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Yeah it's an interesting problem. Modern copyright law seems pretty obviously problematic for software and needs an update, but IP is always tricky and the system we have works well enough, I guess.
In general I think it would be great for game companies to have to release the code open source if they're going to stop supporting something, even an old version of a game. WoW Classic is a great example, how there was obviously a huge amount of players that still wanted to play it but weren't able to due to Blizzard's decisions. And now it's mostly dying with the Turtle WoW lawsuit. Tragic.
The system we have works terrible. Even if we assume that removing/restricting the power of copyright will reduce the content created - we are producing too much anyway.
I agree. 10 years of IP would be perfectly fine imo.
Dean Baker was the guy to read on this some years back. He had some good proposals.
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Yep.
I think the regular threat of release to the 'public domain' or open-sourcing, as you say, would be a positive incentive for companies to maintain games and eventually 'allow' the community to gain some ownership of them if the community wishes to maintain their game past its intended lifespan.
They should be able to figure out a price point which balances out all these concerns if there's some hard limits in the law.
Personally, I think that if you are going to withhold access to a given product entirely, making it unavailable for purchase or even rental to the 'general public,' that's akin to waiving the protections against others copying and distributing said IP. But I might even go a step further and say some information is 'inherently' of value to the public and thus should be kept accessible on general principle, so I generally support the Sci-hub mission.
In general I think our IP laws dramatically stifle competition in the creative realms, which as a consumer absolutely sucks! We could have so many awesome spinoffs of LOTR or Star Wars by now if our laws were sane.
'Fan fiction' could just become the norm a decade after a story gets told. Which would be a great change.
I want to point out, this is a flaw and reason why IP actually does encourage creativity: it's already bad that people keep reusing tropes because they're reliable, encouraging experimentation (even by coercion) leads to better works in the long run.
But IP has so many other downsides, sometimes it even discourages and blocks original works (for example, LLMs being broadly censored against anything resembling IP, because otherwise it's too easy to trick them into generating it). And it turns out, fan-fiction writers are often more creative than original fiction writers, by applying creativity to less common aspects (besides the core characters/settings/etc. which they reused).
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I dream of an era where the "canon" for a given series isn't dictated by the primary IP holder, but instead can be forked off by people where-ever they want, and fans can just form organic consensuses as to what particular canon is 'best,' and pick and choose precisely which parts of it they want to incorporate into their particular experience.
I would absolutely prefer the version of Star Wars where the Darth Jar-Jar theory was true and he turned out to be the evil behind Snoke in the new trilogy. Let me have my canon, and you can have... whatever The Rise of Skywalker was.
Force these massive companies to compete on something resembling quality, rather than Neener neener I own the IP, you have to go through me if you want more content.
There's something nice about having one canon, like how it can be more fun to play Minecraft in Survival Mode than Creative Mode.
But not everyone feels this way (like how some people only play Creative Mode), mainstream canons (especially today) are generally mediocre at best (even according to the mainstream audience), and IP has so many other downsides. People who want this can resort to subscribing to some curation group who picks one canon for every popular media.
I agree one canon is better. I’ve got no idea if JarJar should be reworked but I do think it would be nice if Disney realized some of the stuff they created was stupid with Star Wars and just remake some of the episodes. Episodes 7,8,9 need to be completely redone. The IP for Star Wars has lost a lot of value because they were so bad. They should just remake those films maybe borrowing from fanfiction. Perhaps even admit you messed up and run some crazy promotion like the new episode 7 is free in theatres. How much would it really costs to remake them like 1.5-2.5 b which is significantly less than the initially paid for the IP.
GOT probably needs a reboot either just the last seasons or the final 2. Paramount paid $110 B for GOT. A reboot is tops 3% to do it again but correctly and GOT is likely still WBD highest value IP. Probably more like 1% of purchase price. Some of the issues with GOT was just being a rushed finish, but the WhiteWalkers and John as the Prince who was promised was just poor storytelling. It was the dumb hivemind trope that Independence Day used to beat a super powerful enemy. The real WhiteWalker story has never been told. Not even sure of Martin figured out that story.
The thing with great IP and the stories people really love is it’s not about fantastic graphics and special effects. It’s the storytelling where you need very real talent figuring it out.
