The Big Picture: Copywrong

[lowkey_jotunn]

I've never understood the copyright kerfuffle over "Let's Play" or video games in general.

With music or movies, listening and/or watching is really the entire experience. If I watch a movie on YouTube, that's really the exact same experience (perhaps sans a few pixels) that I would get if I watched that movie on a blueray I purchased.

But video games are different. The whole point is PLAYING the thing. Putting your own hands on a controller, keyboard, etc. and telling the little person on the screen to run right, jump, duck, etc. Watching someone else play a video game is a completely different experience.

If Sony (or any publisher) wants to claim that their product was integral to the creation of the Lets Play, then Dunder Mifflin should be getting a cut of any revenue generated on paper they supplied.

 

[Deadagent]

Oh, pardon me, who'd have thought somebody who actually has to work with copyright law might actually have an opinion and want to provide some context for said opinion?

But it was pretty unneccecary, the only reason to include that is
so you could say that I do not understand your position because you're
in the "unique" position of being an artist.

But the thing is, there is nothing unique about your position as an artist.

And again with that antagonistic attitude. Gawd, the word "artist" must be like a red rag to a bull for you.

What happened? Did an artist kick your puppy, or something?

The attitude that your post gives off annoyed me, and it still does.

 

[Kmadden2004]

Oh, pardon me, who'd have thought somebody who actually has to work with copyright law might actually have an opinion and want to provide some context for said opinion?

But it was pretty unneccecary, the only reason to include that is
so you could say that I do not understand your position because you're
in the "unique" position of being an artist.

But the thing is, there is nothing unique about your position as an artist.

And again with that antagonistic attitude. Gawd, the word "artist" must be like a red rag to a bull for you.

What happened? Did an artist kick your puppy, or something?

The attitude that your post gives off annoyed me, and it still does.

The only person here with an attitude is you, and your annoyance has only come from your personal hang-ups over lord knows what.

Perhaps in future you should just stick with a more measured tone.

 

[Entitled]

Not Deadagent, but I kind of started this discussion line before he agreed with me.

Edit: And now he dropped out anyways, so I'm taking his place if you still care about the discussion.

Analysis of copyright infringement first and foremost looks to whether what is being copied is an idea or the expression of an idea. Similar story themes and tropes are ideas, not expression. It's the difference between me writing a modern fantasy book with magic and wizards and various monsters, and me writing The Dresden Files.

The problem is, that the line between "idea" and "specific expression of an idea", as copyright law recognizes it, isn't based on any measurement of the derivative work's self-contained artistic value, but simply on the ease of proving the derivativeness as a fact in front of court.

Theoretically, you CAN sue someone for copyright infringement, if they are inspired by so many tropes or plot points in their story that it starts appearing too close to yours. But these are rare, because only a direct copypaste can be a smoking gun.

In a way, the problem is the same as with these Youtube problems. Courts are acting like human ContentID systems, acknowledging copyright infringement as long as there is any string of directly lifted code to be caught (no matter how small), while letting go obviously larger examples of unoriginality, as long as it's not something that you can put your finger on.

You say that The Dresden Files should be protected as "an expression of an idea." I agree. But The Dresden Files should be identified as the actual books that Jim Butcher actually wrote, and not abstract concepts like "the Dresden Files universe" or it's worldbuilding elements, or characters, any more than it's tropes or it's art style, not even if the former two are sometimes easier to be objectively proven than the latter.


The problem with enshrining forms of derivation outside of the IP authority as "innovation", yet dismissing the ones bannable by IP holders as a "stunning lack of original creation", is that it mixes legal ability with artistic creativity, in a way that isn't even really compatible with our common way of looking at art.

It's most obvious problem could be summed up like this:

You have repeatedly made references to derivative works not being new pieces of art at all, but merely the "taking" of someone else's work and slapping a new name on it.

If this is the case, how does this relate to the hundreds of highly respected works of art and entertainment, created by someone else than the artist who made the universe, and published thanks to licensing arrangements, or Public Domain allowances?

Earlier in this thread I mentioned Walking Dead (the game), and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comics), but I could have also mentioned Arkham Asylum, or if I want to go fancy, Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, or Margaret Atwood's novel, The Penelopiad.

You either admit that these derivative works are creative on their own, in which case there is no way to justify that copyright is being used to limit the existence of works like these (but under different legal circumstances), or you can insist that these are not really unique works worth protecting, in which case your judgement of artistic merit is more different from mainstream, than even the idea of publishing fanfction.

Well, there are two answers. The first is the "creative integrity" answer. If I write Lord of the Rings, I (or those I've passed my rights in the books to) get to decide which creative works should exist. Which works are within the spirit, and of enough quality, to be made. And I get to decide whether I want a Lord of the Rings video game, chess game, or sex toy.

