Native Jovian:
I can't think of any year, where an individual work demonstratably boosted the overall demand for entertainment in general, and even if there would be, it takes a very special work to do that, and you have provided no reason in your scenario why these particular works would be particularly stricken by less franchise rights. After all, the big revolutionary works that draw audiences to the cinema/bookstore, are also the ones that make the most direct sales.
It's more like sayng that just because it's possible to become rich, doesn't mean that the playing field isn't tilted against the poor.
Yes, writers have a one-in-a-million chance at becoming big IP holders, but the system that makes that possible, is far more likely to put small artists into a salary worker position and make money for someone else with their work, or if they are not willing to accept the terms, then leave them behind as hobbyist fanfiction artists.
I'm not saying that IP is a scarce resource, but that money is a scarce resource. In this case "zero sum game" is not just some elaborate analogy, I'm directly referring to to the pile of money that audiences are willing to pay for entertainment as the "sum". The problem with widely defined IP, is not just that it decreases other artists' IP, but that it decreases their money.
When you say something like this:
Then maybe copyright should be more concerned about the average artist making a living, give them equal rights, and just assume that one of them will be first, than give disproportional rights to a "first artist".
You are entirely fixated on the possible plight of one random artist's certain means of success, rather than the average artist's likely means to success, because you decided to think of yours as the "first artist" from whom all creativity flows. You have provided no scenario that shows HOW that "first artist" situation represent a big amount of artists. You haven't provided a credible scenario where if franchise control would be abolished today, the sum of all writers, and filmmakers, would decide to make less products or none at all, just because none of them gets to be legally enshrined as "first" at the expense of the rest.
Raven Wilder:
That sounds like infringement to me. Like I have said earlier, I care more about incentivizing artists for creating value as audiences see it, than about rewarding work just because it's hard.
Even without the whole "infringing on someone else's work" issue, what you describe sounds like digging holes to fill them again.
Ace of Spades:
I see your confusion. You have read my post where I compared copyright to property, and mixed the lines so it looks like I said copyright is like slavery. (which would imply a degree of similarity between them).
In fact, I compared property to slavery (a historically common claim), then compared copyright to franchise control, and made the statement that the two comparisons are similar to each other.
That is, calling slavery a type of property is hypocritical, and so is calling franchise control a form of copyright.
If on a Cartesian coordinate system where the x axist represents internal consistency, and y represents goodness, property would be at (P; 10;20), and slavery would be at (S -190; -180), while copyright would be at (C 5;40), and franchise control would be at (F -195;-10). Try to draw it. The point is not that C and S are close to each other, or even that F and S are, but that P->S and C->F are both shifted to the same degree on the X axis in terms of betraying the principle that they are trying to invoke, with similar amounts of hypocricy.
"In any event" is the key phrase here. Franchise control, and it's lack, both involve limiting artists' abilities. We can only pick the more balanced option of the two.
If you publish a fanfiction novel based on my universe, you "fuck with what I create", but if I try to forbid you to publish your writing, I fuck with what you create. It's fuckery all around, because transformative work has two different parties with claims that it's "their work". The question is which one's is more important. My stance, is that being the actual, direct writer of a work, is more significant than being the one whose work it is based on.
When you look at a work based on an older universe, such as like My Little Pony: Fighting Is Magic, or Alexandra Quick, or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or The Walking Dead (the game), who is the creator of these works? The artist(s) who spent years actually producing them, or the other artist who didn't, but on whose work they are based on? It intuitively seems to be the former. In any other context, we would talk about telltale's Walking Dead, or about Alan Moore's "League...", or about Invariarity's Alexandra Quick series. (Not Rowling's Alexandra Quick, or Hasbro's Fighting is Magic).
As long as you are in favor of artists controlling their respective writings, you can claim to be for creators' rights to their own stuff, but once you start to give them control over other people's writings, based on an indirect claim on the origin of those, your system becomes everything you claim to hate.
