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Originally Posted by leebase
Society has the stories available for purchase. That's the good. Why should there ever be a time when society takes possession of the rights holder's intellectual property any more than any other type of property? Why shouldn't the heirs of the author inherit the value like every other type of property....subject to the same taxes as any other property?
Fiction is not like medicine or mechanical contrivances where there is only SO MANY ways to accomplish a task.
If 70 years after JK Rowling dies....anybody is still interested in writing Harry Potter fan fic it will be because some corporation is continuing to invest money into the Harry Potter franchise keeping it in demand. Such a corporation is owed the fruits of it's labor.
I've already agreed that truly orphaned works should fall into the public domain rather than disappear due to copyright.
But then....nobody is going to care that orphaned works are in the public domain. If people cared, they wouldn't be orphaned works in the first place. (care in enough quantity to matter).
The real desire is as always "gimme gimme gimme". People want books they don't have to pay for. People want to leach off the name recognition of characters they didn't create. Gimme gimme.
Every fairy tail that Disney ever borrowed from is still available to everyone else. You can't borrow from Disney's version, but you can do exactly what Disney did. If you are talented enough.
We are in a better world with Disney continuing to control Disney property. It's what Disney continues to do that makes Disney characters worth copying. Nobody would care one whit to copy Steam Boat Willie....if Micky Mouse weren't STILL being invested in by the millions and millions - by Disney.
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A large part of the issue is that you keep insisting that any disagreement with you is due to people wanting something for nothing. You also continue to confuse the protection of Mickey Mouse (trademark) with copyright.
To answer your question of why aren't we seeing the problems, the answer is three fold. First, to a great extent, I think that we are seeing it in the movie industry. Movie projects tied up for years in court battles over who has the rights to what. So many big projects are franchises (Marvel Comics, Star Wars, Batman) or remakes. I think that a large part of why we don't see it as much in the book industry is that very few books make enough money to be worth trying to go after. We do see it in some of the big name books such as Sherlock Hoimes, which I've already used as an example.
The second reason is that in the book industry, much like the music industry, most authors are willing to turn a blind eye to what is likely technical copyright violations such as fanfic for a variety of reasons, but mostly because it just isn't worth the effort. There is no money to be had.
Last is that very few books (and I'm going to focus on books) have that sort of cultural impact and it takes time for such an impact to develop. Look at the whole book industry around Sherlock Holmes and Conan, just to give a couple examples. The flip side of that, is that we haven't seen that sort of thing develop around the big cultural impact books that are still under copyright protection (LOTR and Harry Potter, for example). There has been relatively few knock offs of either work. I can think of a couple commercial works that were likely knock offs of LOTR and none of Harry Potter. Are there wizard school books? A few, but really not that many and certainly not the flood that I expected. Both the Tolkien estate and Rowlings are well known for protecting their properties.