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Originally Posted by leebase
We already have libraries where the poor can read books for free. I just don’t see why anybody else should be making money from Walt Disney's work, or Marry Shelley's work, or Dickens work than their descendants. Or in the case of the digital world we live in...nobody will make money from those works.
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Why in the world would anyone deserve to be making money off their several times great grandfather's work? They didn't create the work, it's not necessary to encourage people to write nor is it conducive to maintaining the world's literary heritage.
Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
And how foolish would an author be to write in an post copyright universe of post copyright characters? You wouldn’t own your own work. Or rather, you’d have to compete with everyone else writing with those same characters.
I understand why patents exist. Only you can make a widget you patent for a certain number of years. Then society gets to benefit from the common knowledge of your widget. But there aren’t an infinite number of ways to make a light bulb. There are no limits to telling a new story
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It's because at the heart of many(all?) storytellers there's a child and children love telling stories about their favorite stories. Most fan fiction authors whether amateur or professional are doing it for the love of the original work and many form communities around their shared art (just look at Sherlock Holmes).
I would hate a world where people can write historical novels using real people as characters but be unable to do so with equally dated fictional characters. And I like reading tales where someone takes the POV of a different character and tells me what the story was like for them. I like dressing an old tale up in new clothes (Westside story). I like old tales told in a different medium (there's a very funny graphic novel based on Chaucer- only suitable for those who don't mind mooning). I want people to be able to write ridiculous books psychoanalyzing Shakespeare's characters as if they were real or make role playing games for those who want to play in Middle Earth. I like finding free copies of strange and wonderful old stories (such as
With The Night Mail / A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the contemporary magazine in which it appeared) by Rudyard Kipling). For that matter every translation is also a retelling, which is one of the reasons I tend to collect multiple translations of older works (and the public domain is why there are multiple translations of said works). And above and beyond all that I simply want my favorite books to continue to be available to my children and grandchildren even if the author dies intestate without known heirs. Our culture is composed of common stories, ideas, styles and things all of which *need* to be copied and sometimes revamped.
If you surveyed authors I bet that they'd rather their work survived and was read in a hundred years then be lost in an attempt to give their great grandchildren a small addition to their income. And having people still retelling and remixing their stories would be a compliment (if sometimes mixed) that most works never receive.