For example, you create a popular, compelling character & world. E.g., Harry Potter.

Now suppose that due to its popularity, other artists jump on the bandwagon left and right.

Too many bandwagon-jumpers, and your creation is diluted. It is a commodity. People see it every day.

With nobody else producing works with your characters & world, you are the sole source. If we think about supply & demand, we know what that means.

It really comes down to that doesn't it?

You're the sole source of art you produce, but what you're saying is that you suddenly, by creating a character, gain the exclusive unlimited right to be the only person ever to create any possible creative work with that character.

You're basically patenting the 'idea' of a character, such that no one else can use any variation on that idea.

That's the problem, and it's the problem with patents too; they 'lock up' ideas so they can't be used without licensing / permission; but no just the original idea; all the closely related derivative ideas too.

In practice it's pretty easy (and common) for large holders of these creative patents (for lack of a better word) to do what the Doyle Estate was doing (read here if you're not familiar http://free-sherlock.com/) to troll and shake-down people using the IP; even for relatively unrelated creative works.

Personally, I feel it should be managed more like brands; if I sell shoes with a Nike logo, it's obviously infringement.

...but if I start telling shoes with a logo from some company that hasn't traded shoes in 15 years and their trademark has expired, tough luck to them. You're not a practicing entity anymore; let someone else use that IP instead of leaving it locked up forever.

At some point, though, that's supposed to happen. That's how culture works. Of course most of the stuff so created is going to be crap - most art created is crap, after all. Think what we'd have though, if the Star Wars copyright were over and done with by now, or if the LotR copyright had already expired. Mostly, we'd have a bunch of rubbish barely rising above the level of second-rate fan-fic, but we'd also have some real gems.

20 years is plenty of time.

If you're not familiar with it, have a look at the Touhou project (set of Japanese arcade-style games, where the author explicitly gave permission for people to remix his art, whilst retaining fully copyright over the games, and forbidding commercial distribution of them). Touhou is huge - and it's not just because of the games - the derived art works have significantly impacted take up of the games, and created a somewhat unavoidable franchise, inspired countless of creators to produce and share, and will probably have a long lasting presence within otaku culture.

Notice the author in your example retained full copyright over the games. The author is not allowing derivative games.

In books, this would be equivalent to reusing characters, their personalities or traits, but copying sections of the original works verbatim is obviously still plagiarism.

We do know what it means. It means the price will be higher. Be careful though, because price is not equivalent to profit. Selling a million copies for $10 each is much more profitable than selling a hundred copies for $1000 each.

And if derivative works bring publicity for the original it can drive sales and increase profits, even at the same time as it lowers prices.

But that you can't make derivative work is insane. You would see fan art and fan fiction disappear completely if it was better enforced. The best book I've ever read was fan fiction. Before copyright it was common for characters to be reused between different stories. And it's still true that most works are not original. They are just different in ways that aren't copyrightable. Who cares if you reuse character names if your story is just a clone of another anyways?

Well, if you "support copyright to some extent for economic reasons" it's not really insane. In fact it makes perfect sense.

The work, eg. a book, you've spend tons of money, thought time and effort to make, can be copied in a couple of days or weeks. What's to say what's just derivative or is a rip off? Is changing a few plot points or wording enough?

>You would see fan art and fan fiction disappear completely if it was better enforced

It's not like fan art and fan fiction ever produced anything that worthwhile though. Has there ever been any major fan fiction work hailed as literary worthy? Maybe you'll find one or two examples. I doubt you'll find ten.

You are arguing about technicalities. Obviously changing a few words is still copying the previous assets. Writing a new book with the same characters or plot is still not a copy. The courts can decide on the rare grey area like they currently do anyways.

>It's not like fan art and fan fiction ever produced anything that worthwhile though. Has there ever been any major fan fiction work hailed as literary worthy? Maybe you'll find one or two examples. I doubt you'll find ten.

I can't tell if this is a joke or not. But there is HPMOR and countless others. Obviously most writing is bad (original or not.) The fact that it is a derivative work has nothing to do with it's quality. You just don't see the hundreds of novels that never get published, but bad fan fiction gets posted online regardless.

