Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
If you make a unique chair....you trade mark it or patent it. Nobody else gets to make YOUR kind of chair. One could, of course, sell the rights to the patent or trademark.
Patents expire like copyright. Trademarks do not...if they are kept active by the holder. It is this latter model that is most appropriate for fiction.
Someone invents a Lay-z-Boy chair and patents the mechanism and trademarks the name and perhaps even the looks. Seeing the design, somebody else invents a “reclining chair” using a different mechanism. They patent their method as well. But there are only going to be so many ways to design a reclining chair and thus time limited patents make sense.
But even when the patent for the original Lay-Z-Boy chair expires...you can’t violate the Trademark. You can make a recliner using the mechanism, but you can’t make and sell Lay-Z-Boys.
There is no limit to fiction. Copyrights for fiction should therefore be more like Trademarks.
If you make a chair it is your chair. It doesn’t time out. If you sell the chair....the new owner gets it. And his ownership never times out. The money he paid you for the chair is yours forever...it doesn’t time out.
A copyright for fiction shouldn’t time out either.
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Except you can't patent a chair unless there is something novel about it. Some authors do trademark characters, though there is a fair amount of debate as to how likely it is to hold up in an actual court case.
It seems that your whole argument comes down to the catch phrase "There is no limit to fiction", which is a bit of a non sequitur. Copyright doesn't distinguish between fiction and nonfiction. It's also only true if one used the strict definition of copyright, i.e. the right to copy, rather than consider derivative works, which is really what we are discussing.
As I've point out before, the copyright owners sued the creators of Battlestar Galactica because it was "too similar". The 9th court agreed, pointing to things like
"(1) The central conflict of each story is a war between the galaxy's democratic and totalitarian forces."
and
"(5) The heroine is imprisoned by the totalitarian forces."
Twentieth Century-Fox Film v MCA, INC. (1983)
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_c...=1&oi=scholarr
Yea, not exactly a case where the other party just filed off some id numbers. By that standard, there seems to be no limit on how wide of a net the copyright can cast.