4 ms·

I like your comment. I think once something enters our culture we all really own it regardless of who created it, regardless of copyright law. (Read Free Cult

I like your comment. I think once something enters our culture we all really own it regardless of who created it, regardless of copyright law. (Read Free Culture for a much better and nuanced explanation of this.)

unalone 18y ago
So J. K. Rowling, who spent seven years developing her universe before she even began writing her first novel, who spend inordinate amounts of time developing her systems, her characters, her plot, the morals and concepts she focused on... once she finished it, that's yours? You own some sort of a right to it? You have exactly as much a right to Rowling's universe as she wants you to have. That begins with her novels: she has decided that you have a right to read her stories once you pay money for her books, or once you access her books in some way that involves, somehow, her making money. Once you've done that, you're free to discuss those ideas, you can talk about them with people, you can write about them. But that doesn't give you a right to alter or modify her writing in any way, and I don't think it gives you a right to alter her works for commercial purposes in any way. If you want to make a free online resource, go for it, but if you're going to make money over 17 years of J. K. Rowling's life, there may be a problem. (It's better phrased: she has the right to give you a problem.) Interesting concept: perhaps authors could sell licenses to enter a world's commercial universe. Asimov made a universe for other writers because he wanted them to keep out of his own, then never wrote a story in that second universe himself. Perhaps an enterprising writer could create these huge worlds and scenarios and license them for profit. That would make for a fascinating take on the idea of creative world design that we've already seen explored with things like Dungeons & Dragons.
- xiaoma 18y ago
  >So J. K. Rowling, who spent seven years developing her universe before she even began writing her first novel, who spend inordinate amounts of time developing her systems, her characters, her plot, the morals and concepts she focused on... once she finished it, that's yours? You own some sort of a right to it? Jefferson had it right about copyright from the beginning. It's got to be a balance of incentives for the creators and good for the public. Yes, it's good to give artists incentives to create, but only so long as the public benefits. The original copyright limits years may have been a reasonable balance. Current law is insane. Extending Walt Disney's copyrights even further past his death don't retroactively increase his incentive to create goods for the public. On the contrary, they deprive the public of what he has already created. Similarly, Rowling is already a billionaire. She has been well compensated for her work. There is no moral hazard in letting the public use it. The current system actually gives her less incentive to create anything new, because she (and her estate) have been granted a monopoly on her work until far past her death.
  - unalone 18y ago
    Why can't the public create their own icons? This is the central point of my argument. I know that Disney stops people from taking Walt's original concepts. But is that a bad thing? What concepts did Disney steal? None: he made his own. Other people can do that too. The idea of capitalism is that if somebody, say, changes the face of literature and sells more copies of her book than anybody else sells copies of anything, then she's entitled to spend the rest of her life doing nothing, because she put that much work in. So even if that was the excuse for ending copyright, making Rowling go back to creating things, it's unjust to force her to do so. As it happens, she's going on to write new things, because she didn't write to become a billionaire, she wrote to write.
    - xiaoma 18y ago
      >I know that Disney stops people from taking Walt's original concepts. But is that a bad thing? What concepts did Disney steal? None: he made his own. Other people can do that too. This is completely wrong. Nearly every famous early work of Disney's was "stolen" from others. Among the more famous are Snow White (1937), Fantasia (1940), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), /Song of the South (1946), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), /Robin Hood (1952), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Mulan (1998), Sleeping Beauty (1959), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), and The Jungle Book (1967). The first iteration of Mickey Mouse, called "Steamboat Willie", was copied directly from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill." This is an excerpt from one of Lawrence Lessig's speeches about the topic: "It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years--just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire. This was his character. Walt always parroted feature-length mainstream films to produce the Disney empire, and we see the product of this. This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning them into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they're utterly bloody and moralistic stories, and are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone." To address your second point, "the idea of capitalism" does not necessarily require giving anyone permanent, state-enforced monopolies of anything, no matter how well written it is. Any justification for copyright has to stem from a benefit to society. Strong arguments can be made for giving creators temporary monopolies of a limited scope, but permanent monopolies are bad for both innovation and the public.

