“Farm Boy from a desert planet, I am your father,” said the mystical villain in a black suit and helmet.

The farm boy from the desert planet did not take this news well. “No!”

Could you imagine the Internet being full of dialog exchanges like this? Did I, in fact, infringe on a copyright just by typing up that simple exchange? The whole field of ‘fan fiction’ would be endangered by having to be as bland as I was in the opening of this tirade. What if you really couldn’t invoke the genie of ‘fair usage’ when writing non-commercial texts?

I used to play a game called ‘VGA Planets.’ In this game, there are a collection of races that look suspiciously like fictional races protected by copyrights and trademarks. Would it flatten the game if all of the races had to be created from scratch? How would fighting this form of copyright effect the fact that the game itself was protected by a copyright?

In the forum of the ‘Secrets of the Universe’ website, we have a number of never ending stories. At lest one of them is waiting to be shut down by ‘men in black’ from some agency like the MPAA because of all the copyrights that we have shreded in our attempts to write something of lasting value. We all know that the goal of the Internet, and forums on the Secrets of the Universe website in particular, is to produce deep and meaningful works of global significance. Why else would we write?

As a writer who occasionally hurts his fingers torturing a keyboard connected to an expensive machine that could be doing something more significant in somebody else’s hands, I have created works that are covered by copyrights. Would it be hypocritical for me to call for rational copyrights? I have been known to kill off my characters to keep strangeStrange: we are all strange, so it is no surprise that strange happens.rs from perverting them into things that I would not recognize. Do I have the right to keep them safe from the imaginings and ravings of people who beat on their keyboards just as I do?

By the same token, is it fair to compare people who take drunken walks through movie universes to Osama Bin Laden? There are some fan writers who are better than the real thing. The movie version of Frankenstein was far better than the book version. Does the fact that you may hurt my ego give me the right to call you a bad person in the court of law, at public expense? Who do I think that I am?

Recently, two companies went out of business rather than appeal a conviction on copyright issues. These two companies created edited versions of movies that their customers had to legitimately buy. The edited versions took out objectionable material, making the movies into what the audience actually wanted to see. Apparently, this bruised the ego of film makers who did not want to see their sermons altered to improve the desirability of products.

As an artist, even a bad one as I am, I would fire anybody who would make such a case. If my audience would buy more tickets to see my work if I made some changes, I would be all over the information. There was enough money to keep a company in business making these changes, so there is enough of a market for a special edition. These special editions were more expensive than the originals because you had to buy the original as well.

Maybe copyrights were a bad idea. Personally, I think that it’s time that artists stopped selling out their art for ‘artistic vision.’ Maybe that’s just the Iced Tea talking, but I doubt it. If so, then, “I’ll never mix carrot juice and raddish juice again.’

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 2:21 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.