An artist wanting to protect his creative integrity through the means of censoring other people's creative works on the account of it affecting theirs, is no different than the politician who wants to protect his public integrity by censoring people who would reply to his speeches in a critical manner.

Sure, they CAN benefit from such a right, but is such a right... right? Handing over one person control over artistic self-expression? To protect his integrity alone, at the cost of everyone else's freedom of expression?

The second answer is money. Especially in an era where merchandizing and other "derivative works" (like movies, video games, etc.) are often more profitable than the original work, all of that profit should flow to me.

Or maybe it should flow to the actual creators of those "more profitable" creative works.

The problem is the same with moral rights. Sure, you can claim that copyright holders can benefit from such a right, but that alone doesn't make it a right thing.

All artists holding control of the ACTUAL WORK that they created, seems to be a lot more fair than absolute control for franchise creators, and absolute dependance for the majority of common artists, especially on the accout of something as insignificant as character names, universe rules, and similar insignificant but trackable "contentID bits", that doesn't make the latter artists' work uncreative either.

And you can argue that fan works distributed for free shouldn't be prohibited, but there's no good way to exclude non-commercial works that wouldn't cut into the rights of the original creator. What if Square-Enix wants to make a sequel? Now the unofficial FFVII sequel is competing with the official one.
[...]
It's kind of the same reason we don't let me market "Michael Jordan shoes" with a big ol' picture of Michael Jordan.

Actually, both of these are examples of Trademak law, not copyright. Trademark exist to protect logos, titles, slogans, and similar implications of identification, to avoid counterfeiting and misidentification or creator. It's primarily a customer protection law, not an enforcer of originality.

Tademark is what stops you from implying that you are someone else than you really are. On one hand, Trademark has it's own problems (remeber "Scrolls"?), on the other, it's also more flexible, as it is intended to automatically apply to cases where the intent to mislead is present. That's why a title can either fall from trademark if it becomes a commonly used phrase for an action. For example, "aspirin" used to be a brand, but people started to use it for all painkillers, so courts decided that now it is a synonym for painkiller, and so you can call yours "an Aspirin" without implying that it's made by the original owner of The Aspirin (tm).

The same could happen to Final Fantasy, or Harry Potter, under stricter copyright definitions. If your cover, sequel number, author name, etc. is presented in a fashion to imply an official sequel, trademark lawsuit for you, if not, then apparently you have just used the word as a description of the universe style (that is in public usage), and not a direct reference to the actual copyrighted games/books themselves.

Having never read the book, or the original material, I don't know how much had to be changed. But, in the context of a video game, if you're using all-new art assets, none of the same dialogue, and a completely new story not referencing anything from the original games, the only thing you'd need to do to make it copyright-compliant would be to change the names and call it something else.

With a book, if you're using all new material, using none of the plot elements or names of the original series, the only thing you'd need to do is change the names and not claim it as part of the series.

If the story can stand alone like that, why do you need to use the existing characters or world?

Because, like you have pointed out earlier about tropes, artists are NOT using completely new stories.

Just because they might get away with twisting character names and locations to formally push out a "new IP", it is not necessarily the creatively honest thing to do.

Stories are inspired by each other, criticizing or mocking each other, reconstructing each other's broken fame, reacting to cultural trends set by an earlier one, and creating their own cultural trends.

The problem here is, that the greatest harm that such a ban does, is not obvious at first sight, because the works that it bans usually don't even start getting made, due to being impossible to publish. You don't see game developers putting the finishing touches on their super artistic and meaningful unofficial game in the Star Wars universe, before Disney shuts them down, or forces them to entirely rebrand it, because no such game has a chance of starting development.

But just look at works that CAN get published:

In one sense, a game like Arkham Asylum doesn't use any more direct content from DC than location and character names. It's all original plots, art assets, dialogue, etc. Just because DC owns "the Batman IP", doesn't mean that this is not a real game just a "taking of" the batman, or "an expression" of "the idea" that DC owns. Yet on the other hand, it's art style, even it's gameplay, and it's narrative are all heavily relying on the audience's feeling that it IS about the famous Batman, and Gotham city.

Maybe if Rocksteady didn't get it's license, they would have made some other equally creative game that doesn't rely on these few words appearing so much. But why force them?

If the Odyssey would be under copyright, Margaret Atwood might have been capable of publishing The Penelopiad by changing names and settings and calling it merely "inspired". But the fact is, it's message WAS centered around the cultural significance of Penepole and the Odysseus story, even if it would be forced to hide under winks and nudges.

 

[TristanBelmont]

Woolie, on the Super Best FriendCast, put one part of this very well. There are people who will abuse this to steal money from others by making accounts and claiming stuff is theirs even when it isn't, just to collect the ad revenue illegally.

 

[Gezzer]

I always thought copyright was important no matter what Nina Paley says. But it always seems that when copyright law is trying to be changed it's always to the benefit of the large companies like the Orphan Works Act.

