Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
The world is quite different today as well. We have the ability to put a single file on the web and everybody across the world can get a perfect copy.
We aren’t talking about medicine. We are talking about fiction, stories. There may be only a handful of ways to control pain. Thank goodness patents aren’t forever. Knowledge advances mand kind and patents allow people to make money on their hard work of inventing something new and society get to move forward on their shoulders some 20 or so years later.
But there are an infinite ways to tell a story. There is only one Romeo and Juliet...but there are thousands...likely more...of the same story told differently. Romeo and Juliet is unlikely to have been the first of that archetype anyway.
Anybody today can make aspirin. Won’t be too long and anybody will be able to make viagara. That’s a good thing. I do not think society has any reason other than avarice to take away the rights of stories and characters.
You want to retell a story that springs from the same source that Disney used? Great. You can...but why would your character have to be named Snow White? Sleepy Sarah and the tiny miners. Or whatever.
Instead of Lord of the Rings, you write The Sword of Shanara. But hopefully you do better than actually copying character for character and scene for scene as Brooks did with his first couple of books.
And how pathetic the desire to take away the economic value of an author's works for his descendants just so you can have a free book.
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Once again, you confuse several very different concepts. Copyright has evolved to include both the actual copying of books and derivative works, such as movie rights and writing in the same universe.
Given that I already have multiple copies of LOTR that I paid the full price for, your sneer that anyone who disagrees with you must just want free copies is a red herring and a pretty obvious sign that you are struggling with a coherent defense for your idea that copyright is property and belongs to the author heirs for eternity. Do you really think that someone who wants a copy of a book would wait 56 ( or 100+ years with the existing system) years for the copyright to expire before getting a free copy?