever wrote the letter. Trust me on this: there are flow charts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This means that we spend a lot of time talking to Waugh\u2019s correspondents and their surviving family, tracking down who owns the rights to what and asking politely if we can publish grandma\u2019s letters for the public good. There\u2019s big money involved in the trade of private letters too: in December, Sotheby\u2019s auctioned 10 letters Waugh wrote to his friend Richard Plunket Greene<\/a> and his family with a guide price of \u00a315,000 – \u00a320,000. Some auction houses are kind, and let our editors take notes from such collections before they disappear, perhaps forever, from the public eye. Others are less generous, leaving us to squint at the fragmented images of letters that advertise lots on auction websites.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

All this could change though, if the courts accept that it\u2019s ok to publish Markle\u2019s private letter because<\/p>\n

\"Original<\/a>

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold tells of Waugh’s horror at private letters being made public.<\/p><\/div>\n

her role and lifestyle rely on publicity and because there is significant public interest in her affairs. Could those arguments also apply to writers? Waugh would be horrified. He guarded his privacy fiercely, even moving house after it was \u201cinvaded\u201d by journalists. During a mental breakdown, he was tortured by the paranoid delusion that his friends were reading his personal letters aloud, and mocking them, on BBC radio. And he didn\u2019t have to contend with a tenth of the publicity surrounding the Sussexes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Curious, too, that the Mail<\/em> claim it\u2019s ok to publish the letter because it is not \u2018an original literary work\u2019 but a simple recounting of known facts. This biographer at least was not aware of such a difference in law. As I understood it, copyright in private letters applies equally to shopping lists and drafts of major works (though the penalty for beaching copyright might vary in each case). For Waugh and his friends, of course, the distinction may not be obvious: is a scribbled family tree, for example, merely the re-statement of existing facts or important preparatory material for his autobiography? If we can prove that love letters to Waugh, even if sent by published writers, are \u201cfactual\u201d rather than \u201cliterary\u201d, may we publish with impunity? We will need a new flow chart.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Is Waugh’s scribbled family tree an ‘artwork’ or a ‘statement of existing facts’? Courtesy Evelyn Waugh Archive.<\/p><\/div>\n

Practically speaking, a ruling in favour of the Mail<\/em> would work for or against projects like ours. The misfortune of private letter collectors, whose lovingly (or cynically) acquired caches would plunge in value overnight, could be our gain. Auction houses might as well be libraries, if the contents of letters like Markle\u2019s can be used and published by anyone, however they please. Bonham\u2019s can open up a reading room and make money by selling coffee to academics (they\u2019ll need a new revenue stream, after all). The only problem is \u2013 who would bother to buy our editions, born of years of careful research, if the juiciest bits (strictly non-literary of course) were freely available? And those auction houses and collectors may, in the end, guard their collections even more closely, if the only thing stopping us from publishing their contents is our inability to get close to the words on the page in the first place. That would be a huge loss to scholarship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an upcoming court case you might just have heard of, the Daily Mail will defend its printing of Meghan Markle\u2019s personal letter to her father Thomas. If the paper\u2019s arguments are accepted, the ruling could have a huge impact on who we think owns what \u2013 and on the work of biographers everywhere. Markle\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7],"tags":[30,14,9,15],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evelyn-waugh-archive","category-research","tag-complete-works-of-evelyn-waugh","tag-diaries","tag-evelyn-waugh","tag-evelyn-waugh-archive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/waughandwords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/waughandwords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/waughandwords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/waughandwords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/waughandwords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/waughandwords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":924,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/waughandwords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions\/924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/waughandwords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/waughandwords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/waughandwords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}