Fredrik Colting - Are Classics Fair Game?

Swedish writer Fredrik Colting is sued by the estates of several authors for reproducing classic titles as children's books without permission.

Colting was also sued by JD Salinger, which settled in 2011 for producing a sequel to Catcher in the Rye. This was a bizarre settlement where Colting was not allowed to publish or distribute the book in the US or Canada until it entered the public domain (in 2080) but was free to do so internationally... On Amazon the cover has an attractive red sticker emblazoning: BANNED IN THE USA, which can only be improving sales at £3.56 on Kindle.

Now Colting is back again with a series of children's books, or KinderGuides, with retellings of stories such as The Old Man and the Sea, On the Road, Breakfast at Tiffany's and 2001: Space Odessey. They're sold as illustrated learning guides through Moppet Books and are being challenged for wilful copyright infringement of the material. They are described as "derivative works, taking [the] plot, setting, themes, sequence of events and principal characters from each of the novels wholesale."

So what's the problem here? As a creative writing student, one exercise we were given was to write in the style of another author. But this is a far cry from rewriting a fairytale like Angela Carter and more like rewriting The Bloody Chamber directly for your assignment. Plenty of simplified language versions of classics are published every year, re-prints, learning guides, cliff notes, prequels and sequels; but what lots of people don't realise is that there are rights contracts behind the scenes that are negotiated to allow those versions/companions to the original, which are then checked by the copyright holder for approval.

What Colting is creating is direct but simplified copies and WITHOUT having gone through the rights process. Having been burned by rights laws in the past I can't help but be surprised that he's gone for it again and in an arguably more direct way. His book 60 years later: Coming Through the Rye is a sequel and therefore his own work, but an an unapproved sequel it doesn't pass the copyright laws.

The argument from Colting in 2011 was in defence of 'fair use', which allows for "copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and "transformative purpose, such as to comment upon, criticise or parody a copyrighted work. Such used can be done without permission from the copyright owner." - definition from Richard Stim.

If I was being sued for copyright infringement I would have read up on it and then made an effort not to make that mistake again. The fair use argument could be applied but as he is neither criticising or parodying the works I can't see that it would pass this time either. I will always be on the side of creative and imaginative authors' original works, which means defending those titles from infringement like this. Hopefully Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, the estates of Ernest Hemmingway, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac and Arthur C. Clark demand more than Salinger did in 2011...

More coverage:

The Bookseller
Publishers Weekly

Also Publishers Weekly's original profile of the books: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-book-news/article/71125-kinderguides-translate-adult-classics-for-younger-readers.html