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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
But it's not a easily measurable gain with copyright. An individual author can use those "now available" properties for new stories, but there's no guarantee that the new stories will sell.
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And most authors prefer to do their own creations, thank you, and not play in someone else's sandbox.
The exceptions tend to be in media tie ins, where someone else owns the rights, and you are working for a fee in a "work for hire" contract. Star Trek novels are an example. And because they are based on popular properties, there is some guarantee they will sell.
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Whereas you can see how much of you process will benefit economically from not having to pay a patent royalty... this is one reason for so much cross licensing of patents. What you gain in royalties on one hand you lose paying royalties on the other. If the values roughly balance, it's cheaper to just cross license....
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What you want to do may be covered by someone's else patent, so you damn well better license if it is.
The question is whether it is, and at any moment there are probably millions of dollars worth of infringement suits going on, with one outfit saying "You're infringing our patents! Cease and desist!", and the other saying "No we aren't!"
And it's especially thorny now because we are seeing significant efforts to patent software, and equally significant evidence that the Patent Office isn't qualified to determine whether a piece of software deserves a patent, because they have no idea whether there is prior art.
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Dennis