I support copyright to some extent for economic reasons. It costs millions of dollars to produce a major game or movie, and writing a book takes weeks or months of an individuals time. Someone shouldn't be able to copy your book and take the market by selling it at a lower price or distributing it for free. At least for like 10 years while it's economically relevant.
But that you can't make derivative work is insane. You would see fan art and fan fiction disappear completely if it was better enforced. The best book I've ever read was fan fiction. Before copyright it was common for characters to be reused between different stories. And it's still true that most works are not original. They are just different in ways that aren't copyrightable. Who cares if you reuse character names if your story is just a clone of another anyways?
>"But that you can't make derivative work is insane."
Well, if you "support copyright to some extent for economic reasons" it's not really insane. In fact it makes perfect sense.
The work, eg. a book, you've spend tons of money, thought time and effort to make, can be copied in a couple of days or weeks. What's to say what's just derivative or is a rip off? Is changing a few plot points or wording enough?
>You would see fan art and fan fiction disappear completely if it was better enforced
It's not like fan art and fan fiction ever produced anything that worthwhile though. Has there ever been any major fan fiction work hailed as literary worthy? Maybe you'll find one or two examples. I doubt you'll find ten.
>The work, eg. a book, you've spend tons of money, thought time and effort to make, can be copied in a couple of days or weeks. What's to say what's just derivative or is a rip off? Is changing a few plot points or wording enough?
You are arguing about technicalities. Obviously changing a few words is still copying the previous assets. Writing a new book with the same characters or plot is still not a copy. The courts can decide on the rare grey area like they currently do anyways.
>It's not like fan art and fan fiction ever produced anything that worthwhile though. Has there ever been any major fan fiction work hailed as literary worthy? Maybe you'll find one or two examples. I doubt you'll find ten.
I can't tell if this is a joke or not. But there is HPMOR and countless others. Obviously most writing is bad (original or not.) The fact that it is a derivative work has nothing to do with it's quality. You just don't see the hundreds of novels that never get published, but bad fan fiction gets posted online regardless.
>I can't tell if this is a joke or not. But there is HPMOR and countless others.
Not a joke at all. Especially if HPMOR is the best example one can come up with (or one of the best).
I mean, not even the actual Harry Potter is any work of literary genius. I'm talking about Melville, Nobokov, Joyce, Dostoyevsky and such. It's not like literature would lose anything important if HPMOR wasn't available.
"It's not like literature would lose anything important if HPMOR wasn't available."
It would probably lost a lot of readers, especially among young people. If you remove pure fun please reading as an option, less of them will find themselves in mood for something more serious.
Good literature is more like good code (someone who knows about programming can tell it from bad code) than like brace style (a mostly random choice).
I think the idea that art/literature is "ridiculously subjective" is mostly on the west side of the Atlantic. In ole Europe we tend to take our literary canon seriously, and don't think that all taste is equally OK. Of course individual readers and critics might prefer X over Y, but the value of great works and authors is not doubted in aggregate.
E.g just because some people like Bieber and others like Mingus, doesn't make Bieber as just good as Mingus. Music/literature/etc is a craft (in which one can tell a good from a bad practicer, even if he is not "into" the final artifact) rather than something like different ice cream flavors.
Writing a new story using characters someone else has developed is theft. Your relying on the history of such characters as developed by the original author to give basis to your story.
Just naming someone Luke Skywalker and writing a story about a drunk cabbie with that name would not be derivative and not likely a problem, writing a story about a Luke Skywalker battling evil on some god forsaken world would be because you know his history, the new author had someone do all the hard work for him - making an appealing character, making a character with intrinsic market value.
> It's not like fan art and fan fiction ever produced anything that worthwhile though. Has there ever been any major fan fiction work hailed as literary worthy? Maybe you'll find one or two examples. I doubt you'll find ten.
Wide Sargasso Sea, Coetzee's Foe, and Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead all come immediately to mind. Re-imagining another author's work is a common enough tactic that I'd bet it wouldn't be very hard to find 10 excellent examples of literary fanfic. You might be able to do it just with Shakespeare fanfic.
I have a feeling, though, that this a self-fulfilling assertion, in that you will try to re-define "fan fiction" to go around anything of literary merit that is brought up. The same thing happens with other supposedly inferior genres. Someone asks, Is there any literary scifi? People name some, and then the person responds, Well, that's not really scifi.
I'd guess that "not actually literary" is, in reality, part of the way you are defining fanfic.
In any event, disparaging fanfic by appealing to high literature is a lost cause, because the very techniques of fanfic are solidly embedded in the literary tradition, even if you want to argue about the exact definition of fanfic. Pastiche, playful appropriation, even adversarial reimagination -- all of these are fair game, and can make for sublime reading.
> It's not like fan art and fan fiction ever produced anything that worthwhile though. Has there ever been any major fan fiction work hailed as literary worthy? Maybe you'll find one or two examples. I doubt you'll find ten.
Is this sarcasm? An enormous amount of what we consider great literature consists of "fanfiction"; it would not be permitted under copyright law as a derivative work were it written today and based on modern stories instead. For example, most of Shakespeare's plays are based on older stories, or even the plays of other contemporaries.
To be sure garbage dominates the world of fanfiction, but that's merely a consequence of the low bar to entry. But there are a very few diamonds out there in the deep brown, to paraphrase an article I read many years ago on fanfiction quality.
>Is this sarcasm? An enormous amount of what we consider great literature consists of "fanfiction"; it would not be permitted under copyright law as a derivative work were it written today and based on modern stories instead. For example, most of Shakespeare's plays are based on older stories, or even the plays of other contemporaries.
Shakespeare's works are not what we call "fanfiction". For one, Shakespeare was not some "fan", creating derivative works in the same "fictional universe". Neither is Racine, or the tragic poets in Ancient Greece reusing older poetic themes and myths, etc.
Fan fiction has a quite specific meaning, not just reusing some myth/drama/story plot to create a new work.
In fact the Wikipedia lemma on fan fiction places the first precursors long after Shakespear's time, and is in line with the general understanding of the term "fan fiction".
I honestly don't understand in what sense they are not fans creating derivative works in the same fictional universe.
To be sure, that's not what we usually mean by fanfiction, because part of the connotation of the word is that it's done by a modern "fan" (which has connotations of its own) writing about modern fiction. But I don't see a substantive difference.
But that you can't make derivative work is insane. You would see fan art and fan fiction disappear completely if it was better enforced. The best book I've ever read was fan fiction. Before copyright it was common for characters to be reused between different stories. And it's still true that most works are not original. They are just different in ways that aren't copyrightable. Who cares if you reuse character names if your story is just a clone of another anyways?