Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker.
Adding a little fuel to this debate between Native Jovian and Ever9: Disney has profited extensively from the Public Domain by adapting fairy tales (like with most of the Disney Animated Canon), but it hasn't contributed much at all to the Public Domain itself. "Steamboat Willie" (and by extension Mickey Mouse) has stayed under copyright for almost 90 years because Disney and others keep lobbying to extend Copyright.
So that's another reason why I don't buy this whole argument that "copyright gives an incentive to make new art": One of the ways we get new art is through inspiration from material in the Public Domain. If the Public Domain stays at the same place forever, it severely limits what artists can recycle.
Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.
Jupiterian Local
Suffice to say that I disagree. Strenuously.
...for as long as the character is covered by copyright, at least. Once it's in the public domain, anyone can use it however the hell they want (such as Alan Moore and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). And I've already said that I believe that copyright term lengths are far too long.
Is there a middle ground in this for people who don't care if DC and Disney own their characters forever and would just like to protect their own IP for as long as they live without wanting to worry about what happens after they're dead? Because I feel like there should be a place like that. Like, you could pay to have your copyright extended, which folks like Disney could afford. Or have to keep publshing the character, something like that. I believe something similar already applies to trademark and is why DC's Captain Marvel can't be published under that name.
I mean seriously, the primary thing that would be accomplished by making Batman public domain would be dozens of shitty Batman movies.
edited 11th Nov '14 11:08:27 PM by AceofSpades
I'm saying that there is no self-evident order of importance in either direction.
There are plenty of transformative works, including fanfics, licensed works, and Public Domain based works, that contain more original content, than certain "original I Ps" which are blatantly piggybacking on another work's success, or just generally feel derivative.
When E. L. James search-and-replaced every occurance of the names "Edward" and "Bella", that act didn't add much meaningful originality to her work.
Making up interesting plotlines, shaping three dimensional characterization through dialogue, describing new, stimulating locations, that takes huge creative effort.
There are some new I Ps that do well at both of these, and there are transformatives that fail at both. But there are also reverse cases.
The truth is, that character and universe names aren't protected by IP because they are such great, fundamental examples of creative labor, but because a string of characters in a text, or a screenshot with a costumed character on it, can be pointed out in front of a judge to get your rival sued, even these really replesent a small point of inspiration, while general imitation of a style or plot is too intangible for a lawyer to objective prove, no matter how "wholesale" and creatively bankrupt it is or isn't.
You are seeing a moral purpose into a legal distinction, where there is only a difference of feasibility.
When we are talking about trumping people's right to create certain pieces of art, that is exactly about censorship.
There are many ambiguous debates on the net, about what is and isn't a censorship issue, including boycotts, corporate policies, and age restrictions, but this is not one of those issues. Not letting other people publish works of art that they wrote, is pretty much the most archetypical example of censorship that we have, at least on this side of the NSA cutting the signal of an anti-government TV show mid-sentence.
If you think that IP creators deserve to "control their characters", you think that they deserve to censor other artists' art for including those characters. There is no way around that.
Because even if you would value ALL creative works at zero, presumably people should still be allowed to freely publish their work (along with everyone else, just like pre-copyright).
If you would value creative work a little bit, then all artists should be given a few years of narrowly defined copyright over their respective writings.
If you would value creative work a lot, then all artists would be given long, and excessive copyright over their respective writings.
If you would value franchise-creating creative work a lot, and transformative work not at all, then the former would still be given long, and excessive copyright over their respective writings, while the latter would barely be allowed to published their uncopyrightable writings, just like everyone was pre-copyright.
But you don't even say that, you put so little value in transformative work, that you see it as a matter of rights trumping each other, you would rather have franchise creators' IP extend beyond control of their respective writings, and include a censorship right over others' works that the franchise starters themselves have not written, than to let those others write freely.
When you claim to care about creators, yet compared to a world without any copyright, you actively decrease the rights of certain creators who didn't happen to make up character and universe name names, that signals an abysmally one-sided view of what rights should trump others.
