Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
It's my understanding that you don't have to defend copyright, but you do have to defend trademark or lose it.
A copyright owner can give permission, tacit or explicit, for use of their content to any number of people without losing the right to restrict it from other uses. If fans make a magazine & sell it, and Kurtz doesn't stop them, that does *not* give Universal Pictures any right to make a movie without permission.
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Correct. To further clarify that particular situation, the reason many authors do not want to let fans write and publish stories based upon their characters and 'worlds' is that those same fans can turn around and sue the author in the future if the author writes a story that is in any way similar to stories the fans wrote. (They may not WIN, but they MIGHT, and the author still has to defend against the suit.) This kind of thing has happened many times. A secondary reason is that some authors simply just don't want others crapping in the author's sandbox, so to speak. You're free to write your own stories that are remarkably similar to another author's, but you may not do so while appropriating characters (names & traits) and settings created by another author. You can write as many spy novels as you want, just don't name any of your characters James Bond. You can get away with naming your character James Bond, if you're writing a western or romance novel and the character doesn't drink martinis, shaken, not stirred (or whichever way it is). If it waddles and quacks, the court will side with the original author. Your copyright covers the exact words you put down on paper, and (more of a gray area) the general COMBINATION of characters, plots, names, etc. Once works fall out of copyright, the CHARACTERS can still remain protected if they've been trade-marked. In that case, you're free to republish the old works, but you wouldn't be able to create new works using those trade-marked characters without getting permission from the trade-mark holders (I believe Tarzan would be an example of that, but I'm not sure).