endless well of ideas? then clearly inventors have nothing to worry about patent trolls
ofc we’re talking about copyrights, not patents, so let’s imagine an alternate universe where creative works are protected by perpetual copyright. the thought of homer litigating greek poets is absurd, so I should amend my description: an alternate universe where creative works become protected by perpetual copyright. how bout today?
a substantial percentage of all creative works already falls under the public domain. what do we do with all these? leave them in the public domain? if I were a descendant of shakespeare I’d definitely sue the loving shit out of the fanfic writers who came up with ‘sword, nine millimeter’! a grand liberal arts reparation plan probably isn’t feasible, but we then establish that it’s okay for work X to be copyrighted and not work Y simply because you weren’t born in the right age. this is already a fucked up distinction. are you willing to accept this - or is there a compelling reason why currently public works should remain grandfathered into their unprofitable condition? is there a compelling non-legal reason why you can steal ideas from a copyrighted work but not a public work?
regardless, your answer is irrelevant. consider: the number of copyrighted works can only increase.
an author in the year 3000
comes up with a great idea for a story
and checks against a database of 984735897349753984759384798723894714809183509824059 copyrighted works to make sure, absolutely fucking sure, he didn’t unknowingly or unconciously infringe on one of those copyrights
and I’d wager the vast majority of those copyrights would be enforced
do you see where this is going? even patents expire. if copyrights were perpetual, what stops me from copyrighting every possible narrative permutation, shit or otherwise? what stops me from copyrighting not so much stories as a story’s building blocks? if apple can patent a rounded corner, anything can happen! I’d really hate myself if I were a musician in the year 3000.
you’ll probably respond “infinity > a very large but finite number”, in which case continuing this discussion is meaningless. I just hope you’ve taken the above considerations into account when you argue for perpetual copyrights
I look at modern superheroes as being the more advanced version of the classic mythology of God’s children (like Hercules, Perseus, and other half God half mortal offspring that had fantastic powers). Like you alluded to earlier, in the future we won’t read Superman or Batman, we’ll be all about androids or whatever the fuck our crazy society comes up with.
I just look forward to a day when the Marvel catalogue becomes public domain, and some super fan can make an epic Wolverine video game, or maybe a game from the point of view of Apocalypse or Mr Sinister, or Magneto. And doesn’t have to pay Marvel a ton of royalties to do so.