Taking away the laws on the basis of which they sue, certainly wouldn't hurt. If legislators would reaffirm that copyright applies to direct copying of one's respecive writings, then no legal budget could prove that Disney has a claim over how smaller artists publish their own respective writings.
Right now, Disney and Warner are not merely big by the virtue of making lots of well-received movies, but they are on a positive feedback loop of control, where the combination of their money and their control over a century's worth of pop-culture, gives them an incentive to gather even wider claims on that culture. If you care about the smaller creators, you should care about how much opportunity it would mean for them to be allowed to be freely interact with that culture, and how disproportionally more it would mean to them than to Disney.
edited 18th Nov '14 4:55:13 AM by Ever9
V
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
What's your view on the Macross rights dispute?
Ok, first of all, all Disney can do is copyright their specific characters. They can't copyright the fairytales themselves because those are already in the public domain and anyone can make a film of them. See Snowwhite and the Huntsman and the Snow White comedy movie that had Julia Roberts in it. Hell, they can't even sue Dreamworks over the whole Shrek parodies of their works because those characters are sufficiently different. (And also a parody and thus covered under Fair Use.)
In short, Disney can't sue anyone for using Snow White. They can sue someone for using their specific version of Snow White without their permission. Which, legally speaking, is fair enough. But you're acting like they go around suing everyone just for using the same sort of fairytales. Which I have yet to hear of them doing. In fact, there's a couple of series I could name that are interpretations of fairy tales so I can tell you that Disney probably doesn't go around suing people just for using the same sources as them. You'd make a hell of a lot more sense if you were referring to Disney's habit of buying up other media companies, but you act like they're trying to sue the shit out of any other company/person that dares to use fairy tales. (And let's not forget that Marvel and Lucasfilms would and do hold onto their copyrights just as fiercely before being involved with Disney.)
And again, they can't prevent a person from publishing everything. You're acting like being prevented from making money of fanfiction means that a person can never ever publish a piece of work that isn't related to the fanfiction. Like I said, EL James at least went to the trouble of changing the character's names. An artist that wants to seriously publish can at least go to that much effort.
Also, you've named two works that are fanworks and being produced for free, so the legal entanglements of profit are not an issue (and one got into trouble anyway), another based on the public domain the same as Disney's works usually are, and a successful franchise where presumably everyone involved in making the game got their paycheck for their work before the game went out and so were fairly compensated for their work, and that the creators presumably were also fairly compensated for giving out the licensing rights.
Fighting is Magic is using HASBRO'S characters and famous name, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And THAT is the problem. If they were using ponies that weren't the characters, and certainly weren't using the My Little Pony title, they wouldn't have gotten in the trouble they did. And as far as I can tell that seems to be what they're doing now. As for Alexandra Quick: if she wanted to publish that she could excise all the Harry Potter elements. It doesn't seem like that would be hard. L Eague: A Lan Moore got fucking paid for his work, and there was no legal issue because he used works in the public domain. Copyright doesn't apply. Copyright certainly applies to how the characters appeared in League, though.
You fail at making a convincing argument.
@Ever 9: So you're saying that, under your proposed copyright system, it would still be possible to copyright the plot of a story, not just the particular way the author expresses it?
If that's the case, suppose I decide to write a sequel to a novel someone else wrote. Under your system, I'd be able to advertise my story as a sequel to that novel, and I'd be able to use the same setting and cast of characters as that novel, but I wouldn't be able to repeat the sequence of plot events that occurred in that novel. Is that correct?
If so . . . well, it's a pretty odd sequel that can't actually reference anything that happened in the story it's a sequel to. In that situation, it seems like if you just changed all the names in the story, you'd be able to publish it as a piece of original fiction, and the current copyright system would give you no trouble at all.
Raven Wilder:
Wait a minute. First you were talking about a whole work being just another one's rewording. That's not the same thing as referencing the plot of another work.
