| >What gives you the right to prevent them from improving your work? If I don't like one of your character and consider the story better if I put in a character of my own, who are you to decide what I do with this idea or not? If this were the case I'd just not publish, and keep my story with me, limited to a few people I trust. This is what you'll get if copyright wasn't there. >On the other hand, most of the internet is very copyright-hostile. From meme templates to fanfiction and embedding foreign site content, most online communities have a very relaxed take on what copyright means. Imagine what would happen if the person who drew the original trollface were to go around demanding copyright fees and starting lawsuits for violating the rights to his property! Most of the artistic internet doesn't contain works (outside of certain OSS communities) that may have taken someone years to complete and consists of hundreds of thousands of words. I'm amused that you should be somehow okay with the idea of taking a 300,000 words story, adding 10k words, modifying some bits, and selling it as "yours" and profiting off my work. >Copyright in its modern form has existed for what, 400 years? It's not exactly a requirement for a culture to develop. >In my opinion, the real question is: why should copyright exist in the first place? I mean, you can just say that about modern forms of democracies and civil rights. Then why have them in the first place. We can have monarchies, autocracies, theocratic/thalassocratic republics just fine. |