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Comment by Turbo_hedgehog | Hacker News Reader

Let's assume Lord of the Rings was out of term and then a bunch of shoddily made movies got made based on the story and didn't reap much. Would New Line Cinema have laid out the budget for Peter Jackson to make the quality LOTR film trilogy if they didn't have exclusive rights to produce the movies? Those films generated huge amounts of revenue - would we have missed out on that if the books were in the public domain, or would the same revenue have been produced by now with it in the public domain?

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The answer is yes. Because Disney did it with Snow White, Cinderella, etc. A more recent example is Tangled--all those stories are derived from public domain characters. Don't even try to make the case that Disney wouldn't have made Tangled if the length of copyright was rolled back to the previous standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_the_RMS_Ti...

You give a director a big budget from their past successes, not necessarily because the underlying thing is somehow easier or harder to make money off of due to copyright. That's icing, not cake.

Great point, or can you imagine Warner Bros. or Miramax taking a bet on a Sherlock Holmes movie without getting exclusive rights? The mere idea is absurd.

I am very sure if someone else even had made the movies, unless they were good, it wouldn't have mattered.

Look at Fox churning out Fantastic Four movies, which are best to say the least about. Copyrights and IP does not necessarily produce a better content for society.

On the contrary, better content does win in the long run.

Yeah what kind of idiot would make a movie about Robin Hood, the Wizard of Oz, or Alice in Wonderland?

Yes, because the story is that good. Look at how many Sherlock Holmes stories are going on right now, and movies are being made. In generally there aren't a ton of "shoddily made movies" surrounding public domain. We don't have lots of John Carters or Wizard of Oz or Sense and Sensibility.

> would we have missed out on that [revenue] if the books were in the public domain..

Why focus on that, instead of (say) the revenue not made by the Silmarillion movies Peter Jackson can't make because the books aren't in the public domain?

...there were pre-existing LOTR movies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_(1978_...

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