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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 7689836" data-attributes="member: 40166">Don Quixote, in the days before copyright, had an unauthorized sequel. It did not stop Cervantes from writing his planned sequel."Night of the Living Dead" fell into the public domain due to failure to have a copyright notice. Did that stop George A. Romero from making a series of highly-rated zombie movies? Would the copyright on that have stopped any of the imitator zombie movies?As I said above, Roger Corman didn't bother copyrighting "The Little Shop of Horrors". That's why we have the movie "Little Shop of Horrors", that's much more highly rated then the original. Sometimes the imitators are better then the original.As opposed to what? There is a Dracula sequel by Stoker's grandson; it is generally considered pretty bad. The Pern and Dune sequels by the children of their respective authors are usually considered horrible. You want to wipe out the history of Dracula in the 20th and 21st century for what?As for film, unless the author is J. K. Rowling, they probably don't have any control over the film. Any number of films have been made by authorization of the author or estate, and have been horrible, sometimes without even a pretense of having any connection to the original work.Again, in reality, very few people are seeing any money from the work they did seven years ago. Very few books before the ebook age were still in print seven years after their first printing; even now it's the popular new books selling, not the older books. Before the TV age, movies hit the movie theater then disappeared, except for a few that was worth a rerelease. Things have changed some, but it's still true that most movies make their money when they hit the big screen and when they first hit DVD, and then they drop off into a tiny fraction. Heck, even the profits from the big screen are made in a couple weeks; Mockingjay part 2, for example, made $200M of its 260M in the first two weeks.Profitable artists invariably get their profit from a work long before seven years have passed. Heck, there's Kickstarter and Patreon and MEAPs and good old-fashioned preorders for artists who want their money upfront before anyone has seen the work. (MEAP is computer publisher Manning's program where you pay to get the book as it's being written. O'Reilly has a similar program.) Paizo supposedly has its books 100% paid for by subscriptions alone.</blockquote>Would come? There's mockbusters that hit DVD as or before the real movie comes out, hoping to sell on a confusing title or people who believe the cheap DVD at Wal-Mart will be just as good as the new movie at the movie theater. I recommend <a href="https://archive.org/details/AdultEducationFakeBeatles" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/AdultEducationFakeBeatles</a> as a documentary on all the cheap, dishonest ways that record companies tried to cash in on the Beatles craze without actually have a contract with the Beatles. To talk about Star Wars, Starchaser: The Legend of Orin is a story about a kid with a lightsaber who runs into a smuggler, princess and robot and fights the Evil Empire. Imitators are a fact of life.Jim Baen in his arguments against lengthy copyright pointed out that he paid more for an advance on a David Drake book then he did for the entire estates of the old science fiction authors Baen was reprinting. It really is about what you can produce today, not what it is going to be making for you in seven years.[/QUOTE]

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