Those characters do not live in your head. They live in mine. I have full control in expressing who and what they are on paper for others to learn more about them. No one else does, no one else can say they did this or that because they don't have any control over my creations, my thoughts, my personal universe. To say someone else can just write with my characters is tantamount to violating an innermost personal space - indeed, it's intruding on one of the most personal forms of control and self-expression possible. You can't just create situations and settings for things that only exist in my mind. I want others to know, so I'll put out a public work. That doesn't mean someone can put something in my world, my character's lives, without my approval. Copyright is just a legal extension of that God-hood I exert over things in my head.
It is just too bad that the current form of copyright is far from ideal, as we've seen. I'm not against fan fic or other expression of still-in-copyright works either, I tend to like them and tend to agree that they do more good than harm, just pointing out that it does matter in some cases, discretion of the author should always be allowed, and just being well-known and popular doesn't magically make that control disappear. Being dead does though, so much of this doesn't really apply to the original topic, but felt I had to make a response to this.
The problem with that argument is that this statement is simply not true once you tell me about the characters. Now they are in my mind too, and I want control over my own thoughts, just as you do.
I understand that you're saying that the ideas remain yours whether they are in your mind or mine. Either way, accepting your characters into my mind means giving up my control over my mind and thoughts. You are colonizing my mind with your ideas and insisting on limits on my thoughts about them. This would be all right if you paid me rent for storing your creations in my brain, but that would be completely impractical.
> Copyright is just a legal extension of that God-hood I exert over things in my head.
Analogies between humans and divine attributes tend to fall apart when they have to deal with the existence of more than one human. I think this highlights the weakness of the author's moral rights. The author's creation of the character was inspired by many other human creations and real-life characters. The character will go on to be recreated by every person whose unique perspective influences its imagination. Yet the moral rights argument requires picking out one act of creation, conferring divinity upon it, and pretending there are no rival divinities that could possibly conflict with its solitary status.
> because they don't have any control over my creations, my thoughts, my personal universe.
Nor do you or should you have control over the creations, thoughts of the other billions of people on the planet
> I have full control in expressing who and what they are on paper
Why? It certainly isn't natural or basic right. Copyright does not cover or protect things in your head. It covers what you and others fixate into medium. It does(should) not cover ideas, only specific implementations of those ideas. Your imagined god-hood of things in your head matters not.
Creativity is not spontaneous. Despite what you think, your precious characters do not spring original from your mind. They are amalgamations of our shared culture.
You may be lauded for effort of getting them out into a cohesive and entertaining form. But that for fuck sure does not grant you the right to deny the rest of world from doing the same.
It would also have the added effect of making it finally safe to reduce copyright down to a sane time; Somewhere within a lifetime. The Mouse could be protected under trademark law, while his early adventures would be free for anyone to see.
Trademark is also more open to use - A trademark cannot be used to sell, rather than not used at all as with copyright. It makes it far clearer that The Onion can portray The Mouse as getting caught in a toronto-esque crack scandal, or whatever else they wish to parody, without the ugliness of american "Fair Use" laws.
The only thing I care about is truth. If you make a claim X, e.g. branding your item as in a trademark, then it should be true. But I see no harm in allowing products that do not make any false claim at all.
Abstract art doesn't belong to the creator. Once it's published it has a life of its own, like a mathematical proof of a theorem. The only thing that is yours is the claim that you did it. I wish the world worked this way. We'd see more innovation in everything.
The whole patent/copyright thing, I find absurd.
For patents, imagine if the population were a million times greater than it is now, some staggering number. Would you feel comfortable with a patent system then? Probably anything you could come up with would infringe marginally upon another's protected under a temporary monopoly. People would be shut out from selling anything at all, except those who already had resources to discover new inventions.
Copyright is different because perhaps the scope of possible interesting discoveries or inventions is much broader so anybody could participate and create something unique. But even then, who is the creator of abstract art to tell others to not derive joy or economic sustenance from his/her creations? As long as the transactions were based upon truth, e.g. no lying about who the creator is, ideally with correct attribution, then it's none of anybody else's business! If the consumer wants to purchase "fake" fan-fiction, just take it in stride. It does not affect you, your creative ability, nor your economic condition.
I'm playing devil's advocate a bit here, but couldn't the precedent have an effect on the creative output of people alive today, based on their desire for their descendants to inherit something valuable?
From an economic and psychological perspective though, it gets increasingly silly as copyright gets longer and longer. We know that people discount future income, and when you get to time frames of 70-90 years, the present value of any additional income is near-zero.
No, it isn't. Not only is the stated rationale not addressed in the key case on retroactive copyright extension -- Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003) -- that decision doesn't actually justify retroactive extensions of copyright based on any kind of incentive structure. Its only discussion of incentive was in regard to setting the particular term (not its retroactive effect.)
"Given the consistent placement of existing copyright holders in parity with future holders, the author of a work created in the last 170 years would reasonably comprehend, as the “this” offered her, a copyright not only for the time in place when protection is gained, but also for any renewal or extension legislated during that time. Congress could rationally seek to “promote … Progress” by including in every copyright statute an express guarantee that authors would receive the benefit of any later legislative extension of the copyright term. Nothing in the Copyright Clause bars Congress from creating the same incentive by adopting the same position as a matter of unbroken practice."[1]
Stated rational by above post isn't quite the same as the point made in Eldred, but it's based on the same idea -- i.e. parity between terms for newly created works and previously created works.
Sure, it discusses it because that was a challenged aspect. What it doesn't do is say that the retroactive effect is justified because it creates a motivating incentive, it says that the particularly challenged retroactive extension isn't a violation of a posited quid pro quo requirement because inclusion in future extensions is justifiably viewed as part of the existing bargain based on the unbroken past history of including works created before extension in extensions.
Fair enough, but Conan-Doyle's children are dead too. How many generations should get the benefit of something before the public at large does?
If I buy an annuity that pays out over 50 years, it should pay out over 50 years, whether or not I die tomorrow or I live another hundred.
And sometimes people work a job not to support themselves, but to create inheritance money for future generations.