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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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I realize this won't be a popular view, but I don't think you should be able to use, and profit from, a character someone else created, regardless of how long ago they were created. The original work becoming public domain, sure, but write your own characters.
I've got bad news for you about much of the history of human creative work.
There's a difference between getting inspiration from something, and downright stealing it.
Have you by chance read Dante's Divine Comedy? Or Milton's Paradise Lost? Just to name two works that are widely considered Fucking Classic off the top of my head. Do you have much background in literature?
And are they not in the public domain?
What's your point here, exactly?
One, those are famous works that used characters they didn't create. Just off the top of my head. Also The Aeneid, which I haven't read but the internet is telling me is basically Ascended Fanfiction.
Two, you don't really seem to have an informed opinion on this topic. Which is, like, fine. Most of us don't know most things. But maybe consider there's good reasons many people are disagreeing with you.
You know that most of Disney's stuff that they profit from is characters created by other people, right?
Some even closer than most think. The Sword in the Stone is based on a 1938 book, it's not an original adaptation of Arthurian legend.
Though really, there never has been so many new takes on Arthur than today.
Many consider that the real golden age of these stories as popular tales is right now, kickstarted "only" 150 years ago by Mark Twain and his Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
Why not?
No reason to fight this. Everything is a remix of something else. That's just how creativity works.
Looking at the Venus de Milo
“I mean, it’s great and all, but it’s so derivative.”
I mean it's a Venus, probably one of the most sculpted characters in history, he could have at least tried to be original...
But you are using characters you didn't invent to communicate this, without paying someone. Invent your own alphabet!
The alphabet is free and open source.
Free and open source is a subset of public domain
Free and open source that was created by someone else.
Who was it? What was their name?
Dude just binned The Bible.
You're the second person to say something like this. Suggesting the characters in the Bible are fictional will make some people very angry.
Are people angry at Neil Gaiman? Because American Gods sure has a few Jesuses.
And Good Omens has a bunch of biblical VIPs too.
My point was, saying Jesus was a fictional character would make people angry. Using him in a work of fiction is not the same thing.
You can't copyright a real person, obviously. A work about them you can.
Like I give a fuck.
I don't understand what you're suggesting here. How would you reconcile the original work being public domain with still wanting to restrict the use of its characters?
Meaning you can freely reproduce the original work, but you cannot create a new piece of work using the original characters.
Meaning, in the case of Winnie the Pooh, the original books and associated works are free to be used and shared, but you could not create a new book or comic without the permission of the estate of AA milne.
If you restrict reuse of the characters in new work, the original would not be in the public domain. Something is either one's property or it isn't, and something in the public domain is everyone's property. You can't have the original as part of the collective repository of freely-available information and culture while still trying to make bits of it (such as its characters) not part of that.
The public domain period is when the law has agreed that the original authors no longer have exclusive rights to the material they put into the world. Trying to still, after that period has elapsed, declare the characters are still that author's property but only if they turn up in other people's work is a truly bizarre suggestion and I fail to see what would be gained by society in that scenario.
I really don't think this is a difficult concept to grasp, to be honest.
The original work becomes public domain, and can be freely reproduced.
The characters therein are, and remain, the property of the author's estate, and cannot be used in new work without their permission.
We are already seeing this in the real world, where Disney cartoons are public domain, but the characters, having been used in consecutive works, cannot be used by anyone other than them.
This allows a published work to be used for generations to come, but doesn't allow an author's legacy to be tarnished by less than quality adaptations.
This is incorrect. When a Disney cartoon becomes public domain everything in it is also public domain, including the characters as used in that cartoon. The most famous example of this will happen on January 1 when the first Mickey Mouse cartoons go into the public domain, and so will that version of Mickey Mouse. You can read more about what that means for Mickey, and for Disney, in this post by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law.
Nobody's legacy is "tarnished" or otherwise damaged by things other people create. The original is still there, while new things get to express their take on the characters and/or the rest of the material. Derivative works add to the sum total of culture, they don't subtract from it, and the Public Domain denotes the part of culture we all own together and can develop new works about freely. The freedom to do so is a good thing for everyone including cultural creators (who get to enrich their own work using our shared property) and consumers (who get more stuff they might enjoy, and if they don't the original is still there regardless) and everyone wins. Your scenario would make nothing better for anyone.