And in either case, I'm pretty sure that every possible copyright law has ambigous edges where human case-by-case judgement is necessary. The current one has it with the edges of Fair Use, and I have never claimed that this is a problem in itself, or that I know a way to solve it. Right now, if you are skirting between what the system calls "derivative" copying, and what it calls "transformative" creation, eventually you have to bring in a judge who looks at the two works, and decides which it is, based on subjective opinions.
If anything, I wouldn't even call my ideas a whole separate "copyright system", it's more of an observation that the current edges of Fair Use have been absurdly narrow, and that really, it should apply to pretty much any work that we would otherwise identify as a creative work on it's own right. (See my repeated point a about how we are identifying fanfics and licensed works by their direct writer's name, not by it's franchise creator's, and how this indicates that current law ignores the person who can truly be considered "the creator").
And yes, in the end that kind of regulation still can't be ruled by some objective, consistent content ID software, eventually a judge somewhere would have to decide that mirroring a video, or changing sentence structure, doesn't count as the creation of a transformative work, while writing a whole new story, or coding a whole new game, does.
Ace of Spades:
While you are on a winning streak, you might as well explain exactly what is the argument that I just lost by your posting of random trivia about those four works' creation processes.
Because I have only listed them to ask a simple question: "When you look at a work based on an older universe, such as [list], who is the creator of these works?"
Yes, I have very consciously picked them from four different fates, (one censored game, one disenfranchised fanfic, one licensed game, and one comic publishable thanks to Pub Dom). Thanks for writing a detailed analysis of these four fates, and how they have or haven't got paid, but the question was about who to identify as their creator, which I suspect to be similar, since they are all new creative works based on older I Ps.
Even through your inexplicable focus on their respective profitability, you managed to answer the question in one instance: "Alan Moore got fucking paid for his work". His work. Here, you have no trouble acknowledging, that a derivative work that didn't even "go to the fucking trouble of changing names like EL James did", is still the work of the person who made it, rather than just "fucking with" what someone else created. My claim is simply that the same principle applies to the other three as well. Whether they happen to be based on younger work, and whether or not they were arranged inside a license, these are not creative differences but circumstantial ones. The respective creators are Mane6, Inverarity, Telltale, and Alan Moore.
EL James went into a lot more trouble than changing names: she first wrote a whole new book, with it's own pieces of worldbuilding, characterization, and plot, not to mention filling it with page-to-page content, words, sentences, and paragraphs.
The problem with your perception of creativity, is that you entirely ignore these non-trivial parts of creative work, and make their acknowledgemet dependent on the shallow, simple, unremarkable final touch of making up a few random names, as if that would be the most important starting point.
Up until the last minute it had that title, you would have considered Masters of the Universe to be a non-entity, merely an act of "fucking with Meyer's work", that doesn't even deserve the right to exist, should be censorable at Meyer's will, and has no claim to creative value whatsoever, yet from that minor act, it turned into it's own IP that deserves absolute protection, that no one should fuck with, and the creation of which our economy needs to financially incentivize.
If for whatever aesthetic reasons, you believe that works that still use those pre-existing names, can't be taken seriously, that's cool. I personally can't take zombie genre seriously. If you can't take Tangled as seriously as The Lion King, or take The Dark Knight as seriously as Inception, or League as seriously as Watchmen, because the formers have all used other artists' character names, that's, like, your opinion.
But when you start fixating on that opinion so hard, that you would rather strike down the former type of works with a hundred year long period where they can't be freely created or distributed, and hand the authority over allowing, forbidding, or creatively controlling the very existence such works, to the creators of the other kind, we have left the realm of possibly legitimate opinions, and entered the realm of setting up extensive censorship regimes to interfere with creative work based on your tastes, at the expense of artists who were otherwise doing similar degrees of work, and produced similarly enjoyable, popular, and even original pieces of art, heavy with content made with their own hands, but didn't use the same character naming process.
edited 19th Nov '14 9:40:42 AM by Ever9
Jupiterian Local
The original creator creates an original work. The derivative creator creates a derivative work based on the original work. If the original work is still copyrighted — as in, not yet in the public domain — then the derivative work is violating the original work's copyright unless the derivative creator has the original creator's permission to create the derivative work. This is necessary in order to allow the original creator to monetize their original work — if anyone can go and make a derivative work without the original creator's permission, then it's going to be more difficult for the original creator to make money from their original work. So in order to make sure that the original creator is able to earn money on their original work, we limit the derivative creator's right to make derivative works. Not because we think that derivative works have no value as art, or that derivative creators have no value as artists, but because protecting original works and original creators is judged to be of greater value — because derivative creators can't exist without original creators existing first.
