This is a ridiculous idea, that falls apart with even cursory scrutiny. For a trivial example, almost all of Shakespeare's plays were amalgamations of other people's plays or were based on other people's stories (Hamlet, for instance, was a retelling of a 16th century version of the 13th century Scandinavian legend of Amleth).
Would you argue that Shakespeare was not creative? Or is it possible that stories are based on the culture of a society, and the culture of a society is based on the stories told -- meaning that any story can be argued to be a copy of another person's idea.
You're not going to convince me that someone narrating over themselves play Half-Life has the same creativity as Shakespeare, because "everything is a copy". To say that no one actually owns the rights to Pokemon, that someone copying Pokemon frame-by-frame is of equal creative value as someone drawing their own monsters, well I just am deeply saddened by that.
(I'll be honest that I didn't originally didn't read that the topic under discussion was modding of games. Passing off a game as your own is obviously not right, but that isn't the only topic under discussion here.)
Of course modding is not the same as Shakespeare. My point was that stories like those of Shakespeare would not have been possible with our modern notions of copyright. I do agree that many (but not all) examples of such work are just simply rip-offs of other people's work. On the other hand, does it make sense for any work to be untouchable for an essentially unlimited period of time?
So while you might argue that mods are all shameless copies of another person's work, I direct you to 'The Stanley Parable'[1] which was a mod of Half-Life 2. I think most people would argue that it is a creative work that is unique despite the fact that it re-uses assets from a copyrighted work. There are many counter-examples to the idea that the only way to have creative value in a game is to "draw your own monsters". Jim Sterling ran a contest where people were to come up with original works based on an overused Unity asset, and the winning entry was a game made entirely out of textures based on that asset[2]. Is that not a creative work?
I think that ultimately it's a disservice to argue that all such works should not be allowed because many examples of people building on previous work is lazy or a transparent rip-off. That the requirement for a creative work be a strict sense of originality (not to mention that you need to decide how do you define sufficient originality -- is "Harry Potter Told Using Pokemon" an original work?).
Thanks for your comment. I'm certainly not arguing for a binary definition of creativity. I would play The Stanley Parable and vouch for it's existence as a stand-alone work of art.
But should The Stanley Parable be able to profit and set up a free enterprise on the tireless work of Valve engineers? Well, I wasn't really arguing that either.
All I was saying is that, as an artist, if you consider yourself "fucked" because you can't profit off of releasing a commercial game "Harry Potter with Pokemon" that sits on the shelves of GameStop alongside the originals- even though you would be quite good and creative artist in my mind, hell I would play the shit out of that game- you are not realizing that respecting copyright law and abiding by those rules, as "unfair" as they may be, is the only thing that protects companies from being ruthlessly shared on uTorrent for free, and that if you were truly creative and trying to form a business, why not respect this law, and take additional effort to create something "new" and "original", which I understand is total hyperbole, but within our confines of law is simply a matter of "reskinning" so yes Shakespeare could be regarding on the level of reskinning someone else's Angry Birds, but clearly he put his creative spin on it enough to be different or else he wouldn't have made his mark.
In conclusion, nothing is completely "original", and fanfiction is still creative, but artists should strive to not self-identify with other creative entities, if they wish to form a business, out of respect for the law that protects from 100% bad actors which do not wish to creatively enhance, but to sell or distribute identical copies of original creative work.
Again, Disney did exactly that. They ruthlessly exploited Alice in Wonderland and built an empire on it. And you're arguing that no one should be able to do the same. This is the definition of unfair.
I see we're very far apart and probably won't find some common ground, but the way I feel about the situation is that as automation removes the rest of manual labor jobs, people will need to specialize. And modding old ideas is one of the few ways people could specialize and make a living for themselves. You're free to disagree here, but the future is coming, and one day we'll both be gone. The best ideas, however, will be around. And it's hard to imagine that the best idea is not to let anyone else use anything you've thought of for your entire life plus ninety years.
> you are not realizing that respecting copyright law and abiding by those rules, as "unfair" as they may be, is the only thing that protects companies from being ruthlessly shared on uTorrent for free, and that if you were truly creative and trying to form a business, why not respect this law, and take additional effort to create something "new" and "original"
Copyright law is not meant to protect companies. From a historical perspective, it has always meant to temporarily protect authors' rights to their inventions so that society can get more works from those authors. Citing the US constitution (other countries have different justifications, but I assume that you are in the US):
> [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
This matches the purpose of the copyright system defined in 1710 under Statute of Anne (which inspired this clause in the constitution). The copyright system that pre-dated the Statute of Anne was a system of censorship by the publishing houses (that were members of the Printers' Guild), and the public rebelled against their censorship and Queen Anne strove to come up with a system that was far more fair and was meant to inspire authors to produce more work (rather than restrict what they can write so publishers can make more money).
Having a copyright system that protects publishers (which is what we currently have) and lasts for 70 years after the death of the author does not "promote the Progress" of anything (in fact it actively stifles it). I would argue current copyright law is unconstitutional in the US, but I don't have enough money to fight that fight (and the only people that do benefit from copyright law's overreach).
Unfortunately, in our modern age, the true purpose of copyright has been forgotten. People (like yourself) think that the purpose is to protect companies profits -- this could not be further from the truth. Such companies benefit from this misinformation, and regularly lobby the US Congress to add laws which further expand copyright laws (both in breadth as well as length) that result in even more profits for large companies without any more works made as a result. The true hypocrisy is that many of these companies would not have been able to make their works at all without the public domain, and without liberal copyright laws. The first cartoon Mickey Mouse appeared in (Steamboat Willie) made use of things from previous movies (Steamboat Bill Jr -- which was released 50 years earlier).
> out of respect for the law that protects from 100% bad actors which do not wish to creatively enhance, but to sell or distribute identical copies of original creative work.
Even if we ignore that these copyright laws are written by these same corporations (that themselves used public domain, and even infringed on copyrighted works from smaller publishers, to make their products), as I said above this is missing the purpose of copyright law.
Would you argue that Shakespeare was not creative? Or is it possible that stories are based on the culture of a society, and the culture of a society is based on the stories told -- meaning that any story can be argued to be a copy of another person's idea.