Posted in:
By Any Other Name
We learn yet again, from a recent N.Y. Times piece that book titles can’t be copyrighted: there are now two books in print (one 30 years old, mind you) called The Saucier’s Apprentice.
Apart from the fact that Raymond Sokolov, the author of the older book, has done a brilliant job of promoting his work through this piece — it’s the work that comes up when you search for “the saucier’s apprentice” — what interests me is the question of why. Why can’t you copyright a book’s title? Or, to put it more broadly, why can’t you protect your book’s title one way or another, whether by copyright or trademark or…?
In 1996, there were 107,263 titles published in the United Kingdom and 68,175 titles published in the United States. (http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/tableView.aspx?ReportId=202) Including Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it’s probably safe to assume that there were over 200,000 English-language titles published in 2007.
A quick look at Amazon shows that the majority of book titles are five words or less (not including anything after the colon). It seems to me that there would be inherent problems in trying to make sure all of those 200,000 books published had a unique title.
Because they’re seldom original. As Susannah says, it would require massive hunting for new titles – sorry Ralph Ellison, H.G. Wells got there first – and would require a major shift in the law. You can read all about it on Robic’s site
All true, of course. But according to a lovely piece in the Global Language Monitor
Now a million choices for each five places that Susannah’s research shows gives us rather more perms and combs than… necessary. Of course we’d have to cut out various syntactically stupid combinations — or would we? Wasn’t there just a book published in Japan (written on a cell phone) called “If you.” Betcha that’s a first.
You lose:
If you / poems by Robert Creeley ; ill. by Fielding Dawson.
LC Control No.: 79309259
Type of Material: Book (Print, Microform, Electronic, etc.)
Personal Name: Creeley, Robert, 1926-2005.
Main Title: If you / poems by Robert Creeley ; ill. by Fielding Dawson.
Published/Created: San Francisco : Porpoise Bookshop, 1956.
Description: 13, [1] leaves : ill. ; 33 cm.
The law & policy is discussed in my little tome, Vaver, Copyright Law (2000) at 49 ff. An example given there is the (almost) exact Ellison/Wells titles. There is quite a lot of case law. In France, where original titles can be protected by copyright, the case law is utterly incoherent on when a title is creative enough to warrant stand-alone protection for the author’s life plus (there) 70 years. Passing-off or its equivalent seems adequate protection there and here: as you say, will you really mistake Wells for Ellison, or Ellison for Wells? And does an author need more protection than that? Does the public?