> Fair enough, but commercial viability is the point of copyright.
I strongly disagree with this statement. The point of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". The commercial viability is the means through which that point is achieved. If at any time copyright isn't functioning to promote the arts, and instead hinders, then it isn't fulfilling the point.
While I do agree that the tropes are the stronger part, part of the reason why shared characters are so powerful is because they can immediately stand in to represent the trope. If I am writing a Robin Hood story, I don't need to spend time explaining who Robin Hood is, I can just start telling the story. If I am writing a story about "What if Superman were evil?" (e.g. [0][1]), then I need to first spend time explaining who the character is, describing powers, and then drawing just enough parallels so that the audience knows who I'm talking about without drawing so many that I get sued. It's a really boring way to start a story.
> The net effect cannot be anything other than to stifle creativity
This could not possibly be more wrong. The entire purpose of copyright law is to enable creativity. Two main reasons for this:
1. If anyone can take the stories and characters and images you create, and exploit them commercially without having to worry about copyright, that is a massive stifling effect on creativity. You made a popular character? Tough, some big company is going to make all the money off of it and you're going to be left broke. No incentive whatsoever to actually put in the time and effort to create things if you can't reap the benefits. Copyright law exists precisely to let the creator actually benefit from their creations.
2. If everyone can make money by copying other people, who's actually creating stuff anymore? The other main reason for copyright law is to encourage people to come up with their own unique creations, instead of just copying each other.
Now, it's certainly true that corporations have managed to extend copyright law far beyond what most people would consider reasonable. But that doesn't negate copyright law's reason for existing.
> if I want to express my personality by putting a button with some character on my shirt - again, how exactly is this hurting the original author
Because the author has now lost control over the distribution of their work (which is one of the exclusive rights granted by copyright), and any income that said distribution would have generated. Even if they don't want to sell buttons themselves, that's entirely their right to do so, and maybe they have good reasons for not wanting to flood the market with every possible expression of their character. Maybe they don't want to dilute the character, or don't want to have bad reproductions or low-quality merchandise hurting their public perception. Or maybe they just don't care about buttons but would be happy to sign a licensing deal to let someone else sell them if that someone else actually went through the effort of proposing an appropriate deal.
No matter what the reason is, it's absolutely their right to control their creation. We as a society have decided that artistic creation is a valid form of work, just as valid as any other kind of work, and that the artist is entitled to benefit from their work. You are not entitled to copy someone else's stuff just because you like it; the very fact that you assign value to their creation means that their creation is valuable, and your copies are literally stealing that value from the creator. If the creator doesn't want to sell the merchandise you want to buy, that's absolutely their right, and the fact that you want something does not entitle you to that thing.
>What gives you the right to prevent them from improving your work? If I don't like one of your character and consider the story better if I put in a character of my own, who are you to decide what I do with this idea or not?
If this were the case I'd just not publish, and keep my story with me, limited to a few people I trust. This is what you'll get if copyright wasn't there.
>On the other hand, most of the internet is very copyright-hostile. From meme templates to fanfiction and embedding foreign site content, most online communities have a very relaxed take on what copyright means. Imagine what would happen if the person who drew the original trollface were to go around demanding copyright fees and starting lawsuits for violating the rights to his property!
Most of the artistic internet doesn't contain works (outside of certain OSS communities) that may have taken someone years to complete and consists of hundreds of thousands of words. I'm amused that you should be somehow okay with the idea of taking a 300,000 words story, adding 10k words, modifying some bits, and selling it as "yours" and profiting off my work.
>Copyright in its modern form has existed for what, 400 years? It's not exactly a requirement for a culture to develop.
>In my opinion, the real question is: why should copyright exist in the first place?
I mean, you can just say that about modern forms of democracies and civil rights. Then why have them in the first place. We can have monarchies, autocracies, theocratic/thalassocratic republics just fine.
> The comment you chose to reply to was specifically about that one particular example.
Not, it wasn't. It made the following general claim about a problem that would exist without long-term copyright:
>> That would make it so just around the time your kids are old enough for you to introduce them to the great comics, cartoons, movies, music, and books of your childhood it would enter the public domain and become widely used in advertising and low budget productions. <<
> Long copyright terms seem to be doing just fine for Bill Watterson.
