Do you still own the refrigerator magnet after you sell it? Ditto the ceiling of the sistine chapel it belongs to the Roman catholic church who paid for it.
Of course not. But you're missing the point. Yes, I know the Catholic church owns the ceiling that Michelangelo painted. My point is if Michelangelo could have gone on to paint the same, or similar scene, somewhere else? It's not whether he owned the ceiling. It's whether he owned the idea.
There is a gate keeping process. The problem for many is that it requires you pay some attention to what those at lower end who by art will buy. There was a guy some time back essentially mass produced oils of farm scenes I think the name was Thomas Kincaid. The critics hated him but the public ate it up and he made a damn nice living, then there was another dude name did all sorts of offensive and outlandish and without some dolt at the national endowment for the arts taking a liking to him he would have starved.
For what it's worth and in the small world segment my niece makes and sell ear rings at arts and crafts shows.
Thomas Kinkade did make beautiful pictures. I own several of his calendars and a shelf and a half of jigsaw puzzles made from his work. No, they aren't all of farm scenes. Since I grew up on an acreage that was close to a farm, why would I want dozens of pictures of farms around?
I just did an image search for Thomas Kinkade, and don't see much there to do with farms. Of course anything with his name on it after his death wasn't really made by him. There are people he taught to emulate his style.
The critics can shut up. Yes, there are numerous common elements in a Kinkade painting. Stone cottages, gazebos, flowers, streams, bridges, little pathways going here and there... those are pictures I enjoy. His other themes include Christmas, city streets, and I don't remember when the Disney stuff started. I don't care for those. There are whole calendars dedicated to churches and bible verses. Those are not in my collection.
Good for your niece. I wish her every success.
When the cookbook is by a celebrity or a tv chef its not just for the recipes that you're buying the book.
Jean Pare may have been a celebrity when it comes to cookbooks, but I liked the recipes because they weren't complicated. I didn't start getting interested in cookbooks until someone in the local SCA snarkily dared me to autocrat (organize) the next feast.
That resulted in weeks of planning with the people who were actually going to be doing most of the cooking, to plan a several-remove feast that could have been served at a high-ranking court during the 16th century. I deliberately set it in that time period so we could include New World ingredients. I also had to organize the removes for the fighters who thought that fruit-based dishes were "sissy", people who weren't into everything being meat-based, and the one guy I've mentioned who was deathly allergic to garlic.
The feast was a success, btw. The Order of the Ravening Horde (food/feast critics) rated it 5/5.
That's kind of a mean assumption about people who copy things to say they assume they're owed everything with zero effort on their end. In fact, the opposite is true when it comes to IP. If people make a character/story/song and I copy it because I really like it, they're assuming that I owe them whatever money they deem appropriate plus I need to pay restitution to society in the form of legal fees/jail time for a "crime."
If you can ctrl-c + ctrl-v anything and distribute it just as easily, the only way anyone can make money from it is from inventing an arbitrary system of fake crimes to charge people with for duplicating the work. It's not a noble system in the slightest. If I really like something, I can donate to the creator. I can buy some of their physical art or products. For example, the fact that an author feels entitled to my money just for making a fan work (even if I share it for free ) shows that they're the ones looking to maximize what they're "owed" for nothing.
Authors who write fanfiction don't feel entitled to your money. Only the stupid ones think they can self-publish on Amazon without getting caught, because other fans can and will rat them out. We have to, so TPTB don't shut down the fanfic sites.
yea it's pretty weird.
ghost-writing in the abstract is fine btw. but it's been completely absorbed by everything that's wrong with the industry. gig economy problems, and in effect now a part of marketing efforts and/or riding fame than actual work. in the abstract, ghost writing can be a great tool; if someone is very knowledgable about something but don't write well, they can get a good writer to do that part. but that requires both parties involved in the work more than the vast majority of ghost writing that happens these days.
Ghostwriting can help extend the life of a series when the original author dies, ie. Darkover.
The Heirs of Hammerfell is the last Darkover novel Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote by herself. Every one since then has either been some sort of collaboration while MZB was alive, or written/edited by the people she designated as her "heirs" - Elisabeth Waters and Debra Ross. Mercedes Lackey collaborated with her on one of the novels, and I could tell
exactly which parts, and even which sentences Lackey wrote. Their styles didn't mesh well enough to make it seamless.
Debra Ross did a great job on some of the books. Others... yikes. I dunno what she was thinking, writing such a miserable piece of crap that was supposed to be the decades-awaited sequel to one of the best of the Darkover books. She must not have done more than skimmed the first one, or assumed the longtime fans would be glad to get any new Darkover book?
Nope. I gave it a bad review on Amazon, and did not hold back on why.
And when the original author isn't dead, but just isn't good at writing novels, you get the case of Star Wars. The first novel was ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster, which explains why I was disappointed when I finally saw the movie. There were some things Foster had written that were absent.
No, it's not a "mean assumption" when the only kind of copying that's being prevented (in the specific is precisely the one where you can't even be arsed to make the least effort.
A generally poor presentation (what else is news from you) of the excessively rare circumstances where copyright holders actually threaten to sue over fanworks. Even in the rare cases where copyrights holders actually DO worry about fanworks, the typical resolution is almost universally the offending fanwork being withdrawn from the internet, with no money changing hand. Which shows quite pointedly that it's not about them feeling entitled to your money for making a fanwork. It's about them not wanting, for one reason or another, your fanwork to be distributed.
In many of the cases where it's happened, that was at least in part if not in whole about feeling that your fanwork actually risked damaging the reputation of their actual work or characters by presenting them in a damaging light or by otherwise presenting their free product in a way that might mislead others to believe it's actually *their* product. In others, it's because the fanwork was outright being used to attack the copyright holder (in a case of biting the hand that is feeding you). In some rare cases from the early day of fanfiction, it was about protecting themselves from copyright claims on your part if they came up with similar plot ideas in their next story in the same series. And yes, in some case, it's about fearing that free distribution of your story will cause fewer people to buy theirs.
Money does play a part in some of those (precious few things in the whole wide world where money plays no role whatsoever), but in none of those cases is it about them wanting your money. For crying out loud.
Some authors have made it very clear on the fanfiction sites that they do NOT want any stories on their work to appear there, and if found, they are to be taken down immediately. In turn, the site has a list of authors/series that may not be posted. Some Darkover fanfic authors get around this by posting in non-English languages.
This is awfully hypocritical of some of them, btw, if they themselves got their start in fanfiction. The whole
Outlander series, for example, started as Diana Gabaldon's Doctor Who story based on what she imagines happened to Jamie McCrimmon after his memory wipe and return to the Highlands at the end of the Second Doctor era. So for Gabaldon to later go on a rant about fanfic based on Outlander is... rich.
As for "biting the hand that feeds you"... even the pros can get into trouble over that. Diane Carey is one of the
worst Star Trek tie-in authors who didn't get her start in fanfic. She inserted her own political views into the mouths and thoughts of the characters, to the point where I was staring at the page and thinking, "But that isn't what Kirk thinks! WTH?"
Her final novel, and the one that got her fired as a Trek tie-in novelist, was a Voyager novel in which she had Janeway mirror every nasty, hateful little thought Carey had about that series. By the time the publishers realized what a hateful hatchet job it was, it was too late to cancel it and get another author write something to meet the deadline in the publication schedule.
So this POS had to be published. But that was it for Carey.
