Sonic Doctor said:
I've been slowly working on a fantasy novel. If I ever get it published, my wanting full control over my work wouldn't be about money. It would be about people doing stupid stuff and acting like it is a part or associated with my work.
There is no such thing as "full control" over an intellectual work. By it's very nature of being a
limit on something, ccopyright is defined by arbitrary regulations of exactly how far it extends.
The time length before Public Domain is one such extent, even if it has one intuitive-sounding limit, the artist death (although what do you do where there is no single artist, but a developer/publisher studio orchestrating all production?)
But what about the Fair Use doctrine? How far exactly can "full control" go in banning parodies, critical commentaries, smaller quotes, or private re-use (TV show copying as time-shifting, etc.)? How big a cultural unit has to be before it's copyrightable?
To have "full control", would mean that every sound bite, every phrase, and every picture is owned by someone, disallowed from usage by anyone else. That *is* a huge burden on the freedom of expression, just to make certain First Creators feel better about ideas that they consider "owned".
Sonic Doctor said:
It is one of the reasons why we rarely see a good book get turned into a good movie. Some authors cave when they are given large sums of money from movie houses, and they just want to know that their work made it to movie level. The problem is, at that point very rarely do the movie creators do the book justice, because they don't know what makes the book good or even the point that the little things in the book matter.
That all sounds convincing, as long as you assume that the original author is the insightful one, and the movie producers are the idiots. But what if it is the writer who has no clue about how to transform the work, and the producer whose hands are being tied by intrusive copyright law?
You can't enforce greater artistic value by law, especially not by censorship law, and super-especially not by censorship law that rather than at least directly mandating quality, automatically grants an arbitrary class of people (such as novelists) control over another (such as producers, directors, or actors).
Sonic Doctor said:
Freedom of expression is crap when it comes to what I create, because what I create is mine.
Yet you aren't talking about control over the novel that you create, but about banning other people from creating their own movies.
If you are worried about audiences misidentifying the movie as your work, an easier solution to that would be to entirely limit copyright to the actual work being produced, instead of vague extensions to control the "franchise" or the "universe", so it would become more traditionally expected that many people publish many different sequels, adaptations, spinoffs, and crossovers based on a famous work, and they are not all related to a single brand, but free reimaginations.
If people have assumed that the Eragon movie is a direct counterpart to the book, that's because they have been conditioned to think of modern works in terms of "IPs".