I think the point we're trying to make is that, if a derivative work is truly transformative, then it doesn't actually need to be a derivative work at all: if you just change a few surface details, like the names used or a few elements of character design, it should be able to pass muster as an original work. At that point, continuing to market it as being related to someone else's copyrighted work amounts to little more than trying to borrow that work's fame to increase your own.
Suppose I make a movie about how King Kong, following his rampage in New York, is kept alive by the U.S. military, who deploy him as a weapon during World War II. That would be copyright infringement. However, while the exact details of the movie King Kong are under copyright, the basic idea of a giant ape attacking a modern day city is not. So if I call my giant ape something other than King Kong, use a somewhat different model for the ape's design, and either change or don't mention the "brought from a Lost World island to be a Broadway attraction, but then escaped" backstory, then I'm in the clear as far as copyright goes.
That, to me, seems like a pretty small burden to place on the maker of the derivative work if it means protecting the original creator's ability to license and franchise their creation.
(reply to Jovian, and to posssible others, tomorrow)
Raven Wilder:
And my point is, that even at it's best, franchise control is a random nuisance, an arbitrary meddling with what people are and aren't allowed to create.
What would you say, if your government issued a wholesale ban on zombie movies? Even if we assume that all zombie movies were rather trashy, and their creators will still be capable of creating something else instead, they could just replace zombies with wild animals or something, that's not really a justification for intrusive censorship, it's pretty much just an appeal to how it's "not as bad as it could be". Across the thread, I have listed a whole bunch of respected, popular works that exist inside pre-existing I Ps. Even if someone might claim that they are not precisely as valuable as new I Ps (just like zombie movies may not be exactly artistic as others), they seem to be vaguely in the same ballpark.
So why is it justified to so harshly meddle with their very existence, in a manner that not just gives them less protection than to others, but actively takes away even the same free speech protection that even an entirely non-creative, non-copyrightable text, like a phonebook would have? Maybe Jovian's claims that it's necessary to hold such control lest all creativity cease, would hold merit, if they were actually accurate, rather than a bad misunderstanding of how economic incentivization works.
And besides, you are wrong about "truly transformative" works being able to easily shred their source. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead wouldn't be the same without it's commentary on Hamlet. I keep citing public domain based and licensed derivative works, because as classics made by professionals, they can reach the kind of "sacred" status where few people would be openly in favor of their non-existence. But even in fanfiction circles, a comparable example would be Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, that fundamentally relies on being presented as a rationalist, transhumanist, criticque of Rowling's story, and it's not less creative for it. As far as High Concept premises go, "What if Harry Potter would have been an extremely intelligent scientist wannabe", can lead to as much original thought, (if not more), than "what if Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter", or "what if an alien mothership parked in South Africa".
Popular culture itself is part of our world, and works that are based on interpreting an icon of popular culture, are as legitimate as ones that interpret a historical figure, a trope, or an everyday situation.
edited 19th Nov '14 12:02:10 PM by Ever9
Jupiterian Local
You are saying that they both deserve "credit". That's true if we are talking about verbal praise, or the acknowledgement of their existence. But ultimately only one can deserve the control that such credit implies, and when the chips are down, you are more interested in giving control over works to those who are indirectly creditable for paving the way for their origin, than to those who have actually created them.
