>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 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.
>I can't tell if this is a joke or not. But there is HPMOR and countless others.
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'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.
Good literature is more like good code (someone who knows about programming can tell it from bad code) than like brace style (a mostly random choice).
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.
Writing a new story using characters someone else has developed is theft. Your relying on the history of such characters as developed by the original author to give basis to your story.
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.
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.