It's one of two things:

The copyright holders are publishing new editions edited to modern sensibilities to maximize their profits by selling to a new audience.

The works are in the public domain, in which case anyone can edit up a new edition however they like, for fun or profit.

What's the alternative? We take away the right of copyright holders to publish new editions of their IP? We disallow people to edit works in the public domain?

If these conditions aren't met within a reasonable timeframe, then (by law) the original version would automatically become fully (or partially) public domain. ("Partial" public domain would mean than anyone could make or distribute copies of the original version. The copyright holders would temporarily retain the exclusive right to make edited versions, until the work fully becomes public domain when the standard copyright term lapses. At that point anyone could make and distribute the original version or their own, edited versions.)

Ideally, yes, but at a minimum he should provide a list of changes and their rationale(s) in the newer editions.

If he edited his book to rebut his own argument and lays out the case then maybe not but it should be stated in the forward that the change was made.

We are moving forward into a time where media is only digital and can be changed at will, it is important to establish a system where when we make changes we record them and also why we made the changes.

If we do not, the only future is one where information is as ethereal as the morning dew and subject to the zeitgeist of the times.

In other words, the diff between editions may be even more interesting than the either edition by itself.

If someone else changes the text on a book from a dead author... how do you know the author would have liked that?

I remember a while ago I was reading on a stage play that's supposed to be only 4~5 men (no women on the play), and the - now dead writer - specified that this should never be changed. And some ppl try to do women-only, or mixed cast, and then the writer's estate sues and tries to intervene...

The only real counter-argument I can make to the position that the author can edit his works but his heirs cannot is that the author chooses his heirs; the author could have instead chosen to will his works into the public domain after his death, or establish a trust or foundation with a strict mandate to republish his works in their original form while returning the profits to his heirs.

It's not a particularly strong argument -- many authors may not have the resources or foresight to make such provisions, and you could just as easily insist on authors who do wish their heirs to manage their works and not simply profit from them make explicit declarations on that point -- which is why I lead with the more extreme case of an author editing his own work.

I can at least talk to you about whether it's reasonable for eg Brian Herbert or (the now-late) Christopher Tolkien to continue to exercise editorial control over their fathers' works, or under what conditions a foundation could be established for the duration of the 90-years-post-author-death copyright the US currently uses.

If it's permissible for Dr Seuss's widow to inherit editorial control of her husband's work along with the copyright, can she pass that control to Dr Seuss Enterprises; if not, could Dr Seuss have established it before his death?

(Personally I think the other reply was better, in stating that it is arrogant to assume that the author's heirs do not know his wishes better than us.)

I guess the widow (or if they are still alive, the editors that worked with the author when he was alive) is the person that probably knows the author best to know if they would've liked their work to be updated or not. Or at least, make decisions on allowing changes that can have impact on how the author is seem (e.g. progressist, non-racist, sexist or not sexist, etc...).

My problem is when someone totally unrelated starts making changes, even in cases where author was explicit that they would never want the gender of their characters changed, and people go ahead and still want to change the gender

Edit: source for what I mentioned on this and my previous comment https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/beckett-waiting-for-god...

There's an obvious counterargument: how do we know [better than the author's estate] that a dead author would have been so committed to the retention of a particular stereotype or word that has acquired different connotations that they'd have angrily refused editors' suggestions they change it a bit for the next edition? In the cases discussed here, it seems particularly unlikely - would the bloke who accepted the suggestion that the workforce of African pygmies he imagined should stop being characterised as African pygmies really feel the purity of his writing was being destroyed if an even later revision made the comparatively minor switch to describing them as "people" rather than "men"?

There's an odd dichotomy between arguments that authorial intent is being destroyed by substituting or omitting a couple of words and various arguments that retaining them serves to create "teachable moments" about "how bad things use to be". With a few notable exceptions, "teachable moments" isn't at all what the author intended by a character using a word considered offensive in 2023 or casually assuming that women or foreigners were constitutionally unsuited to certain things, and generally they weren't trying to imply the character was a bigot (as modern audience might well misinterpret), or say anything at all about the contemporary attitudes incidentally referenced. Authorised translators use very non-literal translations, add or remove gender references or omit minor details that local audiences would completely misunderstand whilst living authors remain unconcerned and usually blissfully unaware; why are we so certain that the dead ones would deeply resent their publishers and estates making equally minor tweaks for the culture of 2020s English speakers?

But as you mentioned, the author's estate, family and editors that worked with them when they were alive are the ones that can probably make the best guess.

My problem is when publishers make changes even at times when authors are explicit in saying they don't want changes, without (not sure about this specific case, I'm just assuming here) getting approval from the estate

Automatic compromise: your copyright to the original is compromised or shortened in a way that makes its survival no longer dependent on you.

