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What's _______ for you guys? Also, I truly believe they don't know. They just say no, out of some bizarre corporate reflex.
(lemmynsfw.com)
For me, ________ is basically all sports games that have ever been broadcast. Most of them are just locked away somewhere, with literally no legal way for anyone to see them.
I really don't think 3 years would hurt anyone in any real way. No one is good at playing second fiddle. In reality, fan fiction and derivatives are not hurting anyone. You do not need any real protection. It is a hypothetical that I argue does not exist. First to market carries the momentum and if not, you probably didn't do the job you may think you did. That is okay too. It is okay to fail and you should have the right to fail often without it being such a major investment and issue. You should be able to creatively exist like an open source repo where fan contributions are just a part of the process without worrying about ownership. You hold the repo as the original maintainer, they hold a fork. If they do it getter than you, the public will follow the better execution. Maybe your next idea will be better, maybe you're in the wrong line of work. Those things should not be protected IMO.
The big thing that I'm worried about in the three year scenario is the company screwing over the little guy.
Think about a devoted, driven author you're aware of who has to hold another job, who works for five years on their debut novel and desperately wants to finish a trilogy about it, but whose debut novel becomes popular, leading a multi-billion dollar company to produce an inferior sequel before the original writer can finish their own. With that much money, they could easily overwhelm marketing such that the original author's follow-up would never be seen by most people.
This isn't really a hypothetical; authors who grind away at a series part time with mild success for years and only become successful enough to quit their day job later? Companies taking a low-effort opportunity to capitalize on someone popular someone else did? Both of those things happen all the time.
Unlike FOSS software, where the only thing that matters is whether or not your code works better than the other repo's code, the influence of marketing money on publishing can make or break a story, and the original author's power in that realm is going to be incredibly weak.
I don't know about that one. We live in a shitty feudal timeline without net neutrality or freedom of information. Anything you create is very limited in exposure scope. I could search for your exact project on the only two web crawlers google or microsoft either on their website or by proxy, and they will not give me results for your works. They are playing gatekeepers extorting you for exposure to an audience. You will never find success organically like in past eras when freedom of information was too hard to manage and succeed. Your echo chamber is small and growing it comes at a great cost in time and/or money. This means you either already have connections through networking and therefore momentum, or are over valuing and putting too much emotion into what you are trying to achieve, likely with unrealistic expectations.
Like I've been casually writing, and may start posting my story universe on Lemmy at some point. I don't expect it to be popular or go anywhere. I know I'm a bit weird in perspective and have been encouraged to write by some. Maybe I'm naïve but if I create a story universe and others want to contribute it will likely be on a GPL. It is up to me to keep the story compelling and in my artistic control. Ultimately it is about gaining exposure and what you do with that exposure to capitalize off of it. Nothing about an extended copywriter is going to help you increase that exposure because there is no free mechanism for people to share your work. All of the corporate social platforms are connected. As soon as your posts appear commercial in nature they will be very limited in scope unless you pay them for exposure. That payment is more than you will ever make from the results. This is a feudal era and you are traveling a river with many warlords charging tolls far greater than the value of trade for the distance traveled. There is no public square for gathering that is free from corporate pick pockets and thieves. The exception being here, but here is too small to be relevant.
I still see the iterative freedom of a short ownership cycle as a far greater value to artists and creators. It goes both ways. You are much more likely to take the corporate garbage that places like Hollywood vomit out constantly and do a far better job with the stories and characters that they can. This leads to reforming change where audience momentum shifts away from the corporate industrial cattle farm of content to something neutral and centralized culturally that connects creative talent with an audience directly, and with less brand image nonsense like everyone is some two dimensional sitcom character of an artist and creator. You wouldn't need to limit your creativity to your precious /s lotr :) little bubble but draw inspiration from other places as much as you want. You can even borrow characters, and make connections to other works with impunity. I think that is a much more entertaining and artistic environment that would benefit all. We need this kind of democratization if anyone wants to really succeed. Presently, success is a matter of bribery and connections. You are not a citizen in practice, but a serf behind many gatekeeper overlords that want you to invest yourself massively so they can profit from the massive tolls that will leave you no better off than where you started.
I mean, self-publishing is a viable way of becoming a published author specifically because this model works. But even worse, carving back intellectual property (and, crucially, ending corporate IP ownership) would make corporations desperate for new revenue streams; and jumping into a popular self-published story three years and a day after its original release, to drop a low-effort sequel and siphon off all of its popularity, while the original creator is struggling with two full time jobs trying to finish the sequel they originally came up with--well, that would be just the predatory thing a megacorp would do in this instance.
Yes, we desperately need net neutrality, and to return to an actually open web, but that's a separate issue.
I guess that is where we differ most. I want to see the corporations fail precisely because the low effort benchmark they exist under is so low any alternative will beat them. Like I don't care for any video games coming out of any current company. I won't buy a subscription to anything whatsoever. I refuse to be a serf in neo feudalism. I pay attention if someone does an indie game that is creative, but I despise venture capital and investment banker art. To me, the the people in this space, on both sides, corpo and consumer are all irrelevant imbeciles. I don't want to be a part of their bubble for all the money in the world. I simply do not care about them and value my freedom over their tyranny even if it means I'm homeless in a gutter as one of the last citizens in the crush of the digital dark ages.
I also want to see media dragons fail. But I don't think you're paying attention to what I'm saying their advantage truly is. They can carpet-bomb the world with marketing for their low-effort knockoff such that the genuine article doesn't get a chance, and most consumers (who don't really know or care about ownership or authorial intent) won't know the difference. And then the person who actually labored over that property loses big.
You're correct about my quixotic naïveté. I haven't explored the ideas much, but need to, as this has been on my mind. I have hesitated sharing my stories and details thus far because I am unsure about this exact issue. In addition, I'll admit my business sense is poor in this exact area. I've owned a body shop twice and was the Buyer for a chain of bicycle shops. I'm great with numbers, statistics, working; anything intellectually intuitive I excel at. I like to play in the weeds too much. I suck at the emotional side of politics and sales. So when it comes to networking I suck on so many levels. I've had the experience of people taking advantage of my openness and kindness on far too many occasions to count.
So, I have a unique take on an entire future SciFi universe unlike any that have been explored so far. I have a large mind mapped tree that keeps expanding and many ideas and stories started. I'm a total amateur that wants to explore my mind more than anything else, but I would like to share the experience. How do you think I should do that and prevent someone taking advantage of me in the off chance that anyone cares or pays attention to what I create?
I think you should maintain that hopefulness; people like you are an endangered species these days.
I am very much not a lawyer, but I will say that right now the advantage is to you if you hold on to your rights; in the United States and most developed countries, you are able to do that simply by recording your story in a retrievable form. I would recommend researching your options for how to release some portion of those rights without getting shafted by a big company; your play might be a Creative Commons license, or something similar.