Perhaps its doing fine for him, but its not preventing characters -- Calvin particularly -- from Calvin and Hobbes from being ubiquitously used in our culture in a way which shifts the context in which someone newly introduced to the source works might experience them. Sure, its not specifically "marketing toys and junk food", but rather expressing preferences, but its not fundamentally different from the perspective of the kind of cultural context concern raised generally in the post I was responding to.
> Fair enough, but commercial viability is the point of copyright.
Yes, and that point is that it's not for ever.
> It's an exclusive distribution right of a creative work.
Exactly. For a limited time.
Most of us only live for a single lifetime, so anything longer than that is effectively forever: If something is locked away by copyright when you're born, and still is when you die, then you don't ever get it free of copyright.
>There must be rules concerning intellectual property.
Why? Human societies created plenty of art and innovation just fine for thousands of years without the concept of intellectual property being a thing.
We tend not to believe that being the first person to write some specific code gives the author the right to restrict any party from editing or redistributing it under any circumstances, or that the author deserves any compensation at all for their work. Why should that freedom be considered fundamental and inalienable only when applied to software, but not all creative works? Particularly since most such works are now distributed as software.
I can understand paying for the physical manufacture of a book or other distribution medium, or maybe paying to cover server costs and hosting, but I can't see a strong argument for the premise that expression itself can or should be owned, if for no other reason than, in modernity, the ownership of media is also the ownership of culture, and corporate ownership of media is also corporate ownership of cultural expression.
Like as not, Disney's versions of old fairy tales are the canonical representation in most of the world. Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, the DCU, etc, are no less components of modern culture than Shakespeare, Byron, Dickens, Homer, etc.
Yet while anyone can tell a story using Romeo and Juliet, or ancient gods, no one can or will ever be allowed to legally tell stories in the Star Wars, Disney or Harry Potter universes without permission from the IP owners. Those copyrights will be extended and enforced indefinitely. Regardless of your beliefs about whether and how an artist should be compensated for their art, this commoditization of free expression to a form which is only legitimate if it generates revenue (often for a corporation and not the creator,) is damaging to society as a whole.
At best, maybe, the term for copyrights should be extremely limited, and there should be laws preventing the extension of copyright beyond a certain time. But not forever.
>Laws are the rules our society lives by, and when a prominent public organization decides to willfully break copyright law in this manner it harms everyone.
The obvious rebuttal to this is that it is not only our right but our obligation to break unjust laws, and many people consider copyright and IP laws to be unjust.
Of course, the obvious counter-rebuttal to that is that most people who claim the moral high ground for piracy really just want free stuff.
> Perhaps not prohibited. But we could make it so they lose all IP rights.
I'm not sure how that would work. Suppose I make two draft comics of my original character ExampleMan. One features a dark brooding morally ambiguous anti-hero, and the other is a wholesome family character.
Are you saying if I destroy one draft and publish the other, the character comes partially or wholly into the public domain? Or that I am prohibited from claiming the time and money used to make one of the drafts as the legitimate business expense?
Would same logic also apply to a patents of a company that creates 10 different prototype engine designs, and decides to only bring one of them to market?
> AS LONG AS THE COPYRIGHT OWNER THINKS YOU SHOULD WAIT
The point of copyright was to ensure that people who made creative works could get paid and earn a living. Not to tie their cultural works up for the rest of their lives, everyone else be damned.
Given that the idea of a "tragedy" has been around for a few thousand years now (the greeks wrote about it a long time ago) how is any creative work created completely in a vacuum? I believe that the answer is that it is not. Many stories have different details but there are probably only a few dozen archetypical stories.
We have the idea of compulsory licensing for a bunch of different things. Why shouldn't movies and TV shows and such also be licensed that way?
> It would put the characters into public domain and rob the authors of the ability to sustain themselves selling collections of early strips.
That's not true. It might make it harder to make as much money, but there's nothing that says the author can't still profit from selling something after it's in the public domain. I've paid for works in the public domain multiple times, sometimes directly to the author of the work.
