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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 7689828" data-attributes="member: 2067">I don't think that argument has a lot of support. It's like saying we wouldn't have the BBC's Sherlock without a copyright, or 90% of Disney movies. We have those things because of a healthy Public Domain. If anyone could take Luke Skywalker and do whatever they want with him, there'd be a lot MORE stuff out there than there is. Without trying to prove a hypothetical, I can say that being out of copyright doesn't stop anyone from knowing about Dracula or Sherlock Holmes or Frankenstein's Monster or Sleeping Beauty or Alice in Wonderland or the Wizard of Oz or Hercules or Pinnocchio or Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde or Captain Nemo or Paul Bunyan or Tarzan or King Arthur or Robin Hood or Moby Dick (in fact that last one was recently used to advertise a movie that had an otherwise unrecognizable title). What keeps a story in the cultural imagination isn't advertisement. It's entirely as likely in this hypothetical for someone who cared about these characters because they influenced their childhoods to create new movies featuring them or related characters in a way that creates something new and amazing, something worth shooting and promoting.It wouldn't even rule out the marketing blitzkrieg - folks would know how successful these movies were in the past, and the new movies would have a similar 25 year period of exclusivity, so if you want to make bank, you should do it as fast and as up front as possible.This misunderstands both creativity and how attention works. Look, if you create a game that stands on its own, very few people will care. The Internet is littered with the corpses of a host of quality game design ideas that just failed to attract attention because they were screaming into the void. And those quality game design ideas didn't emerge unformed form a nebulous nothingness, they were built on the backs of the game design successes and failures that came before, either by direct succession or by reaction.But these are all more vast issues.The more central issue for these "off-brand" games is one of access and availability. If the people that made the Star Wars book had the capability to go to Disney and WEG and get official permission (even for a low fee), they might've. Such channels don't really exist, and so you get fan products that flow through a legal void of "generally not worth the time to legislate." Much like how folks downloading songs in the '90's shoved buckets of money at Apple when the iPod could store all of 'em and offer you a way to download 'em, most fans who put in that much work anyway would happily buy access to the official OK to do what they're doing, as long as it wasn't prohibitively expensive.</blockquote>

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