This is what we lose when the public domain becomes outlawed by endless copyright extensions. When that genre-based concept gets locked up for decades under th

This is what we lose when the public domain becomes outlawed by endless copyright extensions. When that genre-based concept gets locked up for decades under the same corporate masters, we get Star Trek: Discovery, behind a paywall on a shard of the fragmented video streaming market. The fans inspired by the earlier series while they were younger simply do a better job-with fan-art like this and Galaxy Quest and The Orville--than the officially-sanctioned studio can crank out. It's almost as though we need some "copyleft" seeds for various genres able to support large fandoms, such that anyone can add to them, and submit pull requests to the community-elected maintainers to become canon. Licensing is free (gratis, not libre) and automatic. Rather than going all in on Star Trek, or Star Wars, or Starcraft, or Stargate, or Star Control, or Babylon 5, or Dune, or Asimov-verse, or whatever, all that open-culture fan-fiction can be actually publishable for profit and adding to the common fandom. Like public domain used to be, before they choked it out. I think it would take an alliance of authors/playwrights who don't individually have great chances at becoming rich and famous to essentially enter into a suicide pact lite, to sacrifice the possibility of more rich to improve the likelihood of more famous. They agree upon the rules for the fiction universe, and divvy it up such that each writes a piece of the canon. Then they publish on a fixed initial release schedule and hope it catches on. Once the fan-fic starts coming in, they actually read it, and declare the best work to also be canon, re-publishing it and paying the authors their cut. If it catches on, do a pilot teleplay with the best community theater actors available. Publish digital models of the signature props for at-home 3D printing. It could eat the lunch of the closed-culture franchises. But it could also fall flat, or fall victim to infighting. It seems like this idea is not new, and it isn't. Creative Commons has laid the groundwork. The problem is that it only provides the vision and the legal framework, and hasn't tackled the aspect of creating an intentional community to seed a specific fertile plot in the field. There's nothing there yet to tie disparate creators together as being part of the same overall thing. Space Opera and Sci-Fi Adventure-Drama are proven genres. The conventions don't lie; people go and spend.