Any parent of a teenage girl is aware of the mega-bestselling Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer (major motion picture of the first novel due out in November). My 13-year-old daughter is eating it up, so much so I think she would willingly become a vampire if she met one as sweet and dreamy as Edward.

But now Ms. Meyer has found herself in a place not unlike J.K. Rowling when her final Harry Potter novel was pre-released. In many respects, this is worse, however — Ms. Meyer’s partial transcript for her next book, Midnight Sun, has been posted on the Internet without the permission of Ms. Meyer or her publisher. Because it was a partial, unedited manuscript and there was no guarantee the final book would have followed the path she was pursuing, she writes on her personal web site, the novel “is on hold indefinitely… I am now focusing on spending more time with my family and working on some other writing projects.”

This is a great loss to her fans and to popular literature. I can’t imagine how she feels right now. Naked is probably the word. As a professional writer of 20 years, someone who has written fiction and non-fiction, I would most definitely not want the general public to see a partial manuscript, and I can understand how she could feel derailed. As she said, “It was only an incomplete draft; the writing is messy and flawed and full of mistakes.” I also understand her frustration as a creator regarding her rights:

I did not want my readers to experience Midnight Sun before it was completed, edited and published. I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being. As the author of the Twilight Saga, I control the copyright and it is up to the owner of the copyright to decide when the books should be made public; this is the same for musicians and filmmakers. Just because someone buys a book or movie or song, or gets a download off the Internet, doesn’t mean that they own the right to reproduce and distribute it. Unfortunately, with the Internet, it is easy for people to obtain and share items that do not legally belong to them. No matter how this is done, it is still dishonest. This has been a very upsetting experience for me, but I hope it will at least leave my fans with a better understanding of copyright and the importance of artistic control.

I hope so too, Ms. Meyer.

Finally, there is a sad irony here. Ms. Meyer acknowledges that by writing about this, she will be driving still more traffic to the unauthorized pages circulating online. So she was forced to upload the pages to her own site, in other words promote the infringement that she finds offensive and embarrassing. If anyone out there still believes creators are not victims when their works are circulated online against their will, I challenge you to defend what has happened to Ms. Meyer.

UPDATE: Not exactly fresh news at this point, but Reuters has picked up the story.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 11:38 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under creators, internet, piracy, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.