I think the real cost, the real problem, is the reputational hit from admitting they fucked up, alongside the shame, blame, and perhaps even legal responsability, it puts on the creators (producers, directors and writers, mostly) of the publically disgraced movies and the chilling effect it would have on future works.
Imagine how it would go! It's hardly a new phenomenon, bad movies get made all the time at all budget levels, but admitting it means throwing people under the bus. It means telling, quite directly, to the dozens of fans of episodes 7-9 as they are that they have objectively bad taste, talk about spitting on someone's soul. For any producer, director or writer who is about to work on a Disney movie, they'll have seen how Disney failed to stand behind their works. Are they going to imply the movie I worked years on is shit if it doesn't make them enough money? For the public, they'll have seen how Disney swore, for years, to the tune of billions of dollars that episode 7, 8 and 9 were the sequels we always wanted to the Star Wars saga.
No, I don't think we're gonna get a redo. If that bad all women Ghostbusters movie was never officially disgraced by Sony, Disney's not going to do it with Star Wars. At least that Ghostbusters movie could be pushed into a corner never to be talked about again, while SW killed off or bastardized beloved characters. It's best for them to maintain the fiction that they were perfectly good movies that simply for whatever reason, didn't resonate enough with audiences. The best they could do to correct it is a split timeline, JJ Abrams' Star Trek-style, that they then splice over the bad one, and I have a hard time imagining them pulling it off in a way that doesn't feel like a massive ass pull; at least Star Trek had a history of time travel and diverging timelines.
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Agreed, but then we end up having to watch said canon crash and burn when someone without any love for the IP grabs hold of it and inserts their own vision, and then mocks the people who are suddenly alienated because har har I peed all over your stuff now I own it. A fandom should, in such cases, be able to organize and just pay some other person to continue from where things left off and go on their merry way. This could happen in the current era, but in practice, coordination problems mean you can't outbid Corporations for the rights.
I think books in particular are amenable to a 'flexible' canon. Most long-running series have entries that fans would rather forget/ignore. Oh, and many where the endings rather suck. So if another author wants to come in and rewrite, say book 6 of a series, or just change a single character arc or 'fix' an ending, well, let them publish it, stick it on the shelf next to the originals, and let people choose.
I ALSO support the idea of authors going back over their own works and adjusting things based on their increased experience and feedback... so long as they're very transparent about doing so and keep the previous versions available.
This doesn't always play out well (Kirkman is making some changes from the Invincible comic to the TV show that I find baffling) but I think it is healthy.
This also opens them up to being bullied into making changes that are genuinely horrible, but hey.
Yes there's absolutely an 'artistic integrity' argument to be made.
I think the apotheosis of this would be a wikipedia-like site that tracks all versions of a given canon and charts the different paths readers/viewers can take and lets people provide feedback on individual tracks so future readers/viewers can pick the one they expect to like.
Hey, at least fans can fight over whether Sony's version of the canon is better than Microsoft's. We lost something when the console wars died down.
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That does sound good, except as the other user noted, the IP laws also protect the small quality authors from the massive slop companies to an extent. Right now, if you have Legends of Gemlands and a generic mass-marketed Slop Wars, you can google the former and it will come up. Gonna be a lot tougher if the massive company can fork Legends of Gemlands and have their version come up in the first 10 pages of search.
That's trademark (identity), not copyright (content). Nobody is suggesting that trademark be abolished.
Wouldn't forked content necessarily have identity similar enough that it is easily confused?
The trademark is the name of the work, not the plot and the characters. Just call your fork Legends of Crystalia, and mention on the same page that it's a fork of Legends of Gemlands not endorsed by the original creator, in order to avoid any confusion. (Though if the characters are trademarked separately—e. g., using a specific gemstone character that figures prominently in the plot as the logo for Legends of Gemlands—then you will have problems.)
For a real-world example, see the recent controversy between Notepad++ (trademarked) and a fork that dared to call itself Notepad++ for Mac without authorization.
I think the overall result, though, is not a proliferation of independent creators protected from corporate overreach, its just an inevitable centralization of all the media to the eternal corporate entities, who then shut down anyone else who might want to spin off the works in question... including the original creator.
The ONLY reason Calvin and Hobbes hasn't burned up its Dragon's hoard of goodwill is because the creator has simply refused to be bought and has become a recluse, the sole holdout of his generation of artists.
But it is certain that once he dies, it too will be sucked up into the corporate vaults and exploited to the max.