Not bad on that front, though I disagree with making significantly longer rights for individuals. I would make it 25 years for everyone, with it's first year even including franchise control (that should be enough to protect a work from being outshined by quickly made imitations before it even establishes itself as the source of the francise. For example Frozen transformatives would start to be allowed right around now.)
edited 12th Nov '14 1:41:31 PM by Ever9
Jupiterian Local
Rights are not absolute. I have the right to freedom of speech, but I can't lie to you in order to trick you into giving me money — that's fraud. Punishing me for committing fraud isn't censorship, even though it's a limit on my right to freedom of speech. Copyright is the same way — just because it's a limit on freedom of speech, that doesn't make it censorship.
Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker.
Ever9 and Native Jovian: I noticed that there's a lot of talk about franchises and characters. Just wanna point out that the US is the only country that lets people copyright characters.
And Ever9, a small warning: Your last post leaned dangerously close to an Ad Hominem attack/fallacy.
Please try to avoid attacking Native Jovian as a person.
Just because something can be done, doesn't mean that it should.
I've just made a post about how there is no inherent difference in the degree of originality and the creative value of what you described as "being inspired by other artists", and what you described as "using another artist's work". And your only reply to this, amounts to "yeah, but we can draw a legal line to stop the latter".
I've just described with specific examples how legal originality can take far less effort than meaningful creative originality, and you don't even see it as a problem that our system is based around giving an absurdly wide trump card to the former?
This really sounds like wanting to stop art is the default state for you, and only would allow derivative styles and plots because you wouldn't get away with regulating them.
How about considering that being inspired by another work's plot or aesthetics is a great thing, and being inspired by a universe or a character can be equally great and creatively valuable, and the latter still shouldn't be stopped just because it's possible?
You are trying to accuse me of a noncentral fallacy, and it doesn't work, because banning with the free creation of certain artistic works is one of the central reasons why censorship is considered terrifying. It's right there up next to suppressing political dissent, and enforcing religious uniformity.
I don't need to name francise control as censorship, because even without that word, it is what it is: The limitation of artistic freedom, the powerful few's authority to control what media we are allowed to consume, the intentional mass deprivation of artists from their livelihood, and the sacrifice of creative value on the altar of legal enforcability.
Haven't you ever any of those dystopic movies where the bad guys are persecuting artists, and burning piles of valuable art, becase they are evil? Have you ever noticed how no one respects the Hayes code, or the Comics Code Authority? Well, franchise control is a straightforward example of the same principle, only with even worse justifications. At least the moral guardians had a theory about what dangers free art can cause: you are just tautologically justifying that limiting artists' freedom of the press is good, because the right to limit it "belongs to someone else".
You not once stopped to justify why those people deserve to control not just their own works, but other people's work that causally rely on theirs as a source.
Rights are not absolute, but they should extend until they infringe someone's proportionally important rights. All other things being equal, silencing people would be bad, but fraud is even worse, so we silence fraudsters. Call it censorship, or "a limit on freedom of speech", or whatever, it's something unpleasant that something we have to do when the alternative is disproportionally unjust. However, protection from lies isn't absolute either: you can't ban every lie ever that inconveniences you, if it involves a massive control of others' political, religious, or artistic self-expression. The specific lie's possible harm, and the specific speech's value are matched against each other.
Franchise rights can't withstand the same principle. With copyright's primary purpose being to create a vibrant art scene for the public, there is no possible way through which franchise control could help boosting that, at least not one that is comparable to the cultural harm that the artistic restrictions necessary for it can cause.
There is a woman who designs a book series for several years, carefully researching it's details, fine-tuning her protagonists' characterization through dialogue, planning a series of great twist endings, and setting the general atmosphere through narration, and typing thousands of pages of it down. We, as a society, decide that to promote such works being created, her work should be incentivized by an exlusive right to sell copies, and even restrict other people's sharing of it's text, to make a living. That book becomes a huge hit, and the writer becomes a billionaire.