That's my whole take on this thing as well.
As far as I'm concerned copyrights and patents should be so that the originator has a protected ability to see a return on their creativity. But as the length of both types of IP protection continue to get extended the IP protection it's self becomes a hot commodity. That's why IMHO we have so many companies that only buy and sell IP rights. And it's why IP rights holders are encouraged by the system to furiously defend their rights. IP rights currently have such high values that not defending those rights will hurt their value and the holder monetarily as well. Personally I feel that reducing the period that an IP can be protected would remove a lot of the current problems we now see. It's simply actually. If a copyright is, for example, for the life of the originator big corporations would no longer feel the need to snap up those rights as a long term investment. So no massive IP rights market, or overvaluing of those rights, and the need to defend at all costs will be reduced. Hopefully by a lot. Problem solved.

 

[RJ 17]

Spoiler: Soooooo basically this comic sums things up?

Gotta say this is all pretty ridiculous if you ask me. Other than the topic that Bob touched on with regard to censoring negative reviews and such, I still can't see how any media producing company would be opposed to free advertisement and promotion on YouTube. Granted, the majority of this flagging is coming from bots, but still, I'm betting that YouTube was pressured into making these policy changes which led to the bots which led to the claims, and that means that some companies out there had to be doing the pressuring.

That or YouTube is just run by a giant bag of dicks, which could be true as well.

 

[Korsgaard]

Copyright reform has been a long time coming, especially as the conflict between folks on the web and industry giants cash more and more as 'fair use' gets tossed under the bus of automated scan bots.

I tried dipping my toes into doing movie reviews on YouTube - I ended up putting it on hold because, despite film reviews being covered by fair use, the automated bots scanning for footage by the various movie studios made posting any reviews a nightmare, and the appeals process is a joke - even if the claim gets dropped, usually, they will send another claim for the same clip a few weeks later. It truly is obnoxious, and it was enough to send me slinking off back to writing reviews as opposed to getting into the more lucrative YouTube market. I can only imagine how it must be for established folks getting hammered by the latest round over this.

 

[Seldon2639]

I tryed to write a detailed response but ya know what, screw it. I'll just say you are wrong on most of your accounts.
And you do not understand what you are being presented at all. I have more important things than this in my life. Bye

Well argued. I'm sure that your more pressing issues of "being wrong about copyright law" and "making crap up" take up a lot of time. How about leaving the grown-up discussions to the grown-ups?

The problem is, that the line between "idea" and "specific expression of an idea", as copyright law recognizes it, isn't based on any measurement of the derivative work's self-contained artistic value, but simply on the ease of proving the derivativeness as a fact in front of court.

That's somewhat of a misleading way to phrase it. Yes, it is copyright infringement even if you add a bunch of original work on top of an existing work when you're taking the existing work verbatim (He's So Fine vs. My Sweet Lord). But if there's enough "artistic value" in the derivative work itself, you can take out all of the copyright infringement and make it work (Fifty Shades of Grey)

Theoretically, you CAN sue someone for copyright infringement, if they are inspired by so many tropes or plot points in their story that it starts appearing too close to yours. But these are rare, because only a direct copypaste can be a smoking gun.

Theoretically, it's more of a "under a very, very, specific set of circumstances where not only are there many similarities but you can show actual copying." Absent copying in fact, substantial similarity isn't about the feel or the tropes or the mis-en-scene, it's about using the actual content.

In a way, the problem is the same as with these Youtube problems. Courts are acting like human ContentID systems, acknowledging copyright infringement as long as there is any string of directly lifted code to be caught (no matter how small), while letting go obviously larger examples of unoriginality, as long as it's not something that you can put your finger on.

That's not quite how substantial similarity works, and I'd encourage you to go look at the case law on the subkject. It's significantly more complicated than "yup, that sounds an awful lot like it."

And what you describe (derisively) as allowing through larger examples of "unoriginality" is actually precisely what you demanded earlier in this thread: that copyright law accept that there is nothing truly new in any medium. There are no new notes, no new stories, no new themes. So, instead of saying "well, because it has a similar overarching story, it's copyright infringement" it is limited mostly to (a) copying verbatim, or (b) creating a derivative work.

You say that The Dresden Files should be protected as "an expression of an idea." I agree. But The Dresden Files should be identified as the actual books that Jim Butcher actually wrote, and not abstract concepts like "the Dresden Files universe" or it's worldbuilding elements, or characters, any more than it's tropes or it's art style, not even if the former two are sometimes easier to be objectively proven than the latter.

That's certainly the repetition of your argument, but it doesn't answer the fundamental question of why Jim Butcher should not retain the right to decide which derivative works (if any) are made. Arguing that derivative works must be protected because someone might want to make an unauthorized movie version is a bit like saying "stealing should be legal because someone might want to take your television."

