What are the rules around selling and collecting old notebooks that belonged to other people? I’ve recently been wondering about this after seeing certain items for sale on various sites, including a diary with very intimate thoughts and full names included. Nothing was blurred out in the listing, so I was able to google the people and it seemed like they are still alive. One even seems to be kind of a public figure, though not a celebrity or household name.
I don’t think what I found was just coincidental: the names are unusual enough, and the time span matches ages closely enough that there don’t seem to be a lot of other possibilities. Do these people know or care that their personal lives from 40 years ago are out on the internet for public consumption? There were several listings for journals and diaries, with several pages shared for each. Even if the person who wrote the diaries doesn’t care that other people are reading them, what about the other person who is the subject of some entries? They might not have known they were being written about in the first place.
I can’t help feeling like some line has been crossed by that seller. If I had ever lost or thrown out some of my old diaries and they somehow ended up with a reseller, I would hope that person might try to contact me and let me at least try to buy them back. I don’t have a particularly unique name, so it might not work, but I’d be mortified if my private musings were posted publicly without my consent. Maybe the seller did manage to contact the original owner of the diaries I saw for sale and that person didn’t care? But unless permission was given for full exposure by all parties mentioned, I think the names should have been redacted from the listing. Whoever bought the diaries would still see the names, but at least they wouldn’t be out there on the internet for everyone to see.
In my own collection, I have a number of “other people’s notebooks” that still have names in them. I think they’re all old enough that those people are dead, but I have still taken care not to include identifying information in my posts other than the occasional name or innocuous details about people who don’t seem to have any current digital footprint. None of my “other people’s notebooks” have contained any embarrassing details, but I also have one notebook that I bought on eBay that was said to be a sort of diary and sketchbook– it turned out to be mostly diary, seemingly written by someone with serious mental illness. I’ve never even posted about it because it just seemed disturbing and somehow wrong to use it as blog content.
I guess if someone is already a public figure, there may be different ideas about what’s considered fair game– some of Joan Didion’s old diary entries have just been published in a book, and there is some controversy about whether this should have been done without her explicit consent. But some of her published writing was already highly personal, and she must have known that any writing she produced and saved would have been fodder for publication and study after her death unless she gave explicit instructions otherwise.
I guess “consent” and “instructions” are the key words here… maybe in addition to the space for contact details and the “reward if found,” notebooks should should come with checkboxes for “ok to read/sell/publish after my death” and “destroy after my death!”
Hi, Vic here, from Portugal. There are no ethics on the huge www. Everything is out there for the grabs. “To make another dollar” is just “to make another dollar no matter what”. Is sad, sometimes even tragic, but it is the reality. I like your blog – cheers! Vic
This brings up another issue (becoming more pressing with each passing decade) about what to eventually do with one’s journals. Like you, I certainly don’t want them to end up on eBay, which makes it my responsibility to destroy them myself. But when? There are certain periods that I’m interested in re-reading, though I have to be in the right frame of mind, so I haven’t yet. And in my dotage, maybe the rest would be somewhat entertaining? Or more likely boring, and I should just shred them all now?
This is why I burn my journals when I fill them. I’m not interested in re-reading them for posterity, and I have no heirs or desire to pass them on. My journals are for reflection in the now, not the future.
I have seriously considered using my past journals and diaries to create a memoir, which I would leave behind to my family and then have all my notebooks destroyed. There are things in there that were true in the moment that I wrote them but that I would not want others to see. Of course, I have over 30 years of notebooks and counting, so that would be a monumental undertaking.
I keep daily pages (aka Morning Pages) to help center myself. I remove the identity page and shred that, but then I just recycle the rest. I never use full names when writing about people, so they become essentially anonymous once I remove the identity page.
I put stuff in there I’d never want my heirs to see, or anyone else, but if it’s anonymous and sent to recycling, who’s ever gonna see it? And if someone does, what’s to tie it to any person, living or dead? Once I’ve filled them up, they’ve served their purpose for me: I have no interest in reading them later, so why keep them?
I also keep a Some Lines a Day journal that I DO want to keep for myself and my posterity, but I’m careful that nothing goes in there that I wouldn’t want someone else to read. So I guess the key for me is to not put everything into the same journal.
I use my fictional name (alter ego) in all of my journals/diaries/notebooks.
And I use alternative names for other people mentioned in my writings.
So even if someone reads them – no way to tie back to me, personally
It would be nice to have someone in the distant future read them, and gain the writer’s POV on what it was like for them to live in their era.
This is so odd to me because isn’t any writing by Person X automatically copyrighted at the moment of creation? That’s how copyright law works in the US anyway. One can formally register a piece of work with the US Copyright Office, but it’s absolutely not necessary in order to own the rights to that work (it just makes it a little bit easier to prove should there be any disputes in the future).
I did some light googling, and while I know that that’s not at all substitute for actual legal research, a cursory scan of existing legal sites makes it pretty clear that diaries are subject to copyright, too.
Of course, the *subject* of diary entries have no such copyright protection (unless it’s *their* diary), so that’s an entirely different matter. But when someone is selling a third-person’s diary and profiting off of it, and that person is still alive or hasn’t been dead for X years (in the US I think copyright expires 70 or so years after the copyright holder’s death), then there’s the question of whether or not the seller has the right to sell it…? (Publishing it and selling it are two different things, I realize.)
ANYWAY, yes, I told my husband that if I pre-decease him, to please burn everything!
Good point, I suppose the concept of copyright would apply. It would be a pretty clear case if the original writer found out and told the seller to cease and desist, but they’d have to find out the sale was happening first…
Yes, this is why I think old diaries are a collector’s item in the first place. It’s fascinating to see snippets of a regular person’s life from another era.
Good idea!
I think about this too– if I want some of my notebooks to be passed on but not others, when and how am I going to do the work of sorting through them? Maybe we need to read more about Swedish Death Cleaning to see if that’s covered!
Y’all might be interested in American Diary Project. They have adopted many best practices of “unknown” sourced journals but are also a solution to “What do I do with my journals?” I have plans for my (27 years /50-ish notebooks & counting!) worth of journals.