Story Ownership

Who owns a story?

It's a simple question with a complex answer; there's certainly one naive answer that immediately comes up - the one who created it.

Which makes a great deal of sense when the author, and the person who performs the story, are one and the same; which is really the way the first stories were related, so in a historical context it'll often be true.

It makes less sense, though, when the performance of the story is seperate from the author of the story - does a dead author still own a story, for example?, Because that butchers the idea of ownership pretty badly; once you're dead, you don't own anything anymore. Certainly the ownership is not generally inherited - the children of JRR Tolkien couldn't simply add an additional book in Lord of the Rings series if they saw fit. Legally they could, but it would not be percieved as if it had been written by JRR - so at the very least, the exact type of ownership JRR possessed is not inherited. Perhaps a different type of ownership is what the children recieve, but that's really besides the point!

What I'm getting at is not that ownership of a story depends on the proximity of the author and the performance; it's rather that the question has an intuitively trivial answer given some very particular, but fairly common, circumstances. That is, it's trivial if a story is performed and made by one and the same person.

But if it is written, such that the story is detached from the author, it almost gains a life of its own; it sometimes lives beyond the mortal life of the author, at which point ownership becomes difficult to define. It becomes apparent that there are several kinds of ownership (of which I have aluded to at least 3 here), and that these depend upon a lot of different circumstances.

I hope to touch on this subject again later, because it's worth exploring in more detail.