The value of the unauthorized movie is dwarfed by the value of protecting Mr. Butcher's rights in his own work.

The problem with enshrining forms of derivation outside of the IP authority as "innovation", yet dismissing the ones bannable by IP holders as a "stunning lack of original creation", is that it mixes legal ability with artistic creativity, in a way that isn't even really compatible with our common way of looking at art.

I cannot write The Dresden Files: The Movie. I can write a modern fantasy movie. Your idea seems to be that it must be all or nothing when it comes to derivative works: either we have to make all derivative works illegal (including those whose similarity is in ideas, not expression), or we have to allow even directly derivative works.

Yes, a derivative work authorized by the original creator is less concerning than an unauthorized work. Why is that surprising to you?

If this is the case, how does this relate to the hundreds of highly respected works of art and entertainment, created by someone else than the artist who made the universe, and published thanks to licensing arrangements, or Public Domain allowances?

To the first, it's an agreement by the original creator which gives the right to some other person to make derivative works. To the second, it's publication agreement, not itself a derivative work. To the third, a work which has passed into the public domain is deemed to be fair game.

But that's actually a good example of why your argument is farkakte. Imagine a movie made about The Little Mermaid after the original story entered the public domain. If a second movie comes out using the same art assets, and (rather than being a retelling of the original story) is a continuation of the first movie. That's not taking the same underlying ideas (including those in the public domain), it's taking someone else's work.

Earlier in this thread I mentioned Walking Dead (the game), and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comics), but I could have also mentioned Arkham Asylum, or if I want to go fancy, Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, or Margaret Atwood's novel, The Penelopiad.

Licensed, licensed, licensed, public domain, definitely public domain.

If your argument was that we need to allow unauthorized derivative works in order to ensure that there is sufficient creativity, those cut against your argument.

You either admit that these derivative works are creative on their own, in which case there is no way to justify that copyright is being used to limit the existence of works like these (but under different legal circumstances), or you can insist that these are not really unique works worth protecting, in which case your judgement of artistic merit is more different from mainstream, than even the idea of publishing fanfction.

There is a way to justify that copyright would be used to limit those works under different circumstances. If, instead of partners with WB to create Arkham Asylum, Rocksteady was me by myself making an unauthorized video game of Batman, I would be able to (a) sell my game under the name of a popular franchise and thus profit without permission from someone else's work, (b) harm the franchise, and (c) make artistic decisions that the creator/his assignee does not approve of.

An artist wanting to protect his creative integrity through the means of censoring other people's creative works on the account of it affecting theirs, is no different than the politician who wants to protect his public integrity by censoring people who would reply to his speeches in a critical manner.

Oh please. Criticism is protected, and any argument of "it hurts my business by saying my work sucks" has been rejected. Your analogy is bad, and you should feel bad. A better analogy would be Leonardo Da Vinci being able to prevent other people from making "The Mona Lisa, Part 2."

Or maybe it should flow to the actual creators of those "more profitable" creative works.

And my incentive to write, when it becomes apparent that if my series is popular it's going to be taken by every Tom, Dick, and Harry to make derivative works (movies, television shows, other books, merchandise), is not diminished?

Weird that your focus is on the profitability of the people whose only creative ability is "I took someone else's work and did something with it.

All artists holding control of the ACTUAL WORK that they created, seems to be a lot more fair than absolute control for franchise creators, and absolute dependance for the majority of common artists, especially on the accout of something as insignificant as character names, universe rules, and similar insignificant but trackable "contentID bits", that doesn't make the latter artists' work uncreative either.

Except that if your much-maligned common "artists" could write a creative work not dependent on existing character names, or existing universes, they would be able to take out the infringing parts and have a damned decent work.

That's like saying that the guy who repaints the Mona Lisa in front of other backgrounds (and is successful only because people want to buy good reprints of The Mona Lisa) is being deprived when it turns out that his landscapes aren't good enough to sell by themselves.

Actually, both of these are examples of Trademak law, not copyright. Trademark exist to protect logos, titles, slogans, and similar implications of identification, to avoid counterfeiting and misidentification or creator. It's primarily a customer protection law, not an enforcer of originality.

Given that you're the guy who only above decided that wanting to protect against derivative works is like a politician wanting to quash criticism, you seem to not have a great grasp on the concept of "analogies."

snip, stuff about trademark law

The point was, in part, that profiting (without permission) from the hard work of the original artist is similarly ethically "wrong" to profiting by using someone else's established franchise name.

Because, like you have pointed out earlier about tropes, artists are NOT using completely new stories.

Just because they might get away with twisting character names and locations to formally push out a "new IP", it is not necessarily the creatively honest thing to do.

Stories are inspired by each other, criticizing or mocking each other, reconstructing each other's broken fame, reacting to cultural trends set by an earlier one, and creating their own cultural trends.