In any given situation, the last actor's conscious, intentional actions, are far more creditable than the indirect starters of a causal chain. When you get a college degree, you deserve credit for your work, and your parents deserve credit for raising you to be a diligent, independent person. Without them you couldn't be where you are. But ultimately it's not your parents who are getting a degree. They deserve praise, but not a claim over what you have done. This is not even about whose job is harder or bigger, raising a kid might be harder than studying in college, but it's two separate lines of work, and even if one set up the other's needs, they deserve rights separately.
If J.K. Rowling never for a waking moment consciously thought to write a series about an american witch called Alexandra Quick, then sure, she might dererve credit for setting up some rules of an universe without which the series couldn't be written the way it was. But she is Not. The. Writer. The kind of responsibility that deserves rewards, (or punishment), is normally applied to the one who has intentionally done the final action with an explicit direct purpose, not for someone who has unwittingly caused an event.
In no other industry, would a dependent relationship alone be enough justification for absolute control of others' work.
Without rubber production, we would have no car production. That still doesn't mean that the rubber manufacturers should be given absolute financial ownership over all automobile production. Not even if a rubber company argues that they need all the extra incentivization, or they might start to go bankrupt, and if all rubber manufacturers go bankrupt like that, then the whole rubber, tires and cars industry suffers.
There are two points of that analogy that are very appropriate for this discussion:
- is, that the rubber manufacturer's claim is obviously misrepresenting how the economy works. "We can imagine one hypothetical company being in the red", doesn't lead to "rubber production is about to drastically decrease". As long as there is stable demand for rubber, any individual failing company would be taken over by the others, and even if all would fail at the same time, we would sooner see car manufacturers producing their own rubber, than drastically decrease car production because their old suppliers went dead. Likewise, as long as the public wants to see new I Ps, one particular IP creator's possible demise is more likely to result in others taking their place, than in a massive decrease of creative work output in spite of demand for it.
- is, that the proposed arrangement is obviously unjust, hence the first half of my post. Rubber creators deserve to own rubber, and car creators deserve to own cars. What incentivization rubber creators deserve, is already justly taken care of just by giving them control over their directly made products. Any demand for extra incentivization through control of profits that are "based on" theirs, could only come by refusing to treat others' respective work as comparably important, and comparably deserving of rights. Likewise, artists are already greatly incentivized by a copyright system that can earn them several dollars every time someone consumes their product. That is a stable revenue source right there. When they demand an extra incentivization, that can only come from an intent to upset that basic system where all deserve cotrol of their direct work, and instead of all artists selling their work, some artists should be selling their own work and others' work too, based on partial claims of "credit".
Got me there, I exaggerated. Nonetheless, your claim is fundamentally flawed.
Your first mistake is that you believe the current system particularly encourages creators to make new I Ps. This is not the case. By putting an extra value on franchises, in encourages creators to keep licensing derivatives, as long as the audience tolerates it, and grudgingly produce one new franchise-starter when it's absolutely necessary. If franchise rights wouldn't exist, and only direct revenues would count, Sony might as well have made a new IP instead of The Amazing Spider Man, in hopes that it would make better ticket sales. Their only reason to force an oversaturated franchise on us, was that they expected long term benefits from keeping the license they rent from Disney, even knowing that it's not the most demanded work they could make.
The second is, that you assume that a hypothetical work plausibly losing money, could be extrapolated to be a common trend through the industry. Even if under my ideal system's installation, Sony would have chosen to make that new IP and lost money on it, that loss would have been someone else's gain, as it represents the audiences opting to watch something else instead. Maybe they would have went to watch Disney's The Avengers vs. The Justice League instead. Or maybe that work would have lost money, and they would have watched Sony's original non-spiderman film. Whichever appeared more interesting. Or they watched a third (original) work. Or they would have spent it on a Kickstarted animated adaptation of Fallout: Equestria.
In either case, the money would have circulated somewhere in the industry, rewarding original and derivative works both in proportion to how many people want to see them, and rewarding artists in proportion to how many people have wanted to see their work.
edited 20th Nov '14 7:55:34 AM by Ever9
V
But what about the thousands of people — including artists — that design cars for a living? And, um, anything about that Macross dispute?
edited 20th Nov '14 6:42:39 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling On
I'm not sure if you are mocking the far-brought analogy, or you are actually trying to make a point.