There is a man who designs a book series for several years, carefully researching it's details, fine-tuning his protagonists' characterization through dialogue, planning a series of great twist endings, and setting the general atmosphere through narration, and typing thousands of pages of it down. Also, it takes place in the same fantasy universe as the previous woman's. We, as a society, decide that we should hand over the control over that book's very existence to the first woman, and deny the man even the rights that he would have had before we started meddling with "incentivizing artists"
Where is the proportionality in that? How is this a necessary limit on free speech?
The only right that would be denied by the second man being allowed to publish his work, would be an artist's absolute control over their work, but by enforcing that principle to such an extreme degree for the first, we are also denying it to an even more extreme degree for the second.
edited 12th Nov '14 5:06:58 PM by Ever9
I'm not sure if this could be true. For example Japan has some extremely home-market-centric entertainment, I would intuitively expect that we would see a lot more shows with Naruto running around in them if it were legal. If anything, I definitely recall something about Doujinshis merely being informally tolerated by their IP holders.
Sorry, I'm not seeing it. The "You are seeing a moral purpose into.." line and the "When you claim to care about creators..." line are the only ones that might have gotten a bit agressive (and I can tone back if that's the problem), but they are not fallacious, they are both claims that Jovian is looking at the issue of copyright law from a bad perspective, which seems to be on topic.
Edit: My next post was sent before I read your warning, so it's still following some of the same subjects either way.
edited 12th Nov '14 5:06:36 PM by Ever9
Jupiterian Local
Uh... Just chiming in here, the accuracy of the term 'intellectual property' is debatable at best, and probably intellectually dishonest, because while it has a few aspects of property, under proper scrutiny the term isn't actually appropriate for the subject matter.
It's partly why I hate using the term, because it my view, it's just plain wrong.
Advocating piracy is often classed along with hate speech and advocating terrorism, which also tend to be forbidden. On the one hand, maybe there's a good case to be made for banning people from essentially advising other people to commit crimes. On the other hand, it's definitely still censorship, and in the case of piracy it definitely has its roots in IP law. Data piracy could be considered by its supporters as a form of civil disobedience (specifically, a nonviolent one), and we have plenty of historical examples of civil disobedience that are now considered justified, heroic acts. Are we, as a society, so sure about the moral legitimacy of IP law that we can justify using censorship preemptively to stop people from even organizing against it? For that matter, what does it say about the legitimacy of a law if its proponents are so quick to attack free speech?
Join my forum game!
I don't think so. "Agree to disagree" kind of implies that we mutually acknowledge the fact that our positions are equally defensible, if even if differently preferred. This is not the case. I have provided a desription of why "using characters wholesale", or not, can be a matter of simply making up a few names, while establishing a work's style is interwoven with the physical and intellectual formation of the whole work, and writing all it's text.
You haven't even provided any clue to why you would possibly think what you think, or why you feel that my own interpretation of labor effort scales might be off, beyond repeatedly declaring that it is disingenuous, and that you strenuously disagree.
That's a very strong demonstration of how identifying the privileges that copyright gives to creators as "property", always leads to excess and abuse.
Deserving copyrights for doing creative work, is not any more "self-evident" than deserving maternity leave for giving birth to a child. It's a legal right, given due to a specific societal justification, and comparing it to a natural right that's basis objectively existed before getting defended by law, just leads to confusion.
Back in the 19th century, when copyright still only applied to actual copies, rather than controlling other people's art, it's not like legal franchises already objectively existed "out there" in the wild, being unjustly "taken away" by the law from their owners. They were created later, for a good reason. When you treat a legal right as "self-evident", you are basically giving up attempt to justify what a regulation's purpose is, and just assume that it's virtous in and of itself.
Some people, upon thinking of copyrights as property, start to demand that it should be ownable forever, like other property. Others start to erode the audience's Fair Use access, treating it as an entitled demand for "other people's stuff". Your usage of it is a particularly harmful version, because it is used not just to argue for excessively wide control over free speech, but a particularly unbalanced, and unfair one, where it's not even artists in general who get to oppress us, but a special caste of artists oppress all others, through treating their indirect claim on certain works' origin, as more important to defend as "ownership", than the claims of those works' actual authors.
It's the ultimate twisting of copyright.
- An artist writes a book, but struggles to find funding for it since anyone can print copies.