Well, first, we're not actually talking about criticism or cultural trends. You seem to spend a lot of time mistaking "derivative works" for "critical works." If you want to write an article about how The Dresden Files sucks, that's entirely within your rights and no copyright law stops you.

If you want to make the Dresden Files game, you'd be stopped. If you want to make a game in the (obviously popular) modern fantasy genre with a wisecracking main character using cultural trends from Harry Potter and with a critical eye to Twilight, you absolutely can.

Why, in your mind, does "inspiration" require "direct usage of other people's work"?

The problem here is, that the greatest harm that such a ban does, is not obvious at first sight, because the works that it bans usually don't even start getting made, due to being impossible to publish. You don't see game developers putting the finishing touches on their super artistic and meaningful unofficial game in the Star Wars universe, before Disney shuts them down, or forces them to entirely rebrand it, because no such game has a chance of starting development.

No, you don't see an unauthorized Star Wars game. You just see Mass Effect.

But just look at works that CAN get published:

In one sense, a game like Arkham Asylum doesn't use any more direct content from DC than location and character names. It's all original plots, art assets, dialogue, etc. Just because DC owns "the Batman IP", doesn't mean that this is not a real game just a "taking of" the batman, or "an expression" of "the idea" that DC owns. Yet on the other hand, it's art style, even it's gameplay, and it's narrative are all heavily relying on the audience's feeling that it IS about the famous Batman, and Gotham city.

Maybe if Rocksteady didn't get it's license, they would have made some other equally creative game that doesn't rely on these few words appearing so much. But why force them?

You mean that maybe Rocksteady could have made a non-Batman game which was equally compelling, deep, with just as good gameplay, never referencing any part of Batman or Batman mythos?

I agree, which is why them having to get a license to make Batman doesn't stop them from any creative works.

If the Odyssey would be under copyright, Margaret Atwood might have been capable of publishing The Penelopiad by changing names and settings and calling it merely "inspired". But the fact is, it's message WAS centered around the cultural significance of Penepole and the Odysseus story, even if it would be forced to hide under winks and nudges.

Or by getting permission. In order to rewrite a story from a different character's perspective requires (a) permission, or (b) that the work be in the public domain. Because it turns out that far more often with derivative works is the "Seinfeld Trivia Game" than the "creative reinterpretation of the work from another character's view."

What's wrong with the creator (or his assignee) being able to decide "hey, this idea for a book is cool, let's let her write it"?

 

[Strazdas]

Considering that I work closely with YouTube on exactly this question I can assure you, while of course the announcements by publishers are PR, they are also true. Most publishers have NO interest whatsoever in depriving those who advertise their games of their income. The problem is: Content-ID only allows us to set our content to "Track", "Monetize", or "Block". At some point recently, even a "Track" (which is our standard setting for all uploads) entry kept people from monetizing the content for themselves - that was a RECENT change. So no, it's not on the publishers' side this time.

If indeed a track mean automatic block then youtube did wrong. I never claimed they didnt. However what i said was that you had to set the policies to begin with, which you yourself admitted you did.
I understand that most publishers never wanted this to happen, im more inclining they never even understood the policies they are setting and when they finally worked they realized their error and tried to salvage their way out of it.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

I cannot share this video enough times... The best part about the video was when Bob went on a mini-rant about how people think artists shouldn't care about money. For Heaven's Gate, I can't tell you how many times I see fans flipping their lid over the very idea that a creative party is trying in some way, shape, or form to get money, or trying to make a living off of what they enjoy doing. It's ridiculous, absolutely asinine, and shows just how small-minded most fans of these kinds of things on YouTube and the like are!

To be fair, the vast majority of the time it's because they're trying to get money in ways people don't like. Most people have no problem with paying money for a product they think is worth their money. There certainly are a group of people who think artists shouldn't care about money at all, but it's a small group.

OT: Well said in every way. *claps*

 

[Entitled]

Yes, it is copyright infringement even if you add a bunch of original work on top of an existing work when you're taking the existing work verbatim (He's So Fine vs. My Sweet Lord). But if there's enough "artistic value" in the derivative work itself, you can take out all of the copyright infringement and make it work (Fifty Shades of Grey)

Just because you can "make it work", doesn't mean that it's a good thing to do. Fifty shades is a particularly strange work in that in spite of formally being Twilight fanfiction, it had little to do with Twilight in the first place. Many derivative works like my below examples of Arkham Asylum or The Penelopiad might only use names, but the (original) assets built around these names are meaningful enough that copyright enforcement would still break their plot.

Theoretically, it's more of a "under a very, very, specific set of circumstances where not only are there many similarities but you can show actual copying." Absent copying in fact, substantial similarity isn't about the feel or the tropes or the mis-en-scene, it's about using the actual content.

[...]