Not a joke at all. Especially if HPMOR is the best example one can come up with (or one of the best).

I mean, not even the actual Harry Potter is any work of literary genius. I'm talking about Melville, Nobokov, Joyce, Dostoyevsky and such. It's not like literature would lose anything important if HPMOR wasn't available.

It would probably lost a lot of readers, especially among young people. If you remove pure fun please reading as an option, less of them will find themselves in mood for something more serious.

I think the idea that art/literature is "ridiculously subjective" is mostly on the west side of the Atlantic. In ole Europe we tend to take our literary canon seriously, and don't think that all taste is equally OK. Of course individual readers and critics might prefer X over Y, but the value of great works and authors is not doubted in aggregate.

E.g just because some people like Bieber and others like Mingus, doesn't make Bieber as just good as Mingus. Music/literature/etc is a craft (in which one can tell a good from a bad practicer, even if he is not "into" the final artifact) rather than something like different ice cream flavors.

Just naming someone Luke Skywalker and writing a story about a drunk cabbie with that name would not be derivative and not likely a problem, writing a story about a Luke Skywalker battling evil on some god forsaken world would be because you know his history, the new author had someone do all the hard work for him - making an appealing character, making a character with intrinsic market value.

Wide Sargasso Sea, Coetzee's Foe, and Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead all come immediately to mind. Re-imagining another author's work is a common enough tactic that I'd bet it wouldn't be very hard to find 10 excellent examples of literary fanfic. You might be able to do it just with Shakespeare fanfic.

I have a feeling, though, that this a self-fulfilling assertion, in that you will try to re-define "fan fiction" to go around anything of literary merit that is brought up. The same thing happens with other supposedly inferior genres. Someone asks, Is there any literary scifi? People name some, and then the person responds, Well, that's not really scifi.

I'd guess that "not actually literary" is, in reality, part of the way you are defining fanfic.

In any event, disparaging fanfic by appealing to high literature is a lost cause, because the very techniques of fanfic are solidly embedded in the literary tradition, even if you want to argue about the exact definition of fanfic. Pastiche, playful appropriation, even adversarial reimagination -- all of these are fair game, and can make for sublime reading.

Is this sarcasm? An enormous amount of what we consider great literature consists of "fanfiction"; it would not be permitted under copyright law as a derivative work were it written today and based on modern stories instead. For example, most of Shakespeare's plays are based on older stories, or even the plays of other contemporaries.

To be sure garbage dominates the world of fanfiction, but that's merely a consequence of the low bar to entry. But there are a very few diamonds out there in the deep brown, to paraphrase an article I read many years ago on fanfiction quality.

Shakespeare's works are not what we call "fanfiction". For one, Shakespeare was not some "fan", creating derivative works in the same "fictional universe". Neither is Racine, or the tragic poets in Ancient Greece reusing older poetic themes and myths, etc.

Fan fiction has a quite specific meaning, not just reusing some myth/drama/story plot to create a new work.

In fact the Wikipedia lemma on fan fiction places the first precursors long after Shakespear's time, and is in line with the general understanding of the term "fan fiction".

To be sure, that's not what we usually mean by fanfiction, because part of the connotation of the word is that it's done by a modern "fan" (which has connotations of its own) writing about modern fiction. But I don't see a substantive difference.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean here, but I think you're overlooking the possibility that they might have been commissioned to produce an original rather than a derivative work.

Is art, similarly to science, not an iterative process based on the input of dozens, hundreds, thousands of people that came before us?

No. It's certainly influenced by prior art, and techniques like sampling, collage, and cut-ups certainly allow for art that is comprised of prior art but rearrange in a novel way. But a lot of art is original, and speaking of someone's originality is usually one of the highest artistic compliments one can pay. I think this discounting of original work is one of the flaws of postmodernist culture, in which the referential frame is accorded equal or greater semantic weight than the content within. I may be projecting here, though.

Um, this is exactly true in science. But scientists are generally required to make clear and explicit the influences for their work.

