[MereInterest]

I absolutely agree with this. There is a human right to be a storyteller, to reimagine characters and themes, to expand settings and genres. To sit around the campfire and make new stories of King Arthur and Lancelot, new stories about Sherlock and Watson, new stories about Harry and Hermione.

Copyright is supposed to be a balance between the author and society. In exchange for releasing the full body of the work, the author gets paid in the form of a limited monopoly. Somehow, this became an argument about moral rights rather than repayment, and that the author has the right to prevent anybody from using certain characters, in perpetuity.

20 years is a perfectly reasonable time for copyright to last. On the side of the author, most profit comes within the first 5 years. On the side of society, 20 years means that the stories a child grew up with can then be built upon when they are adults.

[wilsonnb3]

> There is a human right to be a storyteller, to reimagine characters and themes, to expand settings and genres. To sit around the campfire and make new stories of King Arthur and Lancelot, new stories about Sherlock and Watson, new stories about Harry and Hermione.

Although I disagree that this should be considered a human right, isn't this generally covered by fair use in the US anyways?

[MereInterest]

No, from my understand of current US copyright law (not a lawyer), this would be considered either a performance or a derivative work, depending on whether it is exactly reproduced. Neither of those are under fair use.

[ConceptJunkie]

I thought there was nothing stopping you from creating derivatives of copyrighted works as long as you don't try to exploit them commercially.

Of course, there are plenty of companies that take down stuff that is not being done for profit. Good examples include Nintendo taking down the tools used to create Pokemon games, or Paramount killing the Star Trek fan shows (because they were better and more popular than anything Paramount could do).

The problem is that there's the letter of the law, the spirit of the law, and how rich and powerful entities can get the courts to interpret the law, and its possible, even common, for all three of those to be different things.

[MereInterest]

> I thought there was nothing stopping you from creating derivatives of copyrighted works as long as you don't try to exploit them commercially.

Nope, creating derivative works is something that is explicitly part of copyright, whether or not it is for commercial gain. Fanfiction or fan recreations are only legal with the consent of the author. Typically, authors will turn a blind eye to it, since it increases the longevity of the original works. It is only a civil matter, and so only the copyright holder could bring a suit against fanfiction authors.