unalone 18y ago

So J. K. Rowling, who spent seven years developing her universe before she even began writing her first novel, who spend inordinate amounts of time developing her systems, her characters, her plot, the morals and concepts she focused on... once she finished it, that's yours? You own some sort of a right to it? You have exactly as much a right to Rowling's universe as she wants you to have. That begins with her novels: she has decided that you have a right to read her stories once you pay money for her books, or once you access her books in some way that involves, somehow, her making money. Once you've done that, you're free to discuss those ideas, you can talk about them with people, you can write about them. But that doesn't give you a right to alter or modify her writing in any way, and I don't think it gives you a right to alter her works for commercial purposes in any way. If you want to make a free online resource, go for it, but if you're going to make money over 17 years of J. K. Rowling's life, there may be a problem. (It's better phrased: she has the right to give you a problem.) Interesting concept: perhaps authors could sell licenses to enter a world's commercial universe. Asimov made a universe for other writers because he wanted them to keep out of his own, then never wrote a story in that second universe himself. Perhaps an enterprising writer could create these huge worlds and scenarios and license them for profit. That would make for a fascinating take on the idea of creative world design that we've already seen explored with things like Dungeons & Dragons.

xiaoma 18y ago
>So J. K. Rowling, who spent seven years developing her universe before she even began writing her first novel, who spend inordinate amounts of time developing her systems, her characters, her plot, the morals and concepts she focused on... once she finished it, that's yours? You own some sort of a right to it? Jefferson had it right about copyright from the beginning. It's got to be a balance of incentives for the creators and good for the public. Yes, it's good to give artists incentives to create, but only so long as the public benefits. The original copyright limits years may have been a reasonable balance. Current law is insane. Extending Walt Disney's copyrights even further past his death don't retroactively increase his incentive to create goods for the public. On the contrary, they deprive the public of what he has already created. Similarly, Rowling is already a billionaire. She has been well compensated for her work. There is no moral hazard in letting the public use it. The current system actually gives her less incentive to create anything new, because she (and her estate) have been granted a monopoly on her work until far past her death.
- unalone 18y ago
  Why can't the public create their own icons? This is the central point of my argument. I know that Disney stops people from taking Walt's original concepts. But is that a bad thing? What concepts did Disney steal? None: he made his own. Other people can do that too. The idea of capitalism is that if somebody, say, changes the face of literature and sells more copies of her book than anybody else sells copies of anything, then she's entitled to spend the rest of her life doing nothing, because she put that much work in. So even if that was the excuse for ending copyright, making Rowling go back to creating things, it's unjust to force her to do so. As it happens, she's going on to write new things, because she didn't write to become a billionaire, she wrote to write.
  - xiaoma 18y ago
    >I know that Disney stops people from taking Walt's original concepts. But is that a bad thing? What concepts did Disney steal? None: he made his own. Other people can do that too. This is completely wrong. Nearly every famous early work of Disney's was "stolen" from others. Among the more famous are Snow White (1937), Fantasia (1940), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), /Song of the South (1946), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), /Robin Hood (1952), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Mulan (1998), Sleeping Beauty (1959), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), and The Jungle Book (1967). The first iteration of Mickey Mouse, called "Steamboat Willie", was copied directly from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill." This is an excerpt from one of Lawrence Lessig's speeches about the topic: "It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years--just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire. This was his character. Walt always parroted feature-length mainstream films to produce the Disney empire, and we see the product of this. This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning them into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they're utterly bloody and moralistic stories, and are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone." To address your second point, "the idea of capitalism" does not necessarily require giving anyone permanent, state-enforced monopolies of anything, no matter how well written it is. Any justification for copyright has to stem from a benefit to society. Strong arguments can be made for giving creators temporary monopolies of a limited scope, but permanent monopolies are bad for both innovation and the public.