I hear you.
…I was specifically talking about Star Trek, and I quoted the Wikipedia page that was specific to the legality of fan fiction that acknowledges this very point. The studios could sue. They mostly don’t. But a cease and desist isn’t a lawsuit.
Looking into it, I might have been incorrect about it being meant to be free so discard what I said.
Yes. And upon looking into it, it might not ever have been meant to be free in the first place (although I can’t be sure). So yeah, you can ignore that post.
I agree there’s a role for distributers. But I feel our current system has greatly distorted their role. In what I feel would be an ideal system, the primary beneficiaries would be the creators and the consumers. The distributers would have a minor support role.
I do not feel this is the case in our current system. I feel that our current system is designed around the distributers being the primary beneficiaries and the creators and consumers being reduced to minor supporting roles…
I feel this is a result of the usual interaction between concentrated money and politics. Distributers are small groups with a lot of money who can organize and lobby for laws that favor them.
Agreed, we have government, “by the rich and for the rich”. That’s how the richest people in the United States got over a trillion dollar tax break while virtually every program designed to help the rank and file citizen is under attack. Unfortunately, asking Congress to clean this up is like asking a committee of foxes to make a better hen house. It’s never going to happen.
I don’t feel this is a great system. It seems to essentially be that there are laws against doing this but it’s generally okay to do it because the laws usually don’t get enforced.
It sounds like what smoking marijuana used to be like. Sure, go ahead and do it because it’s technically illegal but the cops usually don’t care. So you’ll be fine. Unless you happen to be one of the handful of unlucky people who gets arrested and sent to prison.
People eventually realized there was no sense in having laws that most people were able to ignore but a few people got disproportionately punished for violating.
We have the same situation with intellectual property now. Let’s face it; a lot of people go to various online sites and download pirated intellectual property. And the vast majority never have a problem with it. But a handful get slapped with massive lawsuits because the RIAA or some equivalent organization wanted to make some examples.
As noted above, ideas are cheap, the creation of an actual work is, well… work. These artists, these creators, are denied the opportunity to be paid for their work, and labor under the everpresent threat of being sued even as they eschew any financial benefit for the work they’ve done. The moment Viacom decides it is profitable to sue them, or the moment a Viacom executive decides he doesn’t like fanfic, they will be sued.
All these writers and artists, who are bursting with creative energy related to Star Trek know that Viacom owns it, and anything artistic they do with this life changing experience is the property of Viacom, and will be allowed only if Viacom chooses to allow it.
I’d also like to point out that copyright law allows a creator to set up rules for fan fiction in their universe, from Viacom to individual authors. I am familiar with two authors who not only encourage fan fiction in their works, but have guided fanfic writers into becoming published authors in their own right. Most recently, the two of them collaborated with a fan to turn her series of fanfic stories into a trilogy, two books of which have been published and the third due within the year.
The owners of Star Trek have published their list of rules where they allow fanfic (including film productions). Stay within those rules and you won’t be sued.
Ideally, such situations have rules that maintain a certain level of quality and consistency within the shared universe while encouraging creativity. It can also protect the fans who produce their own content, since they, too, are entitled to recognition and compensation.
Incorrect. You do not have to profit or intend to profit to violate copyright law. If someone copied one of my published works and, say, put it on their website without my permission that would in fact violate the law regardless of whether or not they made any money from it.
As it happens, back when I had my monthly column I let a lot of small clubs reprint them in their newsletters (the magazine paying me had first publication rights, I retained the rest). I let it be known that I was OK with that IF people contacted me in advance and asked permission. I never charged for it, but I wanted to know who was reading my stuff. Also, my paying publisher didn’t want anything reprinted within 90 days of their publishing of the column, so by requiring that people ask first I was able to say “sure, but please not before X date”. It all worked pretty well. Except for that guy who originally stole my stuff - he wound up ostracized for quite awhile because that was totally a jerk thing to do.
Yeah, whether you’re giving away your stuff or not you still need to ask permission first.
No, it’s not a lawsuit but it’s the first step on the way to a lawsuit.
Well, to be clear, the United States and other parties to the Berne Convention are the ones adding plus X years.
Good question! I’d go even farther, and ask why it should extend all the way to their death?
There are a lot of people with a life expectancy less than 25 years. Shouldn’t they get at least as much as the corporations?
Maybe, maybe we shouldn’t make copyright terms dependent on how long the creator lives?
…why not?
The power remains with the copyright holders. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing as far as I’m concerned.
Hold on: is this a pivot?
It feels like a pivot.
Your original point was that " if they so much as write a short story set in that world, they can expect to be sued." But that isn’t the case. Not even remotely close.
So now you are arguing that people who appropriate the intellectual property of other content creators should be allowed to profit from that content simply because they expended some effort in repurposing that content?
That sounds like a terrible idea to me.