Creators have a massive advantage when selling their own stuff. They can include things like signed copies and extras that no one else ever could. Fans want to support the creators of the things they love because they want more of it.
> I can do it, but I cannot claim ownership over the characters.
of course not. But you can claim ownership if you don't call those characters their original names, and make sufficient changes to the design (how sufficient is determined by a court of law - thus expenses).
> DC or Marvel if I try to do this at scale.
The show 'invincible'[1] has a character that is a basic copy of superman. And yet, you will find that they don't get a letter from DC.
> Copyright protects the work, not the thoughtspace.
I think that is a good argument, but conflates is and ought, and I have two counters:
copyright owners can dictate how their work is used (with some exceptions), and if that use hurts the copyright owner, the owner should have the right to forbid it.
the intent of copyright is to reward and encourage creators and creativity. If a script kiddie can just train a model and duplicate the hard-won aesthetic work of Molly Crabapple or Ralph Steadman or anyone at all, and either dilute the value of it or actually profit from it, what is the incentive for creators to create new work at all?
>The problem with copyright is that it is used as an excuse to deliver the good idea to protect the new authors who are still alive, in the same package with the bad idea to let unspecified number of loosely related and unrelated people feed off free money source created by long dead authors decades ago.
I think part of the idea is that whether the creators are dead or not, having copyright and "unrelated people feed off", still maintains an economy over the item and gives it monetary value. Whereas if it was de-copyrighted it would lose that value -- everybody could just copy it.
E.g. Disney only being able to create or allow the creation of Mickey Mouse stuff (t-shirts etc), leads to a large business for them, taxes for US etc. (Plus pays a lobby to ensure longer copyright). If Mickey Mouse was suddenly public domain, that would stop and its characters would be devalued very fast, with everybody competing with ever cheaper products with him on.
> Without copyright, I could take apart J.K Rowling's billion dollar Harry Potter empire by simply republishing and selling all the works myself, without compensation to Ms. Rowling.
She probably would have sold a few copies before you'd be able to do that; and maybe you could produce a slightly modified version that would be better.
It's worth noting that some of the best works of mankind were produced when no copyright was in place, so the argument that associates copyright protections with content creation is weak at best.
It's also worth noting that the continuous extension of copyright protection would effectively hamper creation. Derivative works are authored all the time. Most of what Disney ever produced is derived from popular classics from the 18th / 19th centuries (I remember that in "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame", the original author, Victor Hugo, isn't even credited).
I think it's wrong to frame the debate as "copyright versus no copyright at all"; it would be more useful to discuss copyright length. But what has been happening thus far is that copyright proponents have cried wolf, advocated for longer and longer copyright protections, and stronger and meaner tools of enforcement, AND IT WORKED.
And there we are, discussing SOPA, or having to live with HADOPI (crazy French law voted last year).
It's only fair that reasonable people who think shorter copyright terms would be desirable, and SOPA should never have been drafted, become less reasonable, in order to be heard.
I think that's what "zero copyright" advocates are doing; and maybe they have a case. Would a society with zero copyright be "radically different"? Let's see. Would "most people oppose those changes"? Let's ask them!
We need to frighten the MPAA just as the MPAA has been frightening everyone. "Stop pushing or lose it all" is a start.
> It's just that I can't write my own sequel to it, or turn it into a film without the author's permission. This strikes me as a very good thing.
I disagree. Why shouldn't people be able to adapt and reuse previous works, if the author has already been compensated for their time for the original book? Of course, the author still has the ability to write an "official sequel" or make an "official adaption". This ignores fan-art and fan-fics as well (which is not always non-commercial, by the way). We shouldn't need the permission [1] of previous creators to build on top of their works, because culture does not end with them.
>So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
Unironically yes. Copyright is a moral evil, and "intellectual property" is a legal fiction. No one owns ideas.
That being said, I'm pragmatic and realize that copyright (and patents/trademarks/etc.) can be a necessary evil as well, which is why I'd fully support lowering copyright down to 10 or 20 years or so. No reason Disney should have exclusive rights to their latest Marvel CGI-fest for longer than someone who discovers a cure for cancer would have exclusive rights to profit from their discovery.