That's not quite how substantial similarity works, and I'd encourage you to go look at the case law on the subkject. It's significantly more complicated than "yup, that sounds an awful lot like it."

Isn't that what I just said? That the problem is, that copyrights are obsessed with the specifics of content getting reproduced, instead of the actual claims of "unoriginality", or "taking someone else's work instead of creating anything", which then gets thrown at such works.

This is exactly what ContentID is doing as well. Throwing copyright infringement at Let's Play-ers on the account of some ambient sound effect in the background being copyrighted, as if the fact that they have "taken content" from someone would render the rest of their own independent work useless.

And what you describe (derisively) as allowing through larger examples of "unoriginality" is actually precisely what you demanded earlier in this thread: that copyright law accept that there is nothing truly new in any medium. There are no new notes, no new stories, no new themes. So, instead of saying "well, because it has a similar overarching story, it's copyright infringement" it is limited mostly to (a) copying verbatim, or (b) creating a derivative work.

I'm not derisive about unoriginality. I'm just as supportive of new, derivative works repeating plots (that still add new location names), as of new, derivative works repeating a few words, like location names (that write new plots).

I'm questioning the double standard, of why only the latter gets tagged as derivative in the first place.

I would guess that J.K. Rowling spent significantly more time deciding that she should try writing a whimsical wizarding school bildungsroman with an overarching Hero's Journey plot, than with giving his protagonist a name.

So why is it that writing a new whimsical wizarding school bildungsroman with an overarching Hero's Journey plot can still make you a celebrated writer as long as it still has enough interesting points, while using the Eleven Magical Words "Harry Potter" gets you tagged for "merely taking away someone else's work instead creating your own"?

Yes, a derivative work authorized by the original creator is less concerning than an unauthorized work. Why is that surprising to you?

The surprising part is in the specific accusations that get thrown at a work merely for being unauthorised. The Dark Knight was the most celebrated movie of 2008, and I don't recall anyone talking about it in terms of it being "reuse of existing art for someone else's profit", or a "stunning lack of original creation", or that it's artists "lack the originality that the writer of Fifty Shades of Grey had".

No, it was all about Nolan (and even Heath Ledger) being visionaries, and True Artists, and whatever.

It's one thing that The Dark Knight was a legally licensed derivative work, but why is it, that the formality of legal licencing seeps into it's perception as a work of art worthy of it's own recognition?

If this is the case, how does this relate to the hundreds of highly respected works of art and entertainment, created by someone else than the artist who made the universe, and published thanks to licensing arrangements, or Public Domain allowances?

To the first, it's an agreement by the original creator which gives the right to some other person to make derivative works. To the second, it's publication agreement, not itself a derivative work. To the third, a work which has passed into the public domain is deemed to be fair game.

[/quote]


Thanks for repeating after me the legal reality of HOW copyright law justifies the existence of these works, but here we are talking about the OUGHT TO.

I'm not asking for your explanation on why these specific works are allowed to exist, but pointing out that when you are talking about hypothetical derivative works, you are talking about artistic works potentially on par with these, censored by being deemed acts of taking instead of acts of creating.

You have made several hypothetical examples in your posts, inventing derivative works the lowest possible amount of thought put into them to present them as unworthy.

- "I'm taking the music from Mackelmore's latest track and putting some wub wub in it."

- "Leonardo Da Vinci being able to prevent other people from making "The Mona Lisa, Part 2."

- "the guy who repaints the Mona Lisa in front of other backgrounds (and is successful only because people want to buy good reprints of The Mona Lisa"

I just want us to let's be honest about the fact that these are still the works that you are attacking when you present all derivative works as a lower form of creativity, even if these ones in particular had special ways to get produced in spite of copyright.

When you say:

"The value of the unauthorized movie is dwarfed by the value of protecting Mr. Butcher's rights in his own work."

You are also saying that:

The value of The Dark Knight's or Arkham Asylum's righ to exist, is dwarfed by the value of protecting DC's right to control all values deriving from "their work" (that is, Detective Comics#27).

That the value of Moore's League' being allowed to exist, is dwarfed by various 19th century writers' right to stop League' from existing for as long as 70 years after their death.

But that's actually a good example of why your argument is farkakte. Imagine a movie made about The Little Mermaid after the original story entered the public domain. If a second movie comes out using the same art assets, and (rather than being a retelling of the original story) is a continuation of the first movie. That's not taking the same underlying ideas (including those in the public domain), it's taking someone else's work.

And yet the first Little Marmaid movie should still get recognized as a work worthy of copyright protection, even though by your own standards, it has also "taken assets", such as the title and presumably character or location names.

Apparently, just by Andersen's first Little Mermaid passing into Public Domain, after an arbitrary limit of time, taking elements from it is no longer merely taking someone else's work and slapping a new coat of paint on it?

