Alice In Wonderland is public domain. Imagine Disney owning that, and what it would mean to a game like American McGee’s Alice. Oh, you want to do a dark twist on that popular fairy tale? NOPE.
How about Little Red Riding Hood, Phantom of the Opera, vampires, werewolves, dragons, Sherlock Holmes, Snow White, Scrooge, the Three Musketeers, Frankenstein, Hercules, Cleopatra (yes, public domain includes real people, you can’t tell me 100 years from now I can’t make a movie about Hitler without paying his family royalties). Huckleberry Finn, Felix the Cat, Zorro, Peter Pan, Cthulhu, King Arthur, Jack the Ripper, Vlad the Impaler, or hell all of the Wizard of Oz.
All of these things can easily make money, and have made money, and as we’re seeing with the upcoming Oz movie by Sam Raimi, all that matters is the storyteller and the audience. You can argue all you want about Disney needed to keep Mickey to make money, but wouldn’t the better option be to have them create new things to make money for them, and provide something new for us? Especially since it worked oh so well the other several thousand years that a lack of extended copyrights didn’t exist???
To add to that: even if Mickey Mouse was public domain, Disney can still make money off them, advertise themselves as his creator, etc.
If Chrono Trigger went public domain, and I was a game dev, I have a CT re-imagining I want to create. But Square could still release and re-release CT games until the end of time (pun honestly not intended, but funny it ended up that way), and probably make disgusting gobs of cash.
Hell, that Jack the Giant Killer movie coming up? I’m pretty sure Jack of Fables was nothing but good publicity for it…
Why not come up with your own idea and make a profit off of it instead of having to use a story that’s already been told even if you tell it differently?
its more an issue of someone profitting off it decades after you (the content creator) have died. if that bothers you, then yeah you’re pretty fuckin selfish. and these laws enable profiting off the creative work of others as much as they protect against it.
Oh but you do. For all of history, we allowed 20 years. After that it became public domain. It’s also to prevent shit like somebody patenting the cure to something, then banning anybody else from making a competing product or researching it, forever. You’re still given tons of time to make money off it. If it’s popular enough that people want to make copies of it in the future for money that you should be getting, just do a sequel or ummm i dunno do something else for money.
Because sometimes a classic retelling is nice. Whether it’s recent (Avatar vs Dances with Wolves) or older (how many retellings of Romeo & Juliet are there, including the amazing urban retelling?), sometimes a new take on a classic character works wonders. After all, that’s pretty much what comics have been doing for 80 years anyways. Look at people like Frank Miller taking on classics like Batman. No different than somebody making a video game about Zorro. All just retellings. You’re also ignoring things like people wanting Braille copies of texts. Those cost money and are thus not in demand, when compaired to normal books and papers. Public domain was supposed to allow for people to transribe and translate them at a later date and time.
Like @Specs said, I would still go for the original shit over others. I’d watch a Disney Mickey cartoon over a Nickelodeon one. Hell, it might even spur demand in updating some of the old stuff to keep it in the public interest. You know, like the whole point of patent law was intended for.
Let me ask you just one thing: if I start a company, and I create some intellectual property for that company and die later on, but the company still exists 100 years after my death, who should own it?
Certain ICONS will never vanish from history regardless of who keeps a lid on them. I also believe that creativity doesn’t get stunted just because everything isn’t put into public domain. The owners of intellectual property licensne these things out if they think the group asking for rights has a good idea.
I’m fine with medical and mechanical patents going into public domain. In the name of competition, they are sometimes necessary to force advancements in inventing. Other stuff, who cares? Come up with your own shite.
Guy, you’re so cool, can I ever be like you one day?
Why. Answer that question. Why should those in the medical and mechanics fields lose their patents in the name of your goddamned competition, while the rest of us are freeloaders when it comes to media? If you or Rsigley could be fucking consistent for once maybe people would take you seriously.
If we’re all so concerned about ending freeloading, then medical/tech/ALL patents should be granted in perpetuity for all eternity. Competition be damned. Again, your statements taken to their logical conclusion leads to all kinds of fucked up shit, I’ll be waiting for the logical gymnastics you come up with to answer my question. Who knows, maybe I just 'have it all wrong" and am trying to make you look immoral.
