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Originally Posted by leebase
In my perfect world, copyright of fiction would not be like today’s copyright of music. Though you really can’t get past “human judgement” no matter how you write laws.
I’m not so sure “patent trolls” are all that different from publishers. They had to pay to,get the rights. So if the Hans Christian Anderson heirs sold their copyrights....that’s still them getting the value from the work Hans created...rather than Disney.
Those who want to be free of licensing fees need merely to write a new story. Those who want to take advantage of built in cultural awareness would have to compensate the rights holder for the privilege.
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The problem is that no one writes a new story. Everyone gets ideas from somewhere. The big reason that one doesn't see a bunch of copyright battles is that for the vast majority of works, there is no money to fight over. Remember, selling 10,000 books is considered pretty good.
I've always been interested in where artists get ideas. On Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash's Storyteller's album (a live album), they talk about where they get the inspiration for songs. Lots of talk about PD. They also mentioned that they "borrowed stuff" from each other all the time and joked about it.
In the author's notes in various books, the author will sometime talk about where he or she got the inspiration for a book. Needless to say that for a lot of the space opera's the Horatio Hornblower Saga and Aubrey/Maturin Saga are mentioned frequently.
Game of Thrones was loosely based on the War of Roses.
You get the idea. While you might wave you hand and say that all you need to do is change the name, there have been lawsuits over such things. That's why I pointed out the Star Wars/Battlestar Gallactica lawsuit. That's what happens when there is money involved.
If you look at patent trolls, their whole business model is to buy up patents, many of them useless, and suit for patent violations counting on the fact that most companies will settle rather than fight the suit in court.
Now, consider a company that buys up a bunch of copyrights, many obscure then sues a bunch of authors for violating one or more of those copyrights. Remember, one of the copyright violation claims in the Star Wars case was the claim that Skyler was too close to Skywalker. Now, imagine if you have a business model where lawyers are aggressively looking for ways that any new work might have violated their copyright, which is what is happening in the patent world.
Most individual authors barely make ends meet. They can't afford to fight it out in court. Rowling was able to fight back when she got sued for copyright violation, but imagine if she got sued after her first book and didn't have the money. You could certainly kiss the indie authors movement bye-bye. Most of them would be sued into oblivion.