I don;t agree with you here mainly because, in the case of books and CD and DVDs they could very well be precisely the same.[...] That would cost groups like the Eagles and Beatles plenty.
Well, to a certain extent we face this already. It's quite legal to do cover versions of songs. Here Down Under we have a band called
Björn Again which makes its living doing ABBA covers - so successful is it that there are franchised versions overseas. This is done entirely without the permission of ABBA.
And yet ABBA albums are still bought, and the original band members quite wealthy from the original work. As much as people love the ripoff, they love the original more. There's room for
both.
Would that be the case for every band, or for authours? Probably not. But it does show that things aren't black and white.
The guys that they would have to watch out for are the ones who print the LoTR from a scan of the original. Possibly cheaper than they do.
Well, that was why in the 1960s onwards book companies were freaking out about photocopiers. Turns out, people prefer the original, professionally-printed work.
Which really was my point about the dweeb writing
Lord of the Rings II. People want competently and professionally-done work. And most ripoffs aren't.
With copyright, someone need only scan your book at the end of the 15 year period and send it to the printers/CD press/DVD press. Star Wars would be a great one. They held out on DVD for a long time. Then I heard no end to the complaints about slow releases. Ep III would have been up for reproduction in 1992. I am sure that would have cost Lucas films some money.
Alternately, it would have encouraged them to put them out much more quickly.
Certainly it would mean less investment per movie. People would be more reluctant to spend $200 million making a movie if the copyright were going to expire some time before the heat death of the universe. But hey, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. As we've discussed here before, the big expensive movies are becoming a bit too homogenous, nobody will take risks with that much money (unless they're in banking or government). So 20x $10 million films would probably be more interesting than 1x $200 million film.
Your concept is skewed. You are presuming that the dweeb will write a competent derivative work that will not be accepted by the public on account it is a knockoff of a popular work, and everyone should be morally obliged to not support such an endeavor.
No, I am presuming that the dweeb will produce utter shite, and that people will in general avoid utter shite if they have something better on offer.
Alternately, the dweeb is not a dweeb and is actually competent. In which case they will probably prefer to be original anyway.
Also, what if the new work is simply bad? That taints the reputation of the existing IP holder
Does it? Is this shown? I mean, did people not read the last
Harry Potter book because of all the horrific 'ship fiction out there?
Successful or not, the derivative is a commercial threat in that it can oversaturate the market with not dissimilar offerings that drive down demand.
To compete with ripoffs, the creative person can make stuff of obviously better quality, or alternately make more new and different stuff. So what you're saying is that limiting copyright would force creative people to come up with
more new and original stuff? I don't really see this as a bad thing.
One of the problems that copyright was designed to address was a poor author with limited resources having his work copied and then republished on a massive scale which dwarfed the authors publishing and distribution capacity.
The copier by virtue of having more resources was better compensated than the original author, for the work of the author.
Ah, I see. So what you're saying is that with copyright being "life of authour plus 75 years" we no longer have people failing to get proper credit and remuneration for their work?
I wonder what that writer's strike was about, then... Hmmm.
Give me one good reason why he/she or his children should be entitled to less for his/her work?
In general, I am in favour of people
earning the wealth they have, rather than getting income from interest or inheritance. It is not clear to me that anyone has a right to wealth without work.
Finally, in the U.S. games are not protected by copyright in the same manner as books and artworks are. You can't copyright a game here. You can copyright a book published about a game, but the mechanics are pretty much public domain. There's been a ruling or two on this that has set a precedent that makes some of the game companies protect the other elements a lot more like trade dress for example
To be clear:
- copyright is of words, images and sounds
- patents are of methods of doing things
- trademarks are the things which let you recognise that X is the work of Y - like the coca-cola white swirl on red
The text of the game is copyrighted. The methods in the game, like rolling d20, may be patented. The general appearance of the book, its name and so on may be trademarked.
In general people don't patent game mechanics because of a thing called "doctrine of merger"; if there are only so many ways of expressing something, or if the thing has been around for a long time, then you can't lock it up for yourself. So you couldn't copyright a regular deck of 52 cards of spades and clubs and so on. You couldn't patent, "and then play proceeds around the table."
Plus the stakes are low so nobody bothers, it's much harder to patent things than copyright them.