I'm not familiar with the Macross issue. Does it concern any principles of copyright, or it's a unique happenstance, like that monkey-selfie case? Could you describe how it relates to this discussion?
V
No, I'm asking if creators (or teams of them?) of vehicles (or parts for them) should be able to claim copyright over their designs?
You could say so. It's a complicated issue, best described as an international copyright snarl, involving several production companies in both Japan and the US. It is in part described under the Trope Screwed by the Lawyers and in the Trivia tab here.
edited 20th Nov '14 7:02:07 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling On
cars: I have no idea. My guess is that owning a physical product's curves is more of a trademark and patent issue. In either case I'm leaning towards no, it sounds a bit like Apple owning the rounded rectangle. An utility tool's shapes are primarily practical, any creative value in them is largely incidental to their business model, and unlikely to meet the Treshold of Originality.
Macross: The whole Screwed by the Lawyers page in general makes my blood boil, but regional licensing issues seem to be less grotesquely harmful than most. At least works can still get made, and even watched everywhere through means that's discussion has been confined to that one other thread, so I won't speak more about that.
Jupiterian Local
I'm not arguing for taking control away from derivative creators, you're arguing for taking control away from original creators.
The same is not true of a derivative creator. The original creator did not sell the original work to them. The derivative creator does not own the original work. The derivative creator does not have the right to do with it as they please.
If your goal is to create new franchises, then your idea — to allow derivative works without the original creator's permission — is counterproductive. If that was the case, then Fifty Shades would still be a Twilight fanfic instead of a new franchise, for example. The current system is better for creating new franchises than your proposed system, because any new artist is forced to create their own franchise instead of just using someone else's.
Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker.
Here's
an interesting thought about how artists make their livings in the digital age.
The real fix for this is to eliminate the de facto subsidies to giant multinational corporations (lobbying priveleges, legalized tax-cheating, etc). (This would also fix pretty much everything else!).
But in the meantime, we can encourage the 'competitor of last resort' - the Internet and all the services that allow artists to opt out of the big five/four and go on their own. That means not imposing enormous copyright liabilities on them (to found Youtube today, you don't just need a garage full of hard-drives, you also need a $300M Content ID system, which means we aren't going to see a lot of Youtube competitors any time soon).
The existence of an alternative to the big companies puts a floor on the worst offer they can make to artists — it has to be better than the best deal we can get for ourselves, outside of their walls.
So maybe the problem of copyright in the digital age isn't the law, but how the "industry" companies abuse the law and control the major successes.
This was part of a discussion about copyright and creativity in general.
Native Jovian:
It's contradictory only because you take it for granted that "control over that work" inherently includes control over other works, rather than just each creators' equal control over their own writings.
So far, I'm really glad that we could hold this discussion without the kind of status quo bias that plagues many copyright threads, and instead focus on the practical benefit of copyright. Sure, we have our disagreements about how those benefits can be reached, but I would still rather debate with you, than with some stubborn tautological adherence to the current limits of the law just because they are laws.
But in the past two post you seem to be slipping into such a position with these repeated declarations that copyright includes franchise control, made separately from why it should be good for copyright to include franchise control. I get it that right now copyright is written in a way that "full control" incudes control of derivatives, but what if it weren't?
It's not an unimaginable question. According to an 1853 U.S. court decision (Stowe v. Thomas), even translations of copyrighted works didn't fall under the source's copyright that was guaranteed for artists "respective writings" in the Constitution. Franchise control is just a specific feature of it that was invented and expanded through the 1870, and 1909 revisions of the Copyright Act. Other countries had similar histories, as the 1886 Berne Convention was the first international agreement to include a "right to object to modifications". (source).