> Copyright is meant to give the original creator a monopoly over their creation (so that others don't profit off of their work).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the goal of copyright is to incentivize innovation (specifically of art and culture) and to provide innovators a way recoup (and profit) off of innovation they've made public. I view it as similar to how patents work in that it's an incentive for people to publicize and share their works more broadly.
> Are you not a fan of copyright in its current scope / implementation? Because it sounds like you do agree with its goal.
I have a differing understanding of the goal of copyright based off of what you've said, but I think our understandings are similar in that the copyright holder benefits from copyright/patents of their works.
I dislike the ways our current implementations of copyright are abused. I think the concept of fair use makes copyright as it is today workable. I also think our current copyright laws (at least in the US) have a lot of failure modes that subvert what I believe the purpose of copyright should be: to advance art and culture with legal and economic incentive.
> There is a crucial difference between a voice and a character here.
Oh there will be loads of subtle differences. I wasn't claiming it to be a perfect comparison but rather than illustration of how IP is complicated and how a single piece of work might have multiple different strands of IP against it.
> Characters (any creative work) are not created in a cultural vacuum.
Nothing we create is done so in a cultural vacuum. So I agree with your statement but not really sure how it applies (or even adds anything) to the discussion.
> It's actually especially egregious with Disney too, since their business model to no small degree is grabbing a piece of popular culture and transforming it into a Disney product, the company we know today wouldn't be anywhere near what it is without public domain to begin with.
I made that same point too
> Disney got content from it, it profited from it, and now it must , in my opinion, give back.
Here is my issue. We cannot and should not make specific exceptions for specific companies because we do not like them. I fully agree there needs to be a copyright reform that works for consumers, but it should be applied equally for everyone and not have some rules for one company but Disney has a different set of rules "because they're bad".
> There is hubris in the term "creator". Nobody is culturally a creator, merely a transformer.
This is a philosophical point and one that would be fun to debate in the pub over a pint. However it doesn't add anything to this particular discussion.
> The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to create more works.
Is this true? I know in many cases copyright does the complete opposite as it hinders artists from creating derivative work. Then there is a whole genre of art—folk art; which is arguably the most popular genre—where artists continue to do art where the copyright is hardly ever perused, enforced, or if present almost always ignored.
You could just as easily make the case that in the art genre where copyright is the most loose, the amount of art created is the greatest.
> I tried to make the point that this game is itself a derivative of other things, without which it couldn't exist.
Being a derivative in the sense of borrowing game mechanics [1] or drawing influence [2] isn't nearly the same as copying (or deriving from) the content. Many artists put hard work into developing their content, and it cannot be right to say "Hmm, that's popular, I should use it to market my product" without getting proper licensing. Even if it happens to be a corporation in ownership of the content.
I do agree that there might be some benefits to copyright reform, especially relating to culture and literary value. The latter part of your article hints at some interesting alternatives, but I not sure I believe them to be 'absolutely' better.
> When creating new works with Batman, you'll have to fastidiously avoid using any elements of the character that were introduced later, but you should be good.
Everything in your comments makes sense except this part. If this goes as currently planned Batman will be in the public domain, but not e.g. Batwoman (introduced decades later).
However, I can make my own new superhero now called Foobarman and introduce a Foobarwoman without anyone having grounds for saying I'm ripping off Batman.
So if Batman is in the public domain I'll be able to have a Batwoman. Having a female version of a character isn't per-se a copyright violation just because that path's been taken before.
Of course if I go further and actually rip off entire stories involving Batwoman I'll be in trouble.
I strongly disagree with this statement. The point of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". The commercial viability is the means through which that point is achieved. If at any time copyright isn't functioning to promote the arts, and instead hinders, then it isn't fulfilling the point.
While I do agree that the tropes are the stronger part, part of the reason why shared characters are so powerful is because they can immediately stand in to represent the trope. If I am writing a Robin Hood story, I don't need to spend time explaining who Robin Hood is, I can just start telling the story. If I am writing a story about "What if Superman were evil?" (e.g. [0][1]), then I need to first spend time explaining who the character is, describing powers, and then drawing just enough parallels so that the audience knows who I'm talking about without drawing so many that I get sued. It's a really boring way to start a story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irredeemable [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightburn
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