dbenoy said:
However, It makes me uncomfortable to see someone so casually dismissing the creative destruction of copyright as it exists today with just 'yeah well maybe they should have been more original'
Why is your vision of how an artist should produce his works so worthy of receiving the force of law? Should Walt Disney have been sued into oblivion when he created a movie inspired by Alice in Wonderland, or Tarzan? Under today's copyright law, Disney would be long dead before those works became public domain. Should the
choice to re-envision those tales have been stripped from him?
Ah, but Disney would certainly have had the option to license those works from the copyright holder, if the works had not already gone into the public domain. If he'd truly been motivated to produce his own vision of those works, he would have been able to.
Without stealing anything, without getting sued by anyone. Indeed, quite possibly without paying any significant amount of money up front, depending on the property in question.
As for copyright duration, I can't say that it particularly bothers me. Creative endeavors are not like life-saving medicines; no one is going to die because they can't write a Terminator slash fic.
dbenoy said:
TOR need not have created their entire project from scratch in a post-copyright world; just enough to make it new and exciting and draw customers. Certainly that, and the lack of royalties, offsets whatever business would be lost to competition.
Chicken/egg problem. Here you argue that TOR would not have had to develop an entirely new game, simply adapt existing software, which had to have come from somewhere. Given the scope of the project, the problem remains.
Remember,
hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the scale the entertainment industry operates on today, and it's a scale made possible by the laws currently in existence.
dbenoy said:
First, it's an extreme technical challenge to clone a game server with access only to a client, and nearly impossible to keep up to date with a server that has frequent content releases.
Not as hard, however, as developing the game from scratch. If I can, let's say, make a copy of your game server for 10% of the development costs that you expended in creating it (and the rest of the game) in the first place, with the same number of developers and responsiveness in server updates, I can undercut your subscription fees, or your item fees in a "free" MMO model, with relative ease.
There's no need to "keep up", since I'm not copying you after the initial act, but rather taking your work and using it for myself.
Here, you could argue that increased competition would be good for the customer. The problem is that, with the inherent chilling effect that would occur without any sort of IP protection, there would be no game
of that scope to begin with. There'd be no reliable way to recoup the initial investment.
What you wind up with is a great deal of incentive to take and adapt the work of others, but very little incentive to create the initial work to begin with, particularly if doing so is a significant investment of time and/or capital.
While there would be less direct "theft" in media such as film and print (re-editing a film to a particular vision having been met with less-than-resounding applause from man quarters lately, and in print the name of the author is typically what sells a book, rather than the universe in which it is set), in the gaming medium, I expect that the sort of AAA games we enjoy today would cease to exist very rapidly.
As for the rest...
Yes, clearly things in a post-copyright world would be different. What I suspect we will not agree on, however, is that things would be
better. I know quite a few professional authors, for example, many of whom probably would not be able to make a living without some measure of IP protection. You may trust that people would express their appreciation of a given author's work with financial recompense; I am substantially less confident.
Without protection, you may see a broader pool of creation, but it would almost undoubtedly be a substantially
shallower pool, where the individual creators, instead of creating professionally, did so in their spare time. Rather than a given author writing a book a year, he might do so once every five.
At which point he would be George R. R. Martin, and I would hate him forever.
Humor aside, I suspect we would see vastly fewer actors, authors, and artists performing at anything over an amateur level of proficiency in a world without copyright.