There is nothing self-evident about the current scope of the law. Just as it used to be narrower, it could also become even wider than it is now, with so-called "Full Control" also including a control of what is now Fair Use.
Compared to the neutral default position of no copyright protection at all, the current system has taken away creator rights from derivative works (which otherwise would be as freely publishable as anthing else, (even if uncontrolled). If you are arguing for the current system, you are arguing that these creator right keep being taken away.
Just like I mentioned above, It seems to me that you are suddenly more interested in defending the status quo, because any cange in it would involve "taking away" controls that are currently being given, than discuss from whom are these controls being taken away from in the first place.
Actually, they sell it to tire manufacturers, who sell it to carmakers. But that's besides the point, you are not actually challenging any substantial part of the analogy, you might as well say "yeah, but rubber consists of polymers, while creative works don't". It's a trivial aspect of the analogy, the car industry isn't protected from rubber manufacturers just because they also happen to be getting physical materials from them. Feel free to replace it with one where both sub-industries buyers are the end customers, just like in the entertainment industry, where new franchises and derivatives are both sold to the audience.
How about IS Ps vs. website creators? Or Tablets and e-book readers, vs. their leather cases' creators?
No matter where you look, "you couldn't have made your products without me making mine first" isn't enough reason to take over someone else's work.
I'm not saying that the derivative creator should do with the original work as they please, only with the derivative work, and that the two should be viewed as two separate works, rather than the latter merely being an aspect of the former's "full control" (That is not so "full" anyways, it can't be, because you could always stretch the concept of ownership further, or make it narrower.).
That's intentional and necessary. I can't really say that "If franchise control wouldn't exist, maybe Sony would have made a new franchise instead of The Amazing Spider-Man", after all, if franchise control wouldn't exist, then by definition that film wouldn't be much of a franchise, since anyone can follow up on it. So I'm using IP to mean "a glob of content that would be gathered under a new franchise nowadays."
That's possible, however with examples like my Sony one, that could balance out. In either case, it's not so much the amount of franchises that I care about, as the amount of creativity.
I don't have much use for either "New I Ps/franchises" like 50 Shades, that desperately try to tip over the treshold of publishability, nor for the in-franchise/in-IP works that care more about establishing their owner's pop-culture footprint than about telling good stories on their own right, nor for the amateurish, anti-commercial fanfiction culture, that revels in it's own excuses to act unprofessional.
Like I have said earlier, my expectation is that without franchise control, and with every piece of work being it's own legal "IP", the lines would get a lot blurrier between what chain of works would have been considered "a franchise" or "an IP" under the system we have now.
Sure, on one hand lots of newcomers would dive right into the biggest old franchises, but on the other hand, with no reason to preserve their shared "franchise" consistency, they could have a lot more motive to go wild with original characters, locations, and executions.
Just look at what happens when Disney adapts a Public Domain work like The Snow Queen, or even The Little Mermaid. Or look at how few of the better-written fanfictions are actually staying in Original Flavour mode. When you are not responsible for cultivating a canon, or a brand image of your source, you can add your own ideas to a nominally derivative work a lot more liberally. I expect we would see a lot more works that are technically in the Star Wars or Harry Potter or Firefly or My Little Pony universes, but also contain a lot more creative thought than we can expect from the francise overlords.
I just wish when an artist decides to create a work, the first question to ask themselves shouldn't be "Will it be original enough to be allowed publishing (in the sense that a lawyer would recognize "originality"?)", but "Will it be interesting enough to read?", and only have to move from there.
If it would turn out that the demand would only rise for pony crossover fics, then so be it, a free culture is still better than a paternalistic enforcement of obligatory new I Ps/franchises.
edited 20th Nov '14 5:18:46 PM by Ever9
Aw Sam Weston:
You can't blame an organization that's job is profit maximization, for maximizing it's own profits, you can only set the rules in a way that they can't get away with it at our expense.