I think a lot of artists miss the trade-off. If others feel invited to improve on your work then they'll be more likely to credit you, because in the alternative where derivatives are not allowed, anyone inspired by your work will be afraid to credit you for fear of it being seen as an admission of wrongdoing.

That's not much more helpful, sorry. It might give more context if I mention that I have an extreme antipathy towards postmodernism and critical theory in general, which colors my opinions on related topics.

Why does this difference between art and science justify art's comparatively hostile attitude toward "derivative" works?

Also, I don't agree that there is such a stark contrast. I think you over-state the role of testability in science (esp. the task of articulating theories) and under-state the importance of the social process in science.

Oh, it's worth noting that sometimes scientific communities do frown on "derivative" works. E.g. scooping other group's low-hanging fruit. But the general sentiment regarding these cases doesn't even come close to even contemplating something like litigation. (edit: oh, I guess there's some patenting in the natural sciences esp. in near-to-market research. But patents != copyright. And CS comes a lot closer to the nature of art, and AFAIK it's unheard of for a researcher to sue another researcher over derivative works.)

Because science is engaged in a search for truth, new actionable information. Art is expressive, so copying someone else's work (for display rather than to develop one's technique,of course) is a sort of freeloading.

It's also worth considering the economic incentives for science and art are also pretty different. For good or ill, there are few scientists who labor unrewarded out of compulsion, not least because there isn't a whole lot of science you can do without a budget, although I can think of a few mathematicians who fit that bill, eg Grigori Perelman. However, by mentioning the economic side of things I wouldn't want to give the impression that I support existing copyright regimes, which I think are actually economically destructive to individual artists in many respects - it's just that I don't support the opposite position either, of nothing being truly original and therefore nothing being deserving of copyright protection.

I do think testability, or rather falsifiability, is important in science insofar as it makes the differences between conjecture and theorem. But I see where you're coming from; there can be a lot of value in an elegant theory even if it turns out to be superficially wrong, because it can open up new vistas of intellectual inquiry - Riemannian geometry springs to mind, where the failure of [many previous mathematicians] to prove Euclid's parallel postulate by reductio ad absurdum opened up a whole class of non-Euclidean geometrical perspectives even though such geometries were 'wrong' in the Cartesian context.

But to get back to the main point, with science your aiming for results of some sort, whose value lies in their explanatory power (even if that opens up a host of new questions, like some empirical observation that points out a natural phenomenon does not behave as we thought it did, without offering any theory as to why that should be the case). Art, by contrast, is inherently subjective, and might as easily be constructed to alienate or frustrate analysis, or be indifferent to the possibility thereof.

I think there's a tendency today to see art as an accretion of communicatory techniques, but I'm deeply at odds with this view, and feel that it reduces artistic endeavor to the level of marketing. (This is a very personal perspective, obviously.) If you're working creatively you're often asked/advised 'tell a story' or 'articulate what you want to say' or 'identify your point of view'. In a postmodern world, art is treated as a lens through which to view the artist, and there's a great emphasis on context and explanation, such that 'artist's statements' are considered essential to the presentation of art. To my mind this is an awful state of affairs, reducing art from the trancendental to the transactional. Self-consciously derivative and combinatorial art exacerbates this.

You are absolutely entitled to your artistic opinions and I have no interest in challenging those.

However, using the hammer of law to enforce your aesthetic perspectives is just unwise.

Copyright law is absolutely not the place to choose a best-possible-definition of what constitutes good art. We should instead take a broadest-resonable-definition and work from there. And I think most reasonable people -- who are attempting not to enforce their own aesthetic sensibilities -- will agree that if a significant subcommunity of well-established artists call some variation a piece of art (even if derivative or uninspired), then we can proceed assuming it's not an "exact copy".

> there are few scientists who labor unrewarded out of compulsion

There's up to a $40k split between what a top science student can make in industry and a first year grad student stipend at a top school. Plus the dent to future income potential. And even then they are not paid exclusively for the science -- the stipend typically includes lots of community work and/or teaching that is unrelated to the science. A lot of students at lower ranked universities get stipends exclusively for teaching and complete research in their spare time. In other words, completely unrewarded.

And "most scientists" are grad students.