If you can admit that the first movie had an artistic value of it's own compared to the Andersen tale, in spite of being derivative, why isn't the same true for the second movie compared to the first?

There is a way to justify that copyright would be used to limit those works under different circumstances. If, instead of partners with WB to create Arkham Asylum, Rocksteady was me by myself making an unauthorized video game of Batman, I would be able to (a) sell my game under the name of a popular franchise and thus profit without permission from someone else's work

Why is it "someone else's work? You are the one doing the work with the game, not DC. There is significantly more creative work put into all the code, art assets, and dialogues created for the actual game, than 74 year old claim on a few character or location names.

But even assuming that producing an actual product is "dwarfed by" the work of having created names such as "Batman" and "Joker", how is this not true for any other (legal) drivative work? If you make a game based on L. Baum's Wizard of Oz novel, you are also "profit without permission from someone else's work", after all thanks to public domain, you don't have to ask permission from HIS assignees.

(b) harm the franchise

That's circular. After all, what is "the franchise" if not DC's and WB's legal authority gained over other people's work? The question is why they should own something as nebulous as "the franchise" in the first place, instead of just their actual produced works.[/quote]

(c) make artistic decisions that the creator/his assignee does not approve of.

The same problem as with (a), that the same problem would also apply to legal derivativeness. To give another example than Public Domain, under Fair Use you are allowed to create a parody. This means, that you are not just allowed to portray copyrighted characters in an artistic situation that twists their original intent, but that's pretty much the ONLY thing that you can legally do, as straightforward honest portrayals are less protected by Fair Use.

And my incentive to write, when it becomes apparent that if my series is popular it's going to be taken by every Tom, Dick, and Harry to make derivative works (movies, television shows, other books, merchandise), is not diminished?

Maybe it would incentivize you to seek value in the merits of actual works that you produce, instead of dreams of "franchise building". Maybe there would be less games with "Origins" in their subtitle, and more trying to stand up by their own merits.

Weird that your focus is on the profitability of the people whose only creative ability is "I took someone else's work and did something with it.

Yes, I'm focusing on the profitability of people whose only creative ability is writing movies like Dark Knight, instead of the profitability of a corporation being secured on every possible derivation of a 70 year old comic book about a man dressed like a bat beating up a man dressed like a clown.

Except that if your much-maligned common "artists" could write a creative work not dependent on existing character names, or existing universes, they would be able to take out the infringing parts and have a damned decent work.

Yeah, if ony we had some sort of legal system to force Virgil to write a damned decent work instead of the Aeneid, or Tom Stoppard to write something decent instead of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Oh, wait what? They did write many other works, with original "universes and character names", and these are still their most highly respected additions to the Western Canon?

It almost sounds like you are back to spewing your generalizations, about how legal copyright approval is the proof of artistic merit.

snip, stuff about trademark law

The point was, in part, that profiting (without permission) from the hard work of the original artist is similarly ethically "wrong" to profiting by using someone else's established franchise name.

And the point failed on the account of trademarks having an entirely different purpose of guaranteeing seller honesty in advertisements.

You are not forbidden from selling Michael Jordan shoes because slapping the face of Jordan on an ad is "hard work", but because it would misleadingly imply a certain level of quality.

That's why you are still allowed to write a story called the Little Mermaid, because if copyright doesn't extend to it, neither does trademark, since it's no longer an implication of "Andersen quality".

The ethical reasons of trademark are dependent on copyright. If franchise rights wouldn't be a part of copyright, then ethical reasons of trademark would be nulled on that issue just as well, since releasing a "Final Fantasy" game wouldn't be misleading either.

Well, first, we're not actually talking about criticism or cultural trends. You seem to spend a lot of time mistaking "derivative works" for "critical works." If you want to write an article about how The Dresden Files sucks, that's entirely within your rights and no copyright law stops you.

And presumably, in that article I would be allowed to name the works, their protagonists, and main locations.

In other words, by your standards I would be allowed to "take away the original artist's work" for my own purposes.

Why do you think that it is in my right to do take them away from the artist for an article, but not for a fictional work?

Why, in your mind, does "inspiration" require "direct usage of other people's work"?

It doesn't "require", but sometimes it does include that. For example Alan Moore's League' is heavily critical of i's source materials, to the point of satire.

No, you don't see an unauthorized Star Wars game. You just see Mass Effect.

But just look at works that CAN get published

Now, you are pretty much saying that it's all right if some people get censored, because a few can still get permission o say it, and the rest can still say something else instead of what is being censored.

It's no problem if people can't make Let's Play videos, they will do something else instead anyways!

Maybe Rocksteady could have made a non-Batman game which was equally compelling, deep, with just as good gameplay, never referencing any part of Batman or Batman mythos?

I agree, which is why them having to get a license to make Batman doesn't stop them from any creative works.

