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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelph" data-source="post: 7689861" data-attributes="member: 12212">Or Disney would've hired Abrams (or someone else) to create The Force Awakens in 2002, blowing Attack of the Clones out of the water, and Episode III either would've never been made, or it would've been vastly improved in order to compete—or completely forgotten, overshadowed by the competition. What I just wrote isn't quite true, because it completely ignores trademark, which, without its own massive revision, would still prevent competing "Star Wars" movies, though maybe not other movies with different titles (and main characters) set in the Star Wars universe. But the notion that we need endless copyright in order to support things like the recent Star Wars and Star Trek movies is ridiculous—the proliferation of Sherlock Holmes movies/TV in the last decade alone shows that you can have vibrant markets and excellent—even amazing—creations based around non-copyrighted materials.edit: the discussion of how long copyright should be and who should hold it, and whether the current copyright scheme is the best way to compensate creators is far more involved than the comparatively simple question of "would popular IP vanish without long-duration copyright?" With my writer hat on, I think that current copyright is too long, parts of it are too broad, and trademark law is not nearly as broad as people in the RPG industry seem to think it is (hint: nobody is getting sued over a spark plug cap that says "compatible with Ford F150" in prominent letters on the packaging). With my citizen hat on, I think that current copyright is way too long, much, much too broad, and should always be tied to an actual person or people, never to a business entity. You wanna keep making money off of something? Either keep that person employed (i.e., offer them terms that are more valuable than whatever they could get by taking their IP elsewhere), or license the IP from them—but no selling of IP! With my consumer hat on, I more often see copyright being used to enrich a corporate entity than I see it being used to enrich the creators, so while I'm not going to be violating copyright, the cries of "think of the creators" ring hollow to me. IME, when fans are given the opportunity to directly support the creators, they do. But with contracts often structured such that the middleman reaps the profits (as well as, to be fair, the losses, in many cases) and creators don't, I completely understand why people would not respect corporate-owned copyrights, even given that obviously at least part of the money that goes to those corporations eventually finds its way to at least some of the creators.</blockquote>

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