Photography, Copyright and Freedom of Panorama

My husband and I share a home office and most afternoons we listen to the culture program on German radio. Usually I blend it out and concentrate on my writing, but yesterday something caught my ear. The announcer warned that a picture posted online (to Facebook, for example) could end up costing you even if you took with your own camera.

By now most of us are Internet savvy to know that posting someone else's copyrighted photo constitutes misuse. But photos that we snapped ourselves with our camera phone? Those are fair game, right? Not always. In fact, it depends on what (and who) we photograph.

Copyright law also varies by country, but in general, we are not allowed to take photos of copyrighted works such as murals, statues, artwork or even buildings and post them online. If you take a photo on a public street, you are potentially capturing hundreds of copyrighted images (and private people, who have their own protections when it comes to publishing photographs).

Is this photo of me under the Kuwaiti water towers protected under Freedom of Panorama?  I think so!

That's why a Freedom of Panorama exception was created. This means, in most cases, you cannot be held liable for a photo taken in or from a publicly accessible places. In the US, the current law is more narrow and only applies to buildings. That means you can take (and post) a photo of the Empire State Building from the street (but not an adjacent private building), but probably not the Gandhi statue in Union Square.

Since tourists take and post millions of such photos, in practice it is unlikely that you will be prosecuted for such offenses. But it is within the realm of possibility.

All this got me thinking about novels and the futuristic technology within. If there can be such complicated laws surrounding the use of digital photography, what laws might governments have to come up with to regulate teleportation or hovercrafts or lightsabers?  These laws might never come up in the course of the narrative, but it's no doubt a useful worldbuilding exercise to ponder the legal ramifications.

NOTE: I'm not a copyright expert, so take this post with a grain of salt and feel free to do your own research.

Grammar of Old and New Worlds

True confession time. I’ve been watching Spartacus: Gods of the Arena on Netflix.  This is not Kirk Douglas’ Spartacus. This show is a guilty pleasure obviously designed to emulate 300, which, oddly enough, I wasn’t a big fan of.  The Starz channel production uses that bleak 300-esque cinematography and the same stylized stop-action, blood-flying-everywhere fighting. (It is about gladiators after all.) The style can get on your nerves after a while. However, for me, John Hannah and Lucy Lawless as the scheming owners of the ludus (the gladiator stable) make the show worth watching.  Think I Claudius (with a touch of Caligula) meets Gladiator. 

But I come not to praise Spartacus. What has really fascinated me about this show is its use of diction. (Didn’t see that coming did you?) You’ve got the usual stilted language that writers rely on to indicate you’re reading or watching something classical or high fantasy.  But the writers of Spartacus took it a step farther. They tweaked the grammar of English to emulate Latin. Just a bit. They dropped the articles.  Well, most of them. They really aren’t consistent about it, but they did it just enough to give the English the flavor of ancient Rome.  

Here’s a few PG-13 examples (there aren’t many of them) from Spartacus:

When has son denied father?

Man of ambition is capable of anything.

I will not die faceless slave forgotten by history.

This is but glorious beginning.

You get the idea.

Latin, you see, doesn’t have an equivalent to “the” or “a.” (Another true confession.  I took many years of Latin in school. I am geek. I am so geeky that I won the Latin project competition one year with my carefully crafted wax tablets. ) Latin is a very different language than English.  Latin is all about cases and endings, and the word order is flexible.  So, dropping the articles was the simplest way to give the English tripping off the tongues of the citizens of Capua a ring of Latin.

This strategy got me thinking about all the ways diction might be used to create the flavor of other worlds—either fantastic or futuristic.  Vocabulary is one way to do it. [Elana did a great post on slang a few weeks ago.] You get a great sense of the world from this bit from Clockwork Orange:

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.

Style is another.  You can definitely tell high fantasy from a noir detective story by the style of the language. For instance, it's a no brainer which one of these is from Lord of the Rings and which one is from Mildred Pierce:

“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.”

"You think just because you made a little money you can get a new hairdo and some expensive clothes and turn yourself into a lady. But you can't, because you'll never be anything but a common frump whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing."

So, manipulating the grammar of the language can be a third way to create the feeling of a new world.  I don’t mean using bad grammar to indicate an incomplete grasp of our language. No, I mean changing the grammar or sentence structure of English to emulate an alien language or maybe a profound change in a human one. 

Think about how English has changed since Shakespeare or Chaucer's time. What's it going to be like 400 years from now--if we're speaking it all.  Or what would the language be like if we didn't have certain concepts anymore?

The only good example I can think of at the moment is Babel-17 by Samuel Delaney.  In that story, the humans learn a language that actually designed by aliens to be a weapon.  The language doesn’t contain words for “I” or “self,” which theoretically limits the speaker’s ability to think about those concepts (at least in that language).  This is the same idea as Doublethink in Orwell’s 1984.  If you reduce the words in the language, you limit the speaker’s ability to think about concepts outside their vocabulary.

Can you guys think of any other science fiction or fantasy works that have used some tweak in grammar as a world building technique?  What are some of your favorite works that use diction—slang and/or style—in a creative way?