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Comment by lovecg | Hacker News Reader

I think the world would be completely fine without a copyrighted C3PO or Robocop. George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind when working on his wild and thought unlikely to be successful science fiction movie in the 70s. Robocop was also a labor of love. We don’t really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra profits. The art form could be healthier overall.

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Fine if they weren't copyrighted today, or ever? Because if copyright was eliminated the day Star Wars was released, other people would have copied the film reels and charged for entry, and Lucas would have hardly made a cent. Or if copyright was eliminated the day he went looking for funding, it wouldn't have ever been made. Personally, I think the world's a little richer for star wars's existence.

You make a good point, there’s a difference in copyrighting exact works vs. the characters or the story that the work is made up of. I’m not arguing for removing literal copyright (though the terms should be shorter). But I think it’s fine if other people rushed to make their own Star Wars movies after it came out. Hardcore fans are pretty good at deciding what’s “canon” vs. not anyway, and the rest of us don’t care as long as the work is of good quality. Would it matter if the same Spiderman or Batman movie that’s remade once a decade could be made by literally anyone without paying royalties? It could make for richer content I’d think.

The only problem with this view, is:

> "the rest of us don’t care as long as the work is of good quality"

But it also protects every creative author, no matter how disadvantaged, from mass shareholder driven behemoths.

Today "Disney likes your work" is ear music. Without copyright it would be a death nell.

So how can we modify copyright so that it protects the little guy more than it protects Disney?

That's not how laws work.

What do you mean by that? Do you mean that law has a tendency to work the other way, in that it protects the big guy at the expense of the little guy because of extensive lobbying from the well moneyed big guy, or that justice is blind and it effects all equally?

If you're thinking the former I could agree with that on some level and would say that what I'm asking in my original comment is merely aspirational, but if you're suggesting the latter I'd merely point to the former and say that this is the status quo.

The law generally tries to create a level playing field (or more level playing field).

The alternative, creating two classes, those who the law helps and those it doesn't, gets incredibly complicated and easy to game: the powerful will get their version of the law.

In the name of protecting the weak, the law will protect the powerful. Making everything much worse.

This isn't true.

I can think of many examples off the top of my head.

Tax brackets, accredited investors, professional regulation, varying classes of drivers licenses, voting ages, retirement age and pension eligibility... the list goes on and on.

You are right. The entire basis of those laws is the two classes.

I was referring to laws (such as copyright) that don't have an inherent class distinction dimension. Since separating classes is not a primary concern of copyright, having two classes creates an arbitrary line which will almost certainly end up where the rich want it.

> Since separating classes is not a primary concern of copyright,

This is also incorrect as copyright is intrinsically about creating two classes of people -- those who own the copyright and those who don't.

He may have made less money and heay have made more, with different monetization schemes.

In this imagined world, cinemas would have no movies to show, so they'd have to pay people like Lucas to create the films such that there'd be something to put on the screen. If many cinemas got together, and maybe got loans, they could pay for bigger budget films, too

> George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind...

Doesn't copyright stop other people from making billions in merchandising revenue off of George Lucas' ideas without his consent?

> We don’t really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra profits.

Without a copyrighted C3PO, he could start turning up in just about anyone's derivative works. There could be horrible Star wars sequels forever, or TV ads with C3PO selling household cleaning products.

"As a protocol droid, I cannot actually recommend the best smelling cleaning product, but these are the most purchased cleaning products:"

...followed by a semi-hallucinated list containing at least a few being marketed by C3PO.

Centralization makes a difference here I think. Disney built an impressive machine where everything feeds on everything else. The problem is not so much bad sequels per se, it’s all the marketing that goes into making sure they solidly occupy their corner of our mindshare and force the whole industry to compete churning out more and more subpar sequels. If one company would build a Star Wars theme park, another produced toys etc. etc. this might not be a huge concern.

> George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind

From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/01/06/why-is-the-for...

> Lucas’s most significant business decision—one that seemed laughable to the Fox executives at the time—was to forgo his option to receive an additional five-hundred-thousand-dollar fee from Fox for directing “Star Wars” and to take the merchandising and sequel rights instead.

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