I’m a content creator. I can run a business and earn money from the content I create almost solely due to the existence of intellectual property rights laws. What you suggest would destroy my business. Take away my ability to profit from my creations. Its a terrible idea. It would affect millions of content creators all around the world.
All these writers and artists, who are bursting with creative energy are free to create their own science fiction universes and profit directly from those. Or they can create their own fan fiction. Or they can write it all down in the comfort of their own home and never ever publish it. They could host a podcast to discuss their favorite episodes. There are many things they could do to burn off that creative energy without having to play in the world created by somebody else. And I would argue that for most people creating your own universe to play in is much more creatively fulfilling.
Incorrect.
I never claimed “you have to profit or intend to profit to violate copyright law.”
That wasn’t what I said at all.
I wasn’t offering an opinion on copyright law. I was talking about a very specific circumstance and what might drive the studios to escalation to a lawsuit.
So not a lawsuit. Gotcha.
Because live creators still have bills to pay and need an income and dead creators don’t.
I don’t have a problem with making “life” a term of ownership because live creators still have bills to pay and need an income and dead creators don’t.
I don’t feel Russian Roulette is a good model for a legal system.
If violating copyrights is wrong, then we should have general enforcement of the laws against doing it. If society isn’t happy with general enforcement of copyright laws and the consequences that arise from that, we should change the laws.
…fortunately copyright isn’t based on a system of Russian Roulette.
But the system isn’t based around the premise that “violating copyrights is wrong.” Its based (essentially) on the premise that “copyright holders should be allowed to have a say in what can and can’t be done with their intellectual property.”
Society appears to be happy with the general enforcement of copyright laws and the consequences that arise from that. You haven’t made a case that we need to change the laws.
The system is based on putting all the power in the hands of the copyright owner, which is where it should be. Not in the mechancal application of law. It’s the copyright owner’s choice which rights to exercise, whether, and how. If you don’t want to risk it, then do what you’re supposed to do, ask permission.
It’s a pivot, but let’s not pretend that the suit aspect is not remotely close to reality. Star Trek fan fiction may be written, but it requires the consent of the copyright holder, the same as when Viacom hires a screenwriter for their next movie. Viacom owns the copyright and has ironclad control over how the property is used, any fanfic writer who goes outside what Viacom wants risks a lawsuit.
Not exactly, as I said, I wholly approve of copyright holders (as they’re generally defined today) having exclusive rights to profit. But NOT from a moral standpoint. Morally, these other creators are just as deserving of rights as Gene Roddenberry or Viacom. It may not be a good idea to give them property rights, but I’m not buying the morality aspect.
But that’s true of everyone else who works. People who invent stuff get patents. Those don’t last a lifetime.
How come creative people can’t save their earnings and invest them, or rely on various government safety nets like every other person has to do?
Dead creators often have dependents who rely on their income too. But that’s not a very good argument for extending copyright past death. It’s a good argument for life insurance, which is what every other person who has people depending on their income.
Why are we bundling a lifetime annuity into our creativity production legislation framework?
…its your claim that it is. But that isn’t the actual reality.
Other creators have the moral right to take my photographs and profit from them?
Can you explain why a person that doesn’t have my training, equipment, sense of composition, ability to stay in one place for hours on end, can you explain why this person that didn’t do any of these things has the moral right to my work?
Just how much do you think the average creative person makes from their creations? Big winners are rare, most of they have to have a “day job” just to make ends meet while being creative. How the hell are they supposed to “save and invest” when they barely have enough for food and housing today?
WHAT government safety nets? At least in the US there has been a drive to gut and destroy the safety net for decades.
Then there are medical costs - the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US, even among those with insurance.
Given all that why would I begrudge someone a pittance of a royalty from their working life?
Cause I can’t seem to convince my fellow citizens to fund health coverage for all along with a guarantee of basic food and housing from the government.
The average creative person is employed creating works that are owned by a corporation. By a lot.
My goal in reducing copyright term is not to stick it to creatives. It’s because I believe that very long copyright terms are corrosive to the advancement of culture. It’s generally a bad thing that, say, Disney can essentially own for entire human lifetimes stories that were public domain for hundreds of years. The best way to fix that is to return copyright terms to previous much shorter lengths.
Extremely few copyrighted works are commercially relevant for decades. If we’re talking about the difference between a (say) 30-year copyright term and one that lasts for, say 70+ years (lifetime) or longer, the impact is almost entirely encountered by the tiny tiny subset of the extremely successful.
People who are eking out a living in creative fields are not surviving for 50+ years on some work they made in their youth. They are continuing to create. They can retire with a 30-year copyright term because they can work up to 30 years before their death, just like everyone else does.
I mean, that’s bad, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with copyrights and we should try to fix it in general, not just for the very small subset of society that owns copyrights.