The eight values of public domain works, as enumerated by Pamela Samuelson:
Building blocks for the creation of new knowledge, examples include data, facts, ideas, theories, and scientific principle.
Access to cultural heritage through information resources such as ancient Greek texts and Mozart’s symphonies.
Promoting education, through the spread of information, ideas, and scientific principles.
Enabling follow-on innovation, through for example expired patents and copyright.
Enabling low cost access to information without the need to locate the owner or negotiate rights clearance and pay royalties, through for example expired copyrighted works or patents, and non-original data compilation.
Promoting public health and safety, through information and scientific principles.
Promoting the democratic process and values, through news, laws, regulation, and judicial opinion.
Enabling competitive imitation, through for example expired patents and copyright, or publicly disclosed technologies that do not qualify for patent protection.
Everybody.
If that bothers you, surely the people currently working for the company can come up with their own shite.
yeah I know. Thinking a bit more about it, since I’d be dead, it’d be irrelevant, and it’d be mostly family members with a distorted sense of entitlement trying to get money from other people’s efforts and love towards what I had created.
Question: if Mickey Mouse falls into public domain, would a company be allowed to use him in a logo, for example, or in some kind of advertising?
(I’m actually trying to understand how this stuff works.)
I gave you the reason in the same post you quoted. I don’t see why if I’m a company who bought the rights to a fictional character or paid someone to do it for my business and sell the rights to me I am not entitled to keep it even if I’m still in business 200 years later.
public domain is just common sense. after the creator dies, the company should get to make money off it a few decades tops.
oh and since we’re talking about related topics… i’m actually against patents, especially when it comes to tech, because i don’t think they really serve any kind of useful purpose any more. imagine if http protocol were patented or tcp/ip. think about all the innovation we’d lose out on thanks to patents, when patents are supposed to promote and encourage innovation.
oh and fuck copyright law. its just atrociously stupid and bad these days, and just gives corporations reasons to sue grandmothers for millions of dollars. makes me shake my head.
And I don’t see why if I’m a medical or tech company, I should be forced to allow others to innovate off of my product in the “name of competition” and thus curtail my profits.
Try again.
edit: Though I see what you did there, which is quite cute. Despite what you and the crackpots who implemented Citizens United think, corporations will never be people.(Though on the flipside, it’d be great to consider them people if we also put them on trial and charged them for crimes just like we do with people. And no I’m not talking about embezzlement or something like that which we do go after corps for, I’m talking about cases of DeBeers killing people or using jackbooted thugs to help maintain their monopoly)
for the purpose of science, some technology must be released to the public to continue going forward. That isn’t really true for intellectual property. You can come up with whatever story. the number of ideas for logos, creative characters, mascots, story ideas et. al. are literally impossible to count. There will always be people with ideas.
And according to the law corporations are people. At least, that’s what Michael Moore said.
^Because Raz0r and the best economic system ever invented says so.
I"m just trying to see how this “competition” deux ex machina for his argument doesn’t apply to media, but medicine and technology. Us not having the most advanced med/tech doesn’t hurt us per say(depending on viewpoint), no one needs a computer, no one needs a long life, no one needs their pain alleviated through new drugs/procedures. People don’t need competition, and allowing people access to innovate a product/invention that someone else created most certainly goes against the inventors self interest and isn’t needed. But I guess in raz0r’s world he’s so cool and so right and everyone else are all freeloading liberal socialists.
edit: According to US Law they are. Because something is the law does not mean it should be so. If I mandated into law that no one could have private property nor have any private wealth you’d be whining like a newborn infant how it isn’t fair. But it’d be the law, so no, not good
enough.
edit2: and once again, we don’t need, to go forward. As I stated in the other thread when you were talking out of both sides of your mouth, there are people who continue to live like our ancestors do, without our conveniences. And competition hurts profits of inventors, keep. trying.
Face it raz0r. This is all your PERSONAL view, not some preordained fact or supposed “natural order”. You arbitrarily choose to strip tech and medicine of the absolute protections you want placed on media, for your own little view of progress(in which case I could easily make the exact same case you make for releasing literary works to the public domain for the interests of “advancing literature/film/whatever”. Also, people will always have ideas in Science and Medicine too). Again, inconsistent, and when taken to its logical conclusion, idiotic and potentially “immoral”