"And now you, dear filmmaker, want to come along and want to make your own version of Star Wars: A New Hope? For shame! That's like stealing food right out of George Lucas' mouth."
Your comment reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright law. It is perfectly acceptable to copy the basic "idea" of a story. You just can't copy or make derivative works of Star Wars or Alice in Wonderland themselves, but you can copy all the themes and ideas thereof.
The argument is that it's harmful for society to restrict artists from remixing other people's work. And when you put it that way, how could it be otherwise? We'll have to agree to disagree that it'd cause problems for people to be able to tell a Darth Vader story.
It causes problems because then there is no profit incentive and then there goes the entire content creation industry.
You can remix themes and ideas all you want. Just don't call it Darth Vader and profit off other people's investment in that specific expression of the space opera.
Good point about Disney, they shouldn't be allowed to control characters forever. But two wrongs don't make a right. Nintendo and Valve made recent pieces of intellectual property that they should be allowed to own for a reasonable period of time.
I am just waiting for Disney to buy the rights to Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" and try to claim they own the monomyth and all derivative stories are violating their copyright.
Being creative and copying ideas are not mutually exclusive.
For instance, I love the harry potter universe. I just happen to think that JK Rowling is a terrible writer. I would pay hundreds of dollars for quality fan fiction, ideally licensed or legal. There’s really no mechanism for any human on the planet to tell a story in this universe and widely distribute it legally.
Arguably this is more of an issue with copyright and trademark, but I think there’s a lot of room for art to fluorish if there’s a market not beholden to IP law.
Just a small nitpick, there is no such thing as "IP law". There are copyright laws, trademark laws, and patent laws. All of them have different rules and regulations, and the only thing some people think they have in common is that they (in some fashion) "regulate ideas" with small differences in their application. This is simply not an accurate view of such laws, and ends up muddying the waters by making the clear differences between such laws seem unclear (I'm not saying that you are guilty of doing this intentionally -- it is a very common misconception that is spread because the copyright lobby in the US intentionally tries to muddy the waters so that discussions of reform get squashed).
Always refer to copyright laws as "copyright laws", trademark laws as "trademark laws", and so on.
Harry Potter has more fanfiction about it than any other storiy. The most famous one is on hpmor.com, but you can find tons of others on fanfiction.net.
This is a ridiculous idea, that falls apart with even cursory scrutiny. For a trivial example, almost all of Shakespeare's plays were amalgamations of other people's plays or were based on other people's stories (Hamlet, for instance, was a retelling of a 16th century version of the 13th century Scandinavian legend of Amleth).
Would you argue that Shakespeare was not creative? Or is it possible that stories are based on the culture of a society, and the culture of a society is based on the stories told -- meaning that any story can be argued to be a copy of another person's idea.
You're not going to convince me that someone narrating over themselves play Half-Life has the same creativity as Shakespeare, because "everything is a copy". To say that no one actually owns the rights to Pokemon, that someone copying Pokemon frame-by-frame is of equal creative value as someone drawing their own monsters, well I just am deeply saddened by that.
(I'll be honest that I didn't originally didn't read that the topic under discussion was modding of games. Passing off a game as your own is obviously not right, but that isn't the only topic under discussion here.)
Of course modding is not the same as Shakespeare. My point was that stories like those of Shakespeare would not have been possible with our modern notions of copyright. I do agree that many (but not all) examples of such work are just simply rip-offs of other people's work. On the other hand, does it make sense for any work to be untouchable for an essentially unlimited period of time?
So while you might argue that mods are all shameless copies of another person's work, I direct you to 'The Stanley Parable'[1] which was a mod of Half-Life 2. I think most people would argue that it is a creative work that is unique despite the fact that it re-uses assets from a copyrighted work. There are many counter-examples to the idea that the only way to have creative value in a game is to "draw your own monsters". Jim Sterling ran a contest where people were to come up with original works based on an overused Unity asset, and the winning entry was a game made entirely out of textures based on that asset[2]. Is that not a creative work?
I think that ultimately it's a disservice to argue that all such works should not be allowed because many examples of people building on previous work is lazy or a transparent rip-off. That the requirement for a creative work be a strict sense of originality (not to mention that you need to decide how do you define sufficient originality -- is "Harry Potter Told Using Pokemon" an original work?).
