Quote:
Originally Posted by doubleshuffle
Only very few posters in this thread have challenged the general idea of copyright. Personally, I think it is unavoidable in a capitalist society (which we will be stuck with for a long time, so we will need to have something like copyright for a long time.)
What you are overlooking is the fact that literature is not exclusively about making money. Shakespeare didn't use Holinshed's Chronicles because they were a smash hit, but because they inspired him. Say there was a brilliant writer inspired by Kafka's Metamorphosis. Under current copyright law they can just use the story and do with it as they please. Which is a good thing, because that writer might produce something just as brilliant as Kafka's story, which would benefit all of humanity. But with eternal copyright, our author would have to deal with the Holtzbrinck Group, one of the most powerful corporations in the publishing business, which owned the copyright before Kafka's works became PD. So our author can bury the idea right at the start.
I know your reply: why don't they create their own giant bug? But what if they want to use passages from the actual story, putting them in a different context, and what if precisely this kind of montage was essential for the new story?
But all this only makes sense in a context where creativity has already been reduced to nothing but a commodity. I guess in a world in which that nightmare is reality, there is nothing to say against your points. But we don't quite live in that world yet, and limited copyright is one of the few things we are holding onto, keeping us only halfway down the cliff.
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He's also confusing copyright and trademark. Mickey's ears are protected by trademark, not copyright.
In an interesting coincidence, I'm reading Neil Gorsuch's new book "A Republic, If you Can Keep It" which is a collection of speeches, articles and legal opinions that he wrote, collected to make various points. One such point was a speech on how the current legal system has been twisted. A clever lawyer can tie someone up in court for a decade, running up expenses until the other party simply settles because they can no longer afford it. It's the whole basis of the patent troll industry. Harlan Ellison extracted money from the studio making the Terminator movie for much the same reason, not so much because he would have won, but because the time and money required to fight was more than the settlement.
People are already doing what Leebase says they can't and won't.
One of the more interesting examples of what would happen in Leebase's world is what has happened with the Sherlock Holmes copyright.
https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2015...l#.XaWshyUpDyU
Basically, the copyright for Sherlock Homes had many claimants and many people licensed the Sherlock Homes character from someone who didn't actually hold the copyright. The rights to LOTR in the movie industry was also the subject of a long, long legal battle which ended up holding up the production of The Hobbit movies for quite a few years.
These are probably two of the most lucrative literary copyright works so it's not particularly surprising that both were tied up in the courts for long periods of time.