> Except it's never a faceless ... committee in practice.

> It's one of two things:

> The copyright holders are publishing new editions edited to modern sensibilities to maximize their profits by selling to a new audience.

Except that's exactly a "faceless ... committee in practice" (I elided out your injection of "authoritarian," because it missed the point).

Then the marketplaces ban the resale of old editions: https://www.newsweek.com/ebay-removes-discontinued-dr-seuss-....

And due to copyright, they have the power to effectively suppress older editions. There will be no easy way to get your hands on one other than figuring out when the changes was made (which likely wasn't publicized), then tracking down a tattered old copy on ebay.

> The works are in the public domain, in which case anyone can edit up a new edition however they like, for fun or profit.

That's not as concerning, because if the original version is public domain, it will remain easily available and bowdlerized versions are unlikely to be able to compete.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten [1], every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

[1] But originals are still kept in archives, and available upon request, so it's okay! Only a negligible number of people will bother so they may as well not exist, but it's okay!

You'd wish. In reality, custodians of each archive assumed that there are still copies in the other archives, and trashed most of the works to save money, without realizing the other archives were doing the same thing to those same works.

But it's all different committees. There's no Grand Woke High Committee dictating these changes to these works from the shadows. It's just capitalism, copyright law, and market forces.

Dr Seuss Enterprises is a private for-profit foundation established by the author's widow before her death, and while it's probably run by some sort of committee, it's a completely different committee than the board of directors at Netflix, and whatever VP heads up the Roald Dahl Story Company after its acquisition (I assume from the family, who were speaking for the company as recently as 2020).

So do we not allow the author or the author's family to set up foundations or sell their work to a corporation for half a billion dollars?

I suppose groupthink is a more likely explanation though.

As far as I can tell, a major component of woke bowdlerization of the past seems to be finding depictions of black people and either eliminating them or making them conform to the idealistic stereotypes of modern white liberals. That's stacking stereotypes on stereotypes, and the truth of the black experience gets buried even deeper.

The way my grandmother spoke would be cut out of a modern novel as a racist stereotype.

Modern reimagining of The Three Musketeers make Musketeers sound more honorable and noble then actual text. Some comedies make them sound incapable, clumsy and funny. Dumas politics was not pro-ancient regime and he actually makes it clear. Making that into super honorable flawless dudes is as much "changing past fiction" as if you slapped gender or race or made them eskimos. But somehow that is fine.

> If all we see is fictional pasts where black people are just white people with tans, and women are just pretty men, what are black people and women complaining about?

In general, they complain about how they are or were treated back in real world. They also complain about being depicted in fiction as dumb simpletons without agency and then people on discussion forums claiming that those dumb simpletons depictions somehow constitute historical reality.

Back in the early 2000s I saw someone refer to a wheelchair-bound person as "handicapable". The disabled fellow ran over his foot lol.

Point being I think it's best not to minimize people's suffering. Acknowledge it, respect it, and try to move forward together.

I don't want others to think of me as disabled either (though a little understanding might be nice when I fail to mask well enough).

Maybe the problem is how we treat the disabled, not the words we use to talk about disability?

In general, it's (IMHO) not needed to have centuries old books full of stereotypes in modern curricula. There are so many works that have been published in the last decades that provide far better diversity of all kinds than even a "de-racisted" historic book can. Modern authors, modern artists, modern composers and other artists deserve their shine in the spotlight as well - it's ridiculous how much of curricula is spent on stuff that happened or got created hundreds to thousands of years ago. We have to refocus education on modern events if we want a modern society.

And if you want something filled with racial or other stereotypes in curricula, ffs print it with commentary like we do with Hitler's "Mein Kampf" here in Germany. That is, coincidentally, the only way one is allowed to do a reprint in Germany due to copyright and anti-Nazi symbolism laws.

How can a word be a bomb?

And I'm still at a loss how in a supposedly post-enlightenment world, a single word can be so evil that you have to resort to code to refer to it, no matter in which context or whether or not you're quoting.

Yes, you shouldn't call people that way - and if you do, that is a clear sign of a racist mindset. But treating the word itself as some kind of forbidden symbol that must be purged from everything is not much better than medieval magical thinking.

Nonetheless, the continued reproduction of that word makes it "acceptable" to be used, and every time affected persons have to read that, it's bad for them.

That’s nothing new sadly, especially in academia. It used to be considered proper literary form to “translate” how people actually spoke to “proper English” and you can imagine the demographic of the people doing the “translating.”

See for example Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" [1] about one of the last living former slaves in the US. It was published a few years ago nearly a century after it was written because the author refused to white wash the subject’s language and couldn’t get it published in her life time.

Hell that criticism could easily be leveled at some of the most popular western canon like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracoon:_The_Story_of_the_...