Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Let's say you are 21. You write a novel. You reach the age of 72. Your work just became public domain. Some movie stuido decided to make a movie based on your work. The movie studio makes tons and tons of money from this movie. You are still alive, watching others make lots of money from your work and there is not a thing you can do about it. That is not fair in the least. You would be so pissed off.
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Careful with that "you." Maybe it would be better not to make assumptions about how the rest of us would feel in that circumstance.
I think after even 10-20 years, the ideas in a book or other creative work, if it was circulated widely, are so much a part of the common culture that it doesn't make sense to say we can tell whether something was based on the original work, or just on the reflections of the ideas in the culture.
And based on movies made "from books" in the past, odds are good that the resulting movie will have little or nothing to do with the original book, unless the movie studio chose to hire the original author as a creative consultant... and even then, the movie will probably be a completely different animal. So saying the movie studios are making tons of money off the author's work doesn't really make sense. It's like other authors saying they wrote about wizard schools before J.K. Rowling, so she should owe them something.
