Re:The shady one-man corporation that's destroying hip-hop (...
by dalke on Sunday February 09, 2014 @06:40PM
(#7208023)
"How does it not encourage creativity?"
Creativity comes in many forms. It can include a reinterpretation of existing material. Walt Disney films like Snow White were based on materials from the public domain. Were they uncreative for having not come up with a completely new story?
The book series "Wicked" is a very popular revisionist telling of the original Wizard of Oz books. The copyright for the books (but not the movie!) lapsed just months after L Frank Baum's literary estate had come out of copyright. (Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, had thought it was decades out of copyright when he started writing the book.)
It's impossible to tell a revisionist story without having some story to revise. Do you really believe that Maguire was less creative with Wicked than if he had written some other series entirely? If copyright were 10 years longer and so he needed to get a license from the estate, would you say he was less creative?
Similarly, a commercial parody like "Pretty Woman" requires something to parody, like "Oh, Pretty Woman", and it makes little sense to parody something that no one knows anything about.
Creativity comes in many forms. It can include a reinterpretation of existing material. Walt Disney films like Snow White were based on materials from the public domain. Were they uncreative for having not come up with a completely new story?
The book series "Wicked" is a very popular revisionist telling of the original Wizard of Oz books. The copyright for the books (but not the movie!) lapsed just months after L Frank Baum's literary estate had come out of copyright. (Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, had thought it was decades out of copyright when he started writing the book.)
It's impossible to tell a revisionist story without having some story to revise. Do you really believe that Maguire was less creative with Wicked than if he had written some other series entirely? If copyright were 10 years longer and so he needed to get a license from the estate, would you say he was less creative?
Similarly, a commercial parody like "Pretty Woman" requires something to parody, like "Oh, Pretty Woman", and it makes little sense to parody something that no one knows anything about.