Stealing I.P.

[gertsy]

There was a recent thread on this which made me ponder.
J.K. Rowlings made millions by reworking old themes and situations into a new narrative.  Tolkien himself took classical fables and reworked them into his work.  Some phrases straight from the King James Bible.
To take a thought and a premise and rework it into a new piece is surely going to resound as a copy to the same culture.  What is an echo and what is a copy is hard to determine.
To use a line from Tolkien; ..Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
This line has always resonated true for me.  Who has the right to decide that a work is a copy?  Who has the right to deal out judgement?  A judge, a jury, or the original formulator?
All of us can accuse verbally but no one need listen.  Our grievances are tertiary.  
In my mind it is a condition between the originator and the copier.  And only the originator can decide that he or she has been copied.  Even then they should not be too eager to deal out judgement, least they too be judged.
Anyone heard of the infinite monkey theorem ?

PS: But when I find out who slole my Hyundai Mustang line and reused it.. Whammmo !

[kedawa]

I don't put too much thought into IP.  Anything that can be 'stolen' by sharing it or imitating it is just too much of a conundrum for me.

I do think it's in bad taste to pass off someone else's ideas as your own, but there's no shame in simply using someone else's ideas.

[persia]

Who owns the myths of our ancestors, should JK Rowlings have to get permission from the Greek government to turn