If I read a lot of fantasy books as a kid, then start writing my own fantasy book, should I have to pay royalties to the authors of the books I read?

Does your ability to write fantasy books absolutely depend on having read those fantasy books as a kid? Was gaining the ability to write your own fantasy books and profit from them your only motivation to read those fantasy books? After gaining the ability to write fantasy books thanks to having read them, can you now produce fantasy books at a qualitatively different speed, scale, and conditions than any of the authors of the books that you read?

If the answer to those three questions is "yes", then I would argue that yes, you absolutely should have to pay royalties to the authors.

> If the answer to those three questions is "yes", then I would argue that yes, you absolutely should have to pay royalties to the authors.

Copyright lobbies can't have their own cake and eat it too, if you want to enforce such a different way of thinking about copyright compared to the current one, that would destroy the current industry and rightly so.

I would appreciate if you addressed the questions as literally stated.

I could just as well argue that businesses developing or making use of LLM-models can't have their cake and eat it too. If they want their computer programs to enjoy the same rights and prerogatives as human creators do, they should be ready to demonstrate that those models truly deserve the status of legal persons as of themselves, subject to the same laws and obligations.

> If they want their computer programs to enjoy the same rights and prerogatives as human creators do

I don't think they care about that, they seems fine with output images not being copyrightable as per the current legislation.

They already paid when they bought the books. Why would they need to pay more?

Say I want to write a screenplay and produce the resulting film, for profit, but I am literally unable to have any ideas whatsoever unless I base them on book that I read. With this in mind, and with this sole motivation, I buy and read the whole collection of Brandon Sanderson's novels and create a screenplay based exclusively on their content, for I have no ideas nor experiences of my own. I already paid when I bought the books. Why would I need to pay Brandon Sanderson any more?

Anything you create comes from what you've seen, from what you've experienced.

That's a dead-end to start having to pay each and every one of the original sources of the components of your mind each time they are used to create!

So I understand you are arguing that derived works should not be subject to royalties, i.e. I should be able to produce a film based entirely on the work of a living author without restriction or the need to pay any royalties.

No, you're over-generalizing what I'm saying (a.k.a. straw man fallacy).

If you're commercializing e.g. goodies that use the exact same character designed by some artist, so that anybody can tell you it's the same, AND if the traits of this character are actually original (not just so that anybody would come up with it independently), AND if the people buying your goodies are all thinking about the original character in the first place, AND if the original author is alive, then I'd absolutely agree that royalties need to be paid.

That's just an example. To tell you that in specific cases it's obvious that royalties are required.

But in the general case, no. Because, else, anything just is a derived work. Just think about it.

It's even impossible to retrace all of the woven threads, ramified tendrils, that link your mind to the billions of other minds all over the world and over the ages.

The world of ideas is liquid. All is mixing, all dissolves and disappears in everything else, and is reborn new and different, again and again.

How much does the world owe to Gilgamesh and Homer?

I don't know. Whether the answer were to be either 'our entire human culture', or 'absolutely nothing whatsoever', or any point in between, how would that be relevant for the discussion at hand?

Yes, you do. The royalty is usually called a "college degree".

Most jobs require a degree or certification of some sort.

> Because that is not how it works in the real world.

Unless you're satirizing it or making fun of it in some other way. Then it's fair use..

Educators get paid a flat fee, not an indenture on your future work (nor do you owe anything back to the people who made the learning materials they use). And if you teach yourself from books or websites you don't pay anything (except maybe the cost of the books). All of which seems right and proper?