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Originally Posted by HarryT
I must respectfully disagree that it's a "red herring". The article quoted seemed to me to be criticising the estate of Mr. Herbert for "going after" fan sites which violated the late Mr. Herbert's copyrights. I am saying that being a "fan" does not give you any greater right than anybody else has to break copyright law, and that it is, therefore, wrong to criticise the copyright holder for exercising their perfectly legitimate right to protect their intellectual property.
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Doctorow criticizes this action on the basis that it is counter to the interests of the copyright holder and corrosive to social discourse. The topic is the impact of current copyright law and the possibility of granting tribute the same status afforded to parody. The question of "fans' rights" is a strawman that you introduced to the discussion.
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Originally Posted by sirbruce
Also, while this isn't true in the case of Dune, allowing such creations indeed *can* take money out of the pockets of the copyright holders. Consider, for example, PernMUSH, which is allowed to operate by special permission of Anne McCaffery. Now, suppose some compnay wants to make a Pern MMOG with a heavy RP emphasis... the existance of a free PernMUSH is a direct competition to them. So in such a case McCaffery may indeed want to shut down the fan-made version.
But it gets worse, in that you can't necessarily just assume to let the fan-made version run until such an offer comes along. If you let it run over time, it builds up its own base of loyal users. Shutting down a long-running RP world would create more negative feelings than if it had simply never been allowed to exist. A company looking to do an MMOG may just decide it's not worth the effort to try a Pern one since PernMUSH is already out there, even if McCaffery were willing to shut it down.
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A reasonable argument, but it doesn't stand up. Any investor who sees the existence of a readymade market as a bad sign will never make a dime, and any software developer who sees an ad hoc chat game as competition I wouldn't trust to program a VCR. If you cannot exceed, in a for-profit venture, the standards set by people building on the author's work FOR FUN, then hire them or buy them out (which is precisely what smart companies do).
If fan works compete with the copyright holder in any way, they do so at an absurd disadvantage, and are generally open to influence well short of legal action.
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Originally Posted by sirbruce
And times change. 25 years ago, allowing a text of a book on the Internet wouldn't have cost an author anything. But now that ebooks are hot, and those rights are worth something, the pre-existance of a full copy of the book on the Internet that was previously allowed now makes the ebook rights to that book virtually worthless.
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False. You can find nearly complete bodies of work for, at the very least, dozens of authors being traded freely in torrents. Take Frank Herbert for example--Dune has probably been available on the intenet for as long as there's been an internet. Now, go to Amazon, Fictionwise, or Diesel and search for Dune. Do you think they got that book for free?