Yeah, because as long as SOME possible compelling, deep games are allowed to get made, that means that copyright "doesn't stop creative works" at all.

As long as the act of creating art itself isn't banned, everything is fine because artists can always create "something equally good", therefore really nothing is banned.

We might as well extend copyright to 500 years after the author's death, and if someone is no longer able to make a modernized Romeo and Juliet adaptation they planned, literally nothing of value is lost, they can just write something else.

We might as well randomly ban specific works, or genres. Let's ban all zombie movies, and no freedom is lost, because their publishers can just make something else instead.

What's wrong with the creator (or his assignee) being able to decide "hey, this idea for a book is cool, let's let her write it"?

That it also means giving them the right to decide "hey, I don't like this book, let's send out a C&D letter to erease it from existence".

 

[Cpt. Slow]

No one want's to be King George, not even King George.

But King George the Third was a ball of fun. (Yes, if Bob would be more specific about which King George he meant people wouldn't copy and just start phrasing the name King George)

Anyway, maybe it's time to leave YouTube and go somewhere else. YT is not a bank so the 'too big to fail' doesn't apply here. Vimeo is (or so I heard) an excellent alternative for the people who want to share their reviews.

So let YouTube fall, until it becomes Bieber / One Direction / Nicki Minaj-tube and all that will remain is a nice footnote in history about the first true video sharing website that was centred around the user. And how they jumped out of the window because large companies couldn't cope with change in Zeitgeist.

Oh and if the argument regarding 'YouTube is owned by Google, and they have Scrooge McDuck warehouses filled to the brim with money so they will never fall over' will passer by; if nobody will upload any non company videos again to the site, eventually it will wither and be sold because even Google isn't that stupid to keep a non profitable site at arms length.

 

[harryhenry]

No one want's to be King George, not even King George.

Vimeo is (or so I heard) an excellent alternative for the people who want to share their reviews.

Ok, i wanna correct something: Vimeo is not designed for reviews. Vimeo is designed more for inderpendent filmmakers making inderpendent original professional-quality films, not reviews. in fact, the rules state that you can't upload video game footage. Blip is a better site to mention when it comes to other youtube-like sites that are less copyright sensitive, as that site is desgined more for reviews, nut i'll let this slide as your points came from what you've heard.

P.S. in your post, you seemed to be pretty optimistic about youtube finally declining. however, you didn't seem to explain very well as to how it could fall.

 

[maximara]

I'm wondering why no one has mentioned that YouTube is a private company, and that content ID is not the same as a DMCA take down notice. YouTube and its partners can do whatever they want in this area, it is not a matter of law. YouTube also doesn't allow porn on their service, and if they want to use content ID to remove videos so their parnteners(like CBS and VEVO, not pewdiepie) continue to host popular content there, and generate add revenue then it is their business, just like the no porn policy.

Several things here.

1) Youtube cannot do ANYTHING it wants. There are still rules and laws it has to obey.

The "YouTube Issued Copyright Claims Against Miracle of Sound" fiasco is prime example of boneheaded activity that could get them in a LOT of trouble. Claiming that someone doesn't own the rights to totally original content they made that they have given permission for others to use is just sloppy and could get into the land of various legal issues that neither YouTube or the various companies really want a spotlight on.

2) There is porn on Youtube...softcore but it is there.

 

[Nimcha]

Meh, I'm not too bothered. If people really start hating Youtube that much, an alternative will pop up and people will migrate. Myspace is always a nice example of that.

 

[Conrad Hegarty]

maybe spiderman was not the best example... yes there would b hundreds of bad spiderman movies but odds are at least 1 would be good. as it is i have to wait and hope that the amazing spiderman 4 in 2018 bombs (and thats not including all the films they will announce before then, considering 1 terrible movie was enough for sony to announce 5 more) plus however long it takes for sony to reboot or for the rights to default back to marvel and then another few years of production on that. while i of course agree that people should have their IP protected, as i understand it copyright was introduced not only to protect the financial interests of the creators but ALSO to ensure that culturally relevant material at some point enters the public domain. And im sorry but any pretence of protecting the creator being the true purpose of copyright law went out of the window as soon as copyright started to be extended to such a ridicules extent as life of the author plus 120 years. I get that buying and selling profit is the right of every red blooded capitalist, but in the case of sony and fox ect. holding these properties hostage actively inhibits the enjoyment of the people paying for it? ie. us. come on we all want to see spidey in the avengers. and for the record yes marvel and dc are far from noble, as copyright law in those cases never protected the creator, only the publishers who paid the actual authors. I understand the real world dilemma inherent in broadening the definitions of fair use but we really have to be careful when it comes to the idea of buying and selling any right? also "apologies to misguided idealists" aside from being a somewhat unprofessional remark also refers to the numerous professional artists and musicians who also feel that they are not receiving a fair cut of what they created.