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Comment by mongol

6 days ago

I can see a difference between being allowed to publish an expired work as-is, and profit from it, vs reusing the characters for a completely different story.

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mongol

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toss1  6 days ago

Right, so by that rule, someone could stage a theater production or movie of the exact text of one of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books, but could not make anything similar to the characters and relationships of Holmes and Watson. Forever.

And exactly how similar must the new production be? Can there be any deviation from the exact words written by Doyle? It seems your rule would certainly ban the excellent BBC production of Sherlock [0]

What about Shakespeare? It seems this would ban the entire writing and production of West Side Story (of course a 1950's riff on Romeo and Juilet) [1,2].

That sounds like a permanent extension of copyright, with a limited media exception.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018ttws

[1] https://www.westsidestory.com/

[2] https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/west-sid...

  • cryptonector  6 days ago

    We have tons and tons of derivative works not remotely faithful to the original. The list of examples is very long. What about Roxane? What about A Fifth of Beethoven? What about all those novels with biblical inspiration? The works of H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne, and many others have been adapted endlessly.

    Derivatives have to be allowed to differ markedly from the original, even offensively. As you point out, the definitions problems that arise in trying to control derivatives are intractable / inherently political rather than legalistic.

    • toss1  6 days ago

      Gawd yes, the list is ENDLESS! All of culture is new riffs on old stuff. The GP just wants to shut all that down. —Yikes!— if you don't like the new stuff, don't watch it, just re-watch and appreciate the old...

      There is plenty of old art that I deeply appreciate, and see most new copy and riffing attempts as lame at best, but some are just brilliant. I don't think even the idea of shutting it down after the copyright period makes sense, even beyond the utter impossibility of drawing sensible boundaries that would not be endlessly argued...

cryptonector  6 days ago

No, people have to be able to derive works from other works, especially when the latter are in the public domain. Up-thread I sardonically said to burn Picasso's Las Meninas, and I repeat that here because I think it's a good example, and I think you can probably think of many more on your own. E.g., A Fith of Beethoven vs. Beethoven's Fith Symphony -- good or bad?