- A law is written so writers get to sell their respective writings exclusively, thus make a living, and promoting further arts.
- That law starts to get treated as a "property right" that exists for it's own sake, because "people deserve to earn the result of their work".
- Property rights trump other people's usage of that property, therefore IP rights trump free public discourse.
- The abstract elements of a work, such as it's "universe", or it's "canon", are considered pieces of property to be possessed on their own right.
- An artist writes a book, but is legally forbidden from finding funding for it, because apparently the book he wrote, is some other guy's property. What arrangement would be most beneficial for promoting the arts, and what would be the most economical system for the largest number of artists, is utterly forgotten. All hail property rights.
edited 12th Nov '14 7:51:56 PM by Ever9
You've got copyright law completely backwards. Yes, it was created to promote the arts, but it doesn't do that for the artists' benefit; it promotes the arts for the consumers' benefit.
The public wants to have access to a large selection of high-quality creative works, but if no one's getting paid to create those works, then that selection will only contain what some people decided to throw together in their spare time, just for the fun of it. Copyright was created so that people would have an economic incentive to create popular works of art, thus increasing both the quantity and quality of the art available to the public.
Essentially, copyright law is a social contract where artists agree to spend lots of time, effort, and resources creating works of art, in exchange for the public agreeing to pay them for what they create. If you allow the distribution of unlicensed, derivative works, you reduce how much money artists can potentially make off their creation, thus reducing the incentive for them to create artistic works in the first place.
For example, when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out in the early eighties, it was successful by indie comic book standards, but its creators didn't start really making money until the Turtles were turned into a toy line and an animated series. The success of those adaptations earned TMNT's creators big bucks, and many more indie comics were soon created by people trying to replicate their success. But if derivative works weren't covered by copyright law, then the original creators of TMNT wouldn't have gotten so much as one cent the toys and TV show, and we probably wouldn't have gotten the indie comics boom that their success inspired.
edited 12th Nov '14 11:52:01 PM by RavenWilder
You got it wrong. The "artists would make less money" argument might hold for the piracy side of copyright, but only because we assume that if people were free to download movies, they would spend their designated movie money on extra pizza instead, and the whole industry catches less money.
But with derivative works commercialized, money is not leaving the creative industry as a whole, it's just not sticking to franchise owners but flowing on to other artists who can do derivatives on their own. With TMNT, the question is why the cartoon, that did a lot to define it's own version of the universe, rather different from the comics, should be entirely dependent on the comics' owners, rather than profiting for the ones who have actually made it.
Besides, what would have happened to specific works in that scenario is a pretty futile discussion, because our popular culture is so extremely dependent on the way we think about franchising, sequels, and canons, that probably our very production process would be utterly different. Maybe publishers would have less motivation to kickstart a new "original IP" like they do when they plan for a dozen sequels in advance, but they would all be messing with each other's works' derivatives in place of it, so they would have less reason to obey canon and cultivate a consistent franchise either.
It would probably look a lot more organically evolving, with less carefully planned tie-ins and sequels, and more like the bigger fanfiction scenes, with each level of Recursive Fanfiction getting gradually more unrelated to the source: Someone makes a high fantasy movie, then someone else makes an adventure game about it's fan-favorite side character's later adventures, then someone writes a novel about the history of the kingdom that was newly explored in the game, then someone else makes a grimdark movie sequel to that novel, meanwhile someone else started an idealistic sequel to the original movie, that is also a crossover with a popular unrelated steampunk novel of the time, that's other movie version is a "what if" version, that goes a completely different way from either of it's sources....
At the end, you have a bunch of works that each have their fair share of new characters and settings, but thie writers can also be honest about what previous work's ideas they are directly following up on, instead of resorting to expies, or sucking up to the IP holder and obeying it's singular vision.
edited 12th Nov '14 11:46:44 PM by Ever9
What about creative works that have a very high production cost and so rely on selling licensed merchandise to turn a profit (for example, almost all anime)? If anyone and everyone can sell unlicensed, derivative merchandise based on their work, they'd either have to shut down production or operate with a vastly reduced budget.
Merchandising is primarily a trademark issue, not a copyright issue.