If we are talking about a "problem of copyright", that implies that there is a solution, and screaming about how Disney is a bunch of meanieheads definitely isn't a solution. Removing the laws that allow them to be meanieheads, is.
edited 20th Nov '14 11:53:38 AM by Ever9
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Can a Long Runner be a Franchise when an author lets other authors write in his Universenote ?
Why wouldn't it? Outside of literature, most franchises are written by a sequence of people, for example TV shows often have changing episode writers, directors, and even showrunners, who are all "allowed by the author" (the corporation), to write in it. If anything, multi-writer novel series are more similar to pop-culture's typical franchising, than most other literature is.
If you are asking this regarding my statement that something "wouldn't be much of a franchise, since anyone can follow up on it", that applied to the lack of control.
There is no such thing as "The Robin Hood franchise", or "The Romeo and Juliet franchise", or even "The Dracula francise", because no one owns the universes in question, only the individual works in them. This is quite different from a single author in control choosing to use his control in the form of publishing others' derivatives.
Edit: Also, yay Honor Harrington. I've literally just finished the second book ten seconds before I came back to this page. Off I go to read the third. (Although my favorite example of shared universe writing is still Sixteen Thirty Two)
edited 20th Nov '14 4:02:49 PM by Ever9
Mad Scientist Wannabe
Because those are public domain works.
Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great
Yeah... Obviously.
Chapter 1 (Discontinued)
What's an example of a big corp abusing their power over a franchise for reasons not related to unprofitability?
Warning: This poster is known to the state of California to cause cancer. Cancer may not be available in your country.
Ever9, I'm not going to allow you that melodramatic analogy because I find to it to be a disgustingly gross and inappropriate one. Really? You're comparing copyright to slavery? Wow, you and your arguments have gone down some pegs with that analogy, actually. The people who want to use other's works can at least go to the fucking trouble of changing names like EL James did. And quite frankly? The two are no-fucking-where near analogous to each other. Since, you know, slavery was a person being owned by another person and copyright doesn't actually involve owning people and treating human beings as if they were property. I suggest that, if you want me to take you seriously, you find a better analogy.
In any event,"Sweat of their brow" in this case involves infringing on the sweat of someone else's brow, which not necessarily everyone is cool with. Some are, which is why Creative Commons exists. It also doesn't prevent people from attempting to make money, it's preventing someone from using what other people have created to make money. Which is actually pretty reasonable.
And Disney? Is always going to find a way to own Micky Mouse and sue the crap out of anyone who tries to horn in on their particular interpretations of fairy tales. Getting rid of copyright isn't going to change the fact that they have a huge advantage by virtue of being a huge company. I'm more concerned about how copyright can affect smaller or individual creators. And quite frankly? If I create something I don't want someone else trying to fuck with what I create.
@Chronosonic: Ok I'm changing this whole paragraph: Crowdfunding has no actual legal effect on copyright. Copyright is the ability to hold onto your IP legally, so in this case this just makes the little guys less reliant on being hired by the big guys to promote their work. Or less reliant on them to promote their creative works. Which, basically, makes it easier for the little guys to hold onto their copyright since they're more able to make a living off of this, or at least break even. So, rather than eliminating the need for copyright, it makes it easier for the little guys to make a living off their IP and thus to keep their copyright rather than having to give it away to an employer. So yeah, you're a bit mistaken about this making us less reliant on copyright. It's made us less reliant on big companies, but copyright is still a concern for these small creators. Also, I'm not quite sure why you'd use a games journalist for this particular topic rather than say... a video game maker or something? Hell, there's Andrew Hussie who crowdfunded a game based on his IP. And is basically turning Homestuck and his previous works into a franchise of sorts. It's been interesting to watch as the thing has grown.
And crowdfunding also doesn't eliminate the dubious and gray legal area that fanfiction occupies in law right now. Since you can't currently legally make money of said fics, I'm not sure how this prevents fics from becoming dead fics. This seems like a strange conclusion to come to actually. This is the sort of thing that could get someone sued, actually, and that's not fun for anybody.
edited 18th Nov '14 12:11:46 AM by AceofSpades