[KeliNorth]

Though copyright as it is has issues, this seems very off, as characters are the work, moreso than the settings and even plot - as only one of those three items tends to be unique. I've written books and stories, and the best answer I can give to you is this:

Those characters do not live in your head. They live in mine. I have full control in expressing who and what they are on paper for others to learn more about them. No one else does, no one else can say they did this or that because they don't have any control over my creations, my thoughts, my personal universe. To say someone else can just write with my characters is tantamount to violating an innermost personal space - indeed, it's intruding on one of the most personal forms of control and self-expression possible. You can't just create situations and settings for things that only exist in my mind. I want others to know, so I'll put out a public work. That doesn't mean someone can put something in my world, my character's lives, without my approval. Copyright is just a legal extension of that God-hood I exert over things in my head.

It is just too bad that the current form of copyright is far from ideal, as we've seen. I'm not against fan fic or other expression of still-in-copyright works either, I tend to like them and tend to agree that they do more good than harm, just pointing out that it does matter in some cases, discretion of the author should always be allowed, and just being well-known and popular doesn't magically make that control disappear. Being dead does though, so much of this doesn't really apply to the original topic, but felt I had to make a response to this.

[elwin]

> Those characters do not live in your head.

The problem with that argument is that this statement is simply not true once you tell me about the characters. Now they are in my mind too, and I want control over my own thoughts, just as you do.

I understand that you're saying that the ideas remain yours whether they are in your mind or mine. Either way, accepting your characters into my mind means giving up my control over my mind and thoughts. You are colonizing my mind with your ideas and insisting on limits on my thoughts about them. This would be all right if you paid me rent for storing your creations in my brain, but that would be completely impractical.

> Copyright is just a legal extension of that God-hood I exert over things in my head.

Analogies between humans and divine attributes tend to fall apart when they have to deal with the existence of more than one human. I think this highlights the weakness of the author's moral rights. The author's creation of the character was inspired by many other human creations and real-life characters. The character will go on to be recreated by every person whose unique perspective influences its imagination. Yet the moral rights argument requires picking out one act of creation, conferring divinity upon it, and pretending there are no rival divinities that could possibly conflict with its solitary status.

[djur]

The idea that a creator has an absolute moral right to control of their characters is a fairly recent one, and it certainly isn't a widely respected one -- imagine how many movies, books, etc. would have never been written if people had considered Dracula, Don Quixote, Frankenstein's Monster, Othello, etc. to be inviolable property of their authors. I don't think it's a particularly strong argument for state protection of copyright.

[njharman]

Wow, really?

> because they don't have any control over my creations, my thoughts, my personal universe.

Nor do you or should you have control over the creations, thoughts of the other billions of people on the planet

> I have full control in expressing who and what they are on paper

Why? It certainly isn't natural or basic right. Copyright does not cover or protect things in your head. It covers what you and others fixate into medium. It does(should) not cover ideas, only specific implementations of those ideas. Your imagined god-hood of things in your head matters not.

Creativity is not spontaneous. Despite what you think, your precious characters do not spring original from your mind. They are amalgamations of our shared culture.

You may be lauded for effort of getting them out into a cohesive and entertaining form. But that for fuck sure does not grant you the right to deny the rest of world from doing the same.