There is a set of IP rights known as moral rights. These rarely come up here in the US and aren't discussed much because they are quite limited in the US, but they play a more-meaningful role in France, whose legal tradition attaches certain rights to an artist to restrict use of his work (and who cannot give these rights up, regardless of whether he wants to do so or not, and where these rights never expire, even after death). They tend to aim at this sort of "tarnishing" concern.
That's not to say that I particularly support this class of right, but there are places in the world where it is more-important and is a real thing in law.
I don't know whether, in France, they would extend as far as to the use of characters.
As far as I understand you, you're just against fan fiction. I know some people that also think that whatever is non-canon shouldn't be approached by reasonable people, but even they don't think that it should be forbidden
Although I don't share your point of view, I respect and would like to know more, would you care to elaborate on the reasons that led to or justify your opinion ?
Mostly seeing the appalling job some people have done adapting a former beloved character, or the inevitable NSFW adaptations.
Imagine someone writing a story where, for example, Christopher Robin kills someone, and profiting from it? Would you be happy having your childhood memories of reading Winnie the Pooh tainted like that?
I understand, I don't know exactly how I would feel if this scenario hapened.
But regardless, I can't control what people do with the characters I love, even the rightful onwner can defame a character I love, and they sometimes do (I'm thinking of detective pikachu, which I didn't like, because of exactly what you are talking about).
At the same time, some stories written by non-owner are amazing, and really extended my understanding or appreciation of a character, had they been prevented to write those because of copyright enforcement, I would never have had these great ideas and take on the characters.
Maybe instead of preventing other people from writing stories about preexisting character they didn't create, we could instead enforce that derivative stories must contain a disclaimer for people that want to avoid non-canon.
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to explain, I'm really interested in how property (intellectual or physical) shape our society, and all point of view is interesting to ear and take into account.
There would always be the option for an author, or their estate, to allow such a work.
Clearly labelling whether a work was by the original author is only fair, of course.
Despite Disney's best efforts I doubt rule 34 has spared Winnie the Pooh, and yet my childhood memories are just fine. I prefer the musical/tv movie version of Peter Pan with Mary Martin, but the Disney adaptation hasn't spoiled my memory of it.
Have you ever tried ignoring works you don't like? Just go about your life and mind your own business, it's actually quite easy.
Interesting that you chose this example, because it has already happened in a commercially-released horror film. The result wasn't in any way damaging to the legacy of the original work; all the books, adaptations, and such that kids love are still available. All that ended up happening was that people who like that particular sort of thing gained a new movie to watch, people who don't like it can ignore it, and pop culture as a whole keeps chugging along undamaged. All our childhood memories of Pooh are still the same ones we had before this movie came out.
I'm taking the lumps of the community here with you, but I do feel that civilization benefits when creators can reasonably profit from their creations and it's derivative works.
I don't think it needs to be as extreme as us copy write controls, but I don't feel it should be opened up the way this community seems to think it should be.
These down votes are lame. I disagree with you completely, but your opinion is still valid. I think after the original author is long dead, I'd like to see new perspectives breathing new life into old fictional characters. Otherwise, are you saying we can't make new stories about Hercules, Odysseus, Jesus, etc?
Robin Hood is another example of a set of works that had many people contributing different stories into what became the present-day collection.
Historically, a lot of works had many authors using the same character. I think that it's a bit unfortunate that modern copyright law tends to discourage that.
H. P. Lovecraft was unusual in that he allowed other authors to make use of his characters (and settings, which are also covered by copyright), which is why his world -- with Cthulhu and all that -- has been widely used.
I imagine saying those people are fictional characters would make some people angry.
If you mean Jesus, it's not terribly controversial that there was a historical Jesus, but there were definitely different people writing up material about Jesus, and the Bible contains self-contradictions between those stories. How closely each individual narrative hews to the historical Jesus...shrugs
For example, Christ's birth is described differently in the different Gospels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativity_of_Jesus