Thanks for your comment. I'm certainly not arguing for a binary definition of creativity. I would play The Stanley Parable and vouch for it's existence as a stand-alone work of art.
But should The Stanley Parable be able to profit and set up a free enterprise on the tireless work of Valve engineers? Well, I wasn't really arguing that either.
All I was saying is that, as an artist, if you consider yourself "fucked" because you can't profit off of releasing a commercial game "Harry Potter with Pokemon" that sits on the shelves of GameStop alongside the originals- even though you would be quite good and creative artist in my mind, hell I would play the shit out of that game- you are not realizing that respecting copyright law and abiding by those rules, as "unfair" as they may be, is the only thing that protects companies from being ruthlessly shared on uTorrent for free, and that if you were truly creative and trying to form a business, why not respect this law, and take additional effort to create something "new" and "original", which I understand is total hyperbole, but within our confines of law is simply a matter of "reskinning" so yes Shakespeare could be regarding on the level of reskinning someone else's Angry Birds, but clearly he put his creative spin on it enough to be different or else he wouldn't have made his mark.
In conclusion, nothing is completely "original", and fanfiction is still creative, but artists should strive to not self-identify with other creative entities, if they wish to form a business, out of respect for the law that protects from 100% bad actors which do not wish to creatively enhance, but to sell or distribute identical copies of original creative work.
Again, Disney did exactly that. They ruthlessly exploited Alice in Wonderland and built an empire on it. And you're arguing that no one should be able to do the same. This is the definition of unfair.
I see we're very far apart and probably won't find some common ground, but the way I feel about the situation is that as automation removes the rest of manual labor jobs, people will need to specialize. And modding old ideas is one of the few ways people could specialize and make a living for themselves. You're free to disagree here, but the future is coming, and one day we'll both be gone. The best ideas, however, will be around. And it's hard to imagine that the best idea is not to let anyone else use anything you've thought of for your entire life plus ninety years.
> you are not realizing that respecting copyright law and abiding by those rules, as "unfair" as they may be, is the only thing that protects companies from being ruthlessly shared on uTorrent for free, and that if you were truly creative and trying to form a business, why not respect this law, and take additional effort to create something "new" and "original"
Copyright law is not meant to protect companies. From a historical perspective, it has always meant to temporarily protect authors' rights to their inventions so that society can get more works from those authors. Citing the US constitution (other countries have different justifications, but I assume that you are in the US):
> [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
This matches the purpose of the copyright system defined in 1710 under Statute of Anne (which inspired this clause in the constitution). The copyright system that pre-dated the Statute of Anne was a system of censorship by the publishing houses (that were members of the Printers' Guild), and the public rebelled against their censorship and Queen Anne strove to come up with a system that was far more fair and was meant to inspire authors to produce more work (rather than restrict what they can write so publishers can make more money).
Having a copyright system that protects publishers (which is what we currently have) and lasts for 70 years after the death of the author does not "promote the Progress" of anything (in fact it actively stifles it). I would argue current copyright law is unconstitutional in the US, but I don't have enough money to fight that fight (and the only people that do benefit from copyright law's overreach).
Unfortunately, in our modern age, the true purpose of copyright has been forgotten. People (like yourself) think that the purpose is to protect companies profits -- this could not be further from the truth. Such companies benefit from this misinformation, and regularly lobby the US Congress to add laws which further expand copyright laws (both in breadth as well as length) that result in even more profits for large companies without any more works made as a result. The true hypocrisy is that many of these companies would not have been able to make their works at all without the public domain, and without liberal copyright laws. The first cartoon Mickey Mouse appeared in (Steamboat Willie) made use of things from previous movies (Steamboat Bill Jr -- which was released 50 years earlier).
> out of respect for the law that protects from 100% bad actors which do not wish to creatively enhance, but to sell or distribute identical copies of original creative work.
Even if we ignore that these copyright laws are written by these same corporations (that themselves used public domain, and even infringed on copyrighted works from smaller publishers, to make their products), as I said above this is missing the purpose of copyright law.
Ah, a small correction: I'd never pass someone else's work off as my own. The idea is more along the lines of "Look at this silly hat I put on Picachu. Won't you give me a few cents so I can keep dressing up Pokemon as space marines?"
"And now you, dear filmmaker, want to come along and want to make your own version of Star Wars: A New Hope? For shame! That's like stealing food right out of George Lucas' mouth."