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Comment by causesothere | Hacker News Reader

AO3 is wonderful. I strongly believe that humans have tens of thousands of years of telling and retelling stories. The Odyssey isn't one book, it's something that was composed and collected and retold.

The idea that a company could "own" a story and the characters within is recent. Very recent.

IMO, AO3 continues the human tradition of retelling stories, and we should celebrate that.

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This is why I’m a copyright minimalist. 15 years + 5 years extension is my belief. I should be legally allowed to use what I grew up on to tell stories and invent within that world and, if the market enjoys it, make some money doing it. Anything more is various shades of immoral, and the current 95-150yr terms are closer to something from parody than reality.

but that would literally destroy capitalism at a symbolic level. copyright is the one thing holding all the myths

We've had myths for hundreds of thousand of years without copyright. If it's a choice between capitalism and culture then we should destroy capitalism at a symbolic level.

There could also be a downside to this, lets use Super Mario as an example, what happens when the entire market gets flooded with unofficial Mario games, scammers would no longer have to worry about copyright and can make absolute shovelware to trick old people hoping to buy a Christmas present for their grandchildren etc. Nintendo as a company would be completely helpless against all of this and sure, there could may well be some great games made by people who care, but the cons would outweigh the pros.

trademarks? Nintendo is still protected as Nintendo with its logo and all. We'd start seeing Nintendo's Super Mario and be all "ahh, great, the fun one!"

Or even "Bob's Super Mario? Ah, great, the fun one". More fun Mario games for us.

The “market flood” would happen 20 years after release. For comparison in this hypothetical: Odyssey still has 11 years of protection, Sunshine has been out of copyright for four years, and Galaxy comes out of copyright next year. Nintendo made their money, and those initial likenesses are now within the cultural memory and not locked away into abandonware. Any interpretations in Galaxy 2 would be locked until 2030, just like how the only legally public Mickey Mouse started with Steamboat Willie and worked up from there.

By this logic, in 2005 we’d see “scammers” release the original 1985 Super Mario Bros. for modern systems, three years after Sunshine. No consumers would be confused by that. Perhaps a hypothetical Granny gets confused, but a hypothetical Granny also gets confused in that era by buying a used copy of 64.

If the cons that supposedly outweigh the pros of creative freedom and preservation of our culture is old people being slightly confused at Christmas, then I must ask what kind of bizarre gifts did your grandparents confuse at Christmas time?

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