How artists get paid is a universal question, and it remains complicated today. A good example is the difference between literature and painting. Paintings can vary hugely in price, so that one artist makes far more than another per canvas produced. But with books, they all cost more or less the same and authors make more the more copies they sell, no matter the quality of the work. So artists and writers have very different incentive structures.
Before copyright, literature was largely a noble/genteel affair. Copyright made it a more middle class affair, with hacks and journalists writing novels for money.
So yes, it matters very much how writers and artists get paid, and it will made a big difference to who can make art and what kind of art they make. Looking forward to seeing what ideas you have for reforming it.
Protection for derivative works of the sort that contain verbatim portions of the original work (e.g. music remixes, or modified versions of software) may fall out of regular copyright protection, since it involves copying passages. If people could make as many copies of this sort of derivative work as they want for free, copyright would be toothless: people could just make slight modifications and copy it for free. And if this sort of copying involved requires permission, the only way you could make this sort of derivative works is stitching together portions of legally bought copies, which would be quite impractical.
The sort of derivative works you discussed are derivative in a much weaker sense. Essentially the question is how fictional characters came to be copyrightable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fictional_characters has some discussion, it seems to come from court decisions, rather than explicitly from statute), and whether they should be (IMO no). Ideas generally aren't copyrightable, only the concrete form is; AFAIK retelling or summarizing a story in your own words generally isn't a copyright violation, if not for copyright on characters. Copyright on characters seems like a weird exception, affording copyright protection to what I'd consider an idea, and what consists of so little information (a name and perhaps just a few bits' worth of attributes) that it wouldn't generally be copyrightable.
It says the modern derivative-works distortion of the copyright monopoly only showed up in statute in 1976. I need to look through the case law to see how well it was established before then, but it's clear that it was NOT established in 1870.
So this is a surprisingly recently development. I say "surprisingly" because, if it wasn't law before 1976, that *seems* to imply that commercial fanfiction was both legal and copyrightable when the first issues of SPOCKANALIA hit the early cons. And (as a Star Trek fan fiction producer and Star Trek fan fiction history-study-er), let me assure you that nobody in our fandom treated it that way in 1966-76.
Economically, copyright made sense as an institution once the printing press made the production of multiple copies cheap. It allowed a printer who invested the large cost in labor and type to produce a publication to amortize the cost over a large print run; without copyright it was easier for multiple printers to set the same book in type, each being able to amortize only over a fraction of the potential sales.
But now that we have xerography, and PDFs, and other such technologies, anyone can set up to do multiple copies of a document at a much lower cost. And I'm not sure that copyright is lastingly viable any more.
How artists get paid is a universal question, and it remains complicated today. A good example is the difference between literature and painting. Paintings can vary hugely in price, so that one artist makes far more than another per canvas produced. But with books, they all cost more or less the same and authors make more the more copies they sell, no matter the quality of the work. So artists and writers have very different incentive structures.
Before copyright, literature was largely a noble/genteel affair. Copyright made it a more middle class affair, with hacks and journalists writing novels for money.
So yes, it matters very much how writers and artists get paid, and it will made a big difference to who can make art and what kind of art they make. Looking forward to seeing what ideas you have for reforming it.
Protection for derivative works of the sort that contain verbatim portions of the original work (e.g. music remixes, or modified versions of software) may fall out of regular copyright protection, since it involves copying passages. If people could make as many copies of this sort of derivative work as they want for free, copyright would be toothless: people could just make slight modifications and copy it for free. And if this sort of copying involved requires permission, the only way you could make this sort of derivative works is stitching together portions of legally bought copies, which would be quite impractical.
The sort of derivative works you discussed are derivative in a much weaker sense. Essentially the question is how fictional characters came to be copyrightable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fictional_characters has some discussion, it seems to come from court decisions, rather than explicitly from statute), and whether they should be (IMO no). Ideas generally aren't copyrightable, only the concrete form is; AFAIK retelling or summarizing a story in your own words generally isn't a copyright violation, if not for copyright on characters. Copyright on characters seems like a weird exception, affording copyright protection to what I'd consider an idea, and what consists of so little information (a name and perhaps just a few bits' worth of attributes) that it wouldn't generally be copyrightable.
This paper is neat, or at least the 70% of it that I swiftly read was: https://www.bu.edu/law/journals-archive/scitech/documents/deneau_article.pdf
It says the modern derivative-works distortion of the copyright monopoly only showed up in statute in 1976. I need to look through the case law to see how well it was established before then, but it's clear that it was NOT established in 1870.
So this is a surprisingly recently development. I say "surprisingly" because, if it wasn't law before 1976, that *seems* to imply that commercial fanfiction was both legal and copyrightable when the first issues of SPOCKANALIA hit the early cons. And (as a Star Trek fan fiction producer and Star Trek fan fiction history-study-er), let me assure you that nobody in our fandom treated it that way in 1966-76.
Economically, copyright made sense as an institution once the printing press made the production of multiple copies cheap. It allowed a printer who invested the large cost in labor and type to produce a publication to amortize the cost over a large print run; without copyright it was easier for multiple printers to set the same book in type, each being able to amortize only over a fraction of the potential sales.
But now that we have xerography, and PDFs, and other such technologies, anyone can set up to do multiple copies of a document at a much lower cost. And I'm not sure that copyright is lastingly viable any more.