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Originally posted by Jack Simth:
PvK:
It can hurt a business severly if someone is freely distributing stuff that is closely related to the product the business is selling. That is actually part of the reason for patent and copyright laws; it helps protect the little businesses.
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Mhmm. But in the case of fan art, the corporations waving legal threats are not little businesses, and the fan art is not competing with the corporations' business in any signifigant way. Fan art is in fact a promotion, celebration, and endorsement of the product. Moreover, private citizens should have the right to mention and produce non-commercial images or even duplicates of commercial media. If they can't, then you're very close to prohibiting things like parody or even discussion of corporate media. With even small children participating in discussions by means such as web pages etc., digital images have become a very common form of expression. Trying to make it illegal for the sake of paranoid corporations' intellectual property-mongering is preposterous and well, evil.
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Suppose, for instance, that company X produces a new (copyrighted/patented) software algorythm that allows an OS to intelligently adapt to a new situation invisibly. Now, suppose Microsoft feels threatened by this, steals the algorythm, and starts distributing it free of charge. Microsoft is big, and can absorb the loss. X is not, and can't compete. Once X goes out of business, Microsoft can buy and use or suppress the algorythm. Copyright and patent law helps to prevent this.
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That's a very different kind of thing from fan art.
For one thing, you're talking about a patent of an algorythm. In many cases, the patent office grants patents for ideas which are something anyone can thing of by considering the problem, so that whole institution is in need of complete reworking.
For another, you're talking about a megacorporation as the perp, not a private citizen.
Megacorps will of course succeed in perpetuating their ownership of anything they can get their hands on, for as long as they can get away with it. I wonder how long it will take for another system to replace it. Clearly it's awfully inefficient to have us designing hardware and software and lawsuits all for the purpose of limiting everyone's access to media, when the technology to freely share all of it is already in place. There needs to be another system developed for rewarding content creators, which allows creative people to earn a living while still making their content available for free distribution.
PvK