Those operating the estate have a fiduciary duty to the stakeholders, meaning they can't pursue litigation where costs would exceed potential value nor when it would have a more significant negative impact on value than protections.
From this most instances of infringement do not justify legal action as the parties in violation have little to no money (fan fictions etc. Can't get blood from a stone) and in many cases the pursuit of legal action would "harm the brand" in a fashion that would far exceed the value (a 1% reduction in consumer engagement is hundreds of thousands if not millions in value).
Copyright is not the same as trademarks, you don't have to pursue every single violation in order to maintain protections.
So what you're saying is you have no objective measure of theft occurring.
You're basing your entire position on an opinion that is very, very clearly not shared by most of reality.
As I said, there are very clear instances of "appropriation", but most occurrences I've seen aren't, in my opinion.
Example: Paolini's elves are clearly appropriation. I also hated the elves in Inheritance because of that, for what it's worth. The elves in The Elvenborn, as another example, aren't. Both instances resemble Tolkien elves visually, but one copies a large amount of cultural overtones and racial "personality", and the other's written by Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey.
If I write a book with a creature I call trolls and they are giant blue hairy with small shark like teeth, a "design" with nearly no association to extant trolls, and that is then appropriated by damn near everyone your position is that they didn't engage in theft, right?
You could see how any author would find such an assertion absurd, right?
Just because it's legal doesn't change what it is. We have plenty of types of "theft" in the _colloquial_ sense that are not theft under law.
> Just because it's legal doesn't change what it is.
Purely opinion. It is well-acknowledged that authors build off ideas they have experienced. Tolkien was a brilliant and inspiring writer who inspired many other writers.
That's how it works. Humans take in ideas, add some twists, and share them.