Mark Lyn­der­say

Over the first 14 hours of the Na­tion­al Sem­i­nar on Copy­right in the Car­ni­val In­dus­try, I'd had no prob­lems keep­ing my si­lence, writ­ing notes about the var­i­ous pre­sen­ta­tions and tak­ing pho­tographs of the pre­sen­ters.

This was, af­ter all, a sem­i­nar se­ries I'd been hound­ing the NCC to host for years now, some­thing to pro­vide a de­fin­i­tive state­ment on the is­sues un­der­pin­ning Car­ni­val's copy­right and the prob­lems that have arisen in re­cent years re­lat­ed to its polic­ing.

I'd watched Pe­ter Min­shall keep ris­ing re­peat­ed­ly to of­fer the per­spec­tives of a cre­ator in Car­ni­val, dri­ven by an un­matched pas­sion for Car­ni­val. I heard an­oth­er con­tri­bu­tion from a tra­di­tion­al mas­quer­ad­er who seemed non­plussed by the gen­er­al tone of the event, which didn't speak very di­rect­ly to the very per­son­al is­sues that arise from copy­right pro­tec­tions in the very mud­dled sit­u­a­tion that Car­ni­val has made of rights and li­cens­ing.

I heard that el­der­ly mas­man, an in­di­vid­ual in every sense of the word, some­one who de­signed, built and per­formed his sin­gu­lar mas­quer­ade very year, grap­pling with one of the great Catch-22s of the mod­ern Car­ni­val era, the role of the NC­BA in con­ven­ing the event and its com­pe­ti­tions.