Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
I can’t change the past. Just because there was a time before IP doesn’t mean I wish to return to that state.
You can write a space opera without Klingons and Vulcans.
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Many changes to copyright law have been retroactive. Works have gone into PD, then been removed from PD when the law was changed.
You keep throwing out that red herring of "you can write X without using Y". So what? You can write a book without using English, does that imply that no book should be written in English? You can't write a space opera without having ships in space. Where do you draw the line? Are Warp Drives off limit? Oh, wait, warp drive was first introduced by John H Campbell in a 1931 novel. Hum, 1931 + 28 +28. Yep, that would have still been in copyright when Star Trek came out. Whoops. Or does that come under can't change the past?
It's basically impossible to write a totally new work. All works are based on previous works that the author read at some point. You try to draw the line to protect Disney and Harry Potter, but both Disney (and the various Disney employees who did much of the work) and Rowlings used characters and ideas from other works. I know that you dismiss that as something that doesn't support your personal belief and therefore is beside the point, but that fact is the main point behind public domain. Both created amazing works because they built on top of other works. Yes, they both have/had incredible talent and imagine, but they still built on top of others.
The advantage of public domain isn't that someone can write a whole new story in the Harry Potter universe, it's that someone can take an element from Harry Potter, put their own twist on it and include it in their work. It precludes someone like Harlan Ellison and the whole patent troll industry from suing to get a piece of someone else's pie.