So I respectfully disagree (and even resent) the implication that science doesn't involve significant personal sacrifice for most scientists, at least on the order of magnitude of the what most artists experience.

My point w.r.t. science was that a lot of highly derivative work is done (including "mashups" of theories, techniques, etc.). Although we realize this research isn't "as original", people aren't going around accusing these researchers of stealing their ideas. Of if they are, they certainly aren't even thinking about the hammer of law or lost profits. This fundamentally demonstrates that the artistic community is making an unnecessary and avoidable choice.

Even abstract paintings tend to rectangles way more than say an octagon. I mean there explorations of form and color yet almost none of them cut the canvas into an interesting shape.

Take the case of Shepard Fairey's use of the AP's photograph of Obama. The iconic "Hope" poster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_%22Hope%22_poster

Now that photographer certainly never would have been paid or even heard of had the photo been used as inspiration. Yet, Fairey lost that case in Federal Court.

People are prevented from using a photograph of someones face to remix into a vectorized, colorized, cartoonized version of this face. A photo that would have died a quiet death as a newsroom archive. It is my opinion that Fairey's usage did nothing but add to our collective culture and that preventing use like this in the future is quite chilling for creatives of many fields. (For more on this topic, written much more eloquently see: http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/)

What happens when a company does a 3D scan of Briteny Spears and produces a model of every muscle movement possible, and then claims copyright over every single photograph and drawing of Ms. Spears that every gets produces hereafter? We already see a similar tactic being used with patent trolls, "patent everything, sue everyone."

Read any of the great artists and they will admit that there are no new ideas. Shakespeare knew it. Even the Greeks knew it when they were ostensibly "inventing" theater.

Incidentally, nigh means the same thing as near.

Read any of the great artists and they will admit that there are no new ideas.

C'mon, you know that's BS, for the same reason you pick a figure like Shakespeare as an exemplar of 'great'. If he actually thought that then why did he waste his time writing all those poems and plays, which are supposedly no different from anything that came before?

I hear this argument mostly from people who have never sat down and worked to produce something.

There are entire books on this subject. Austin Kleon's "Steal Like an Artist" is perhaps the most engaging one right now. Get it. Read it. Quit putting "ideas" on a pedestal.

If an artist takes a one-time commission to paint a Calvin & Hobbes frame on a nursery wall, great. If it's on a million t-shirts or Hobbes is selling medical insurance, then that is something different.

The former comes out of appreciation, the latter, pure exploitation.

Yes, and a lot of us want to be paid for our contributions to this mass endeavour.

Case in point, lots of those giants on whose shoulders we stand got ripped off and died peniless.

Obligatory link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE&feature=kp

(Harlan Elisson, "Pay the writer").

But you don't avoid that by retaining tight control over your IP. You do that by providing a product people genuinely want, and giving them a way to pay for it conveniently. No one thing is an instant solution, and the possibility of your original artistic work being outright stolen for someone else is incredibly rare, as people naturally want to see more from the original author.

All art, indeed all creative endeavors, are derivative works.

The one who created the original material.

The oldest line of record/ad/publishing industry crooks trying to rip you off it's "it will bring you publicity/exposure" (ie. "draws more to your story").

The chart of books in print on Amazon, by decade, offers a compelling reason to allow copyright to expire.[1] There are more books available from 1830 than 1930; more books from 1900 than 2000. The cliff in that chart comes when the indefinite extension of copyright began in the early 20th century. It blew a massive hole in our cultural record.

You'll see the same story in film, and in software, though we have no pre-indefinite-copyright data to compare to. There's an era between roughly 1930 and 1980 where works that would have gone into the public domain, no longer are -- and because they are locked away, they are being forgotten or entirely lost. We enjoy the Eternal Sunshine of the Copyrighted Mind.

Though it's not a reason to allow copyright to expire, it's also worth noting that copyright expiration is required by the US Constitution. A copyright law that didn't include an expiration date would be unconstitutional. In practice, of course, a continually-increasing-yet-finite time is hard to distinguish from forever.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-ho...

You have no doubt benefitted from the richness of our culture, yet are seemingly willing to prevent those who come after you from doing the same?