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I never understood how people bought into this willingly.
I assume natural crowd-following instincts (you want to be part of what everyone else is doing, not go off on some random tangent where nobody else cares), backed by the aforementioned IP regime that makes it very sketchy to put too much effort into a product you can't distribute.
But yeah, its like the one Tyler the Creator tweet about cyberbullying. "How the hell is corporate canon real? Just read the fanfiction, don't watch the theatrical releases, and believe whatever you want."
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Copyrights should expire much sooner, a few years at most. I can't imagine any serious drawback.
It used to be the case in early American history that you had only process patents; not the end product. But if you want to keep to IP law, they were highly protectionist tools designed to protect monopolies rather than foster innovation. The World Trade Organization is the 21st century poster boy for this, by trying to guarantee monopoly pricing power for big corporations. That prevents development and competition, it doesn’t encourage it.
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Yeah I agree with Count, I think 10 years would be a completely fair time for IP to last. It's pretty wild that they can get extended to the 100 year mark, and you have companies like Disney still milking IP a century old.
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Copyrights should be limited to life of author plus like 10-15 years at most, patents normally require significantly more inventiveness and cost and legal procedure to even turn into an enforcable legal right (you can write any old BS on a piece of paper and if you intented to be creative in any way whatsoever it's automatically covered by copyright) and they don't last more than a few decades.
Why extend to life of the author?
As I understand, the main benefit of copyright is to get authors paid for works that are physically free to copy. They should be paid, or many people won’t be incentivized or able to afford creating such works.
But why should they continue to be paid after a few years, when they haven’t done anything else productive (if they did, for example created another work, they’ll be paid from that).
Some things do take a long time to be monetized. Movies that become cult classics etc. Game of Thrones isn’t a cult classic but the first book was published 15+ years before the show which made the story available to a wider audience. He actually needed to write more source material before you could make a show. For him to monetize his story it took decades.
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Without copyright you have things like people bastardizing Tolkien's creations while he is still alive and writing more about his world he created. It would seriously have pissed him off, and justifiably. At least now the bastardising happens when he's dead and doesn't care any more.
We still have that, it's called fanfiction. About the only difference is you can't earn money on it (usually).
Pretty important difference: it prevents Disney from putting $100 million into marketing their own version of Tolkien while he was still writing his.
This is already a known phenomenon with existing IP constraints.
If they have $100 million, they can create their own brand with slightly different details, so it steals ideas from the existing brand without violating its copyright, and succeed off marketing even if their brand is worse.
In both cases, the original creator probably ends up with more sales and attention than they would've otherwise, by being credited with inspiring the heavily-marketed release.
Then why did they pay Lucas $4 billion?
I don't deny that this has happened but the examples - e.g. 50 Shades of Grey which was transformed even if the core point of "dark triad alpha loves me" was kept, that Anne Hathaway movie - say something and the fact that studios still pay or overpay for IP does too.
I think Lucas prefers the billions he made before Disney could just copy him + the billions he made selling it to them to the honor of being the John Carter to whatever successful series Disney made off his ideas.
Certainly, one could argue that Lucas introduced people to Flash Gordon and Japanese cinema but how many? I was a pretty big SW fan and I don't think I ever watched anything because I was told it inspired SW.
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I scratch my head at people that don’t understand the difference. Sometimes I think they just want to pound the point into legislation because it favors their desires over the way people’s work gets abused. If I only could’ve gotten away in English class recklessly chopping up someone else’s work as my own and calling it “fan fiction,” it would’ve made things so much easier for me. Per the chain above as well, 10 years is way too short a copyright on someone’s work.
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"Someone writes new novels set in your world" vs "someone writes new novels set in your world that take over your brand by sheer volume of marketing" is an important difference, yes.
You can't stop anyone from writing a story, especially nowadays. In practice, copyright has a chilling effect.
If there's no money in it you've driven away a lot of people (cynically: the most talented people who would offend writers the most). In a pre-internet world your reach is also going to be functionally miniscule so, except for the love of the game, while do it?
This is true even in fanfiction where Anne McCaffrey's antipathy towards fanfiction blocked it from FFN for years (despite the pro forma disclaimers writers would make). Back in the day you could scare fans trying to write novels in your world off the major sites purely through copyright law (I think Ao3 feels it's on sturdier ground now and has Dragonriders of Pern fics)
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