The basics of that regulation are solid, if you are primarily associated with a brand, you should be the one to sell it. That's not even a creativity issue of who made what, but a customers right issue: Windows, Apple, Pepsi, Sony, their names and logos and slogans are not owned by the virtue of creative value, but because customers have a right not to be deceived by misleading packaging, and an expectation to tell who is a product's creator.
The same should continue to apply to film titles, logos, or specific pictures from it just as well. T-shirt manufacturers and toy distributors don't really have the same claim for needed wide self-expression, as artists do.
Trademarks can get out of hand, when they interfere with storytelling by trademarking characters' appearance in media. For example, right now Disney has a trademark on Snow White, the whole fairy tale character. This way they can not just circumvent the public domain and keeep their cartoon for longer than 95 years, but also stop future movies like Snow White and the Huntsman, based on the older public domain fairy tale, from commercially using the "brand" "Snow White".
That's rather elitist, isn't it?
Lines need to be drawn somewhere between rival interest.
Like we talked in the previous analogy discussed with Jovian: Free speech can be limited by anti-fraud laws, but not all harmful lying is worth a limitation on free speech. Freedom has some value, and regulatory protection of the public has some value, and eventually we have to draw a line to say "this previous statement had enough culturally significant/religious/political content that it needs protection even if it's incorrect, but that other one here is a frivolous case of causing harm for the lulz.
The same goes for free market/trademark issues. It seems reasonable that participants on the market need some protection on the self-identification, but it's also clear that this shouldn't be used so widely to claim a monopoly on writing about Snow White. So a line needs to be drawn somewhere else, where the value lost by limiting freedom is less than the value earned by a safe market.
edited 13th Nov '14 12:49:41 AM by Ever9
Jupiterian Local
You haven't even provided any clue to why you would possibly think what you think, or why you feel that my own interpretation of labor effort scales might be off, beyond repeatedly declaring that it is disingenuous, and that you strenuously disagree.
My point isn't that we each hold each other's stances in equal merit. My point is that our stances are so far apart that we have no basis for discussion of them. It's like I'm arguing that 2 + 2 = 3, and you're arguing that 2 + 2 = 5. If you can't agree on basic premises, then the conversation can't go anywhere.
Karkadinn
You know what, never mind. Whatever I have to say isn't going to do any good in this thread anyway, sorry for intruding.
edited 13th Nov '14 2:01:05 PM by Karkadinn
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.
Actually, I would agressively disagree with that idea, since I find it too similar to the intellectual "property" concept, that focuses too much on how artists "deserve to get paid for their work", rather than on how artists getting paid can be good for society.
It's not work that deserves payment, but the active creation of value. Writing a new book doesn't deserve it's own copyright control just because it takes time and physical effort (so does re-typing someone else's book verbatim, or digging holes and filling them again), but because the end result is a piece of art that can be, as far as the public is concerned, of more or less equal creative value to one in a "new IP".
I might have been unclear on that part. When I say that many works like "50 Shades of Grey" are not really created with more effort than works like "League...", that's really just an indicator of the bigger issue, that many of them are not providing a greater amount of value for the audiences either. It's one thing that transformative artists often appear to be laboring as hard as IP starters, but more importantly, the audiences often appear to be appreciating the two possible directions to the same degree, with no sign of treating te invention of character and universe names as the end-all of creativity.
That's why the theatre play is presented as "Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead", and not as "William Shakespeare's Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead (with support work by Tom Stoppard)".
If those two character names, and the idea of being set in the "Hamlet universe" would be the more important measures of creativity, then Hamlet and "Rosencrantz..." would be seen as the same work, with one real creator, rather than two different people both being famously admired for creating their own respective works each.
My approach is superior, because the crux of it is to try to take public interests into account, while you are deferring to principles like property ownership or legal enforcability, which appear to make sense individually, but put into this context, they form a counterintuitive mess, where people who would be in any sane context identified as "the creator", are not really the creators. Where Stoppard didn't create "Rosencrantz...", Yudkowsky didn't create Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, where Nolan didn't create the Drark Knight trilogy, and so on, and so on, were thousands of popular directors, writers, developers, are not really creators, where there are writers of the Western Literary Canon, who are respected as some of the greatest writers of all time, but at the same time they are not real creators.
Yeah, thanfully at least you are inconsistent about that copyright=property approach. There are also others who are reverse examples, who advocate infinitely extending copyright "because it's property", but have no problem with limiting it by Fair Use.
There seems to be something about the copyright=property approach that makes people fixate on one particular aspect of it and try to apply excessive absolutism to that one, while ignoring others.
edited 13th Nov '14 3:08:28 PM by Ever9
I don't culminate!
Just to say, I vehemently oppose the 'copyright as a form of property' approach. Also, this ![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
hits all of my buttons at once.
Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker.
Can I just get some clarification from Ever9 and Native Jovian? What's the specific main point you guys are debating? 'Cause at the moment it's hard to tell and I think if that question is answered, you guys might come to some kind of conclusion.
Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.
The difference between being the source of a work's inspiration, and being the source of a work's IP, is far, far smaller than the difference between being the source of a work's IP, and being the writer of the work. Yet you are trying to draw an equivalence between the latter two at best, and entirely sideline actual writership at worst.
All right. Let's say that The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen is somewhat more directly backed by Verne's work, than Star Wars is by Kurosawa's. (although I would doubt that, I don't see how codifying styles and feels, consists of less work than making up character names). But even if we accept your hypothesis, both of these are far less involving parts of the creative process, than actually sitting down and writing down a piece of work.
We have already discussed, that "it was made possible only by the use of other people's work" is not a relevant argument. Causation does not equal creation. If you went back in time and killed the young Wright Brothers, then Amelia Earhart wouldn't have been flying across the Atlantic. If Miyamoto didn't get employed by Nintendo, then they never succeeded in gaming, and Bayonetta 2 wouldn't exist. This doesn't mean that Miyamoto made Bayonetta 2, or that the Wight Brothers flew over the Atlantic.
A billion parallel causations can be found behind an event, but "it wouldn't have been possible without x" is not the same thing as "x did this". Crediting someone for creatorship should be restricted to active, conscious, and direct responsibility.
The question is not who caused the characters to exist, but who is the creator of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
The cover of any issue doesn't say "written by Verne, Wells and others", it says "Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill".
When upon being asked whose work is The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and you are instantly replying based on who created some of it's characters, and want to give them "sole compensation" you entirely disregard rewarding the actual authorship, and instead focus on the partial causal responsibility of older artists who have never intended to create The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Why shouldn't he? Serious question.
In spite of conceding the previous point about what is the point of copyright, you still talk as if copyright control would be not just a means to an end that needs to justify it's usefulness, but an end in and of itself, that's limitation must be justified.
If there would be some great purpose behind the necessary evil of letting corporations silence thousands of artists, ban works of art from being published, and force our popular culture into their preferred shape, then I would sadly accept it.
Until then, all other things being equal, free speech is better than censorship. Artistic freedom is better than creative control.
You aren't even attempting such a justification, you are pretty much just asking "why should we allow people to freely sell their writings?" You are saying that copyrights "aren't stopping any other artists from making art", right before you say that they are "stopping other artists from making art based on their IP." It's like you don't even see the possibility that art based on an IP is still art, and just assume that it has a less than zero value and should be censored by default.
Again, that's not an argument in favor of IP creators practicing censorship, just assuming that it's fine where it is, and demanding Joe to justify himself for wanting to make a living from his own art.
Looking at a work like The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and saying that the author who wrote some other works earlier should be entitled to absolutely control it's fate and it's revenues, and the artists who actually wrote it shouldn't even be allowed to publish copies of it (if not for the small mercy of public domain).
The question is not why Moore needed to wrote that grahic novel, but why anyone who didn't write it, would need to control it, even hpothetically, if it's sources were younger.
Why is it that George Lucas who wrote Star Wars, needs to control other works that are not the Star Wars he wrote, and that he isn't responsible for creating, solely because they couldn't exist without him?
edited 11th Nov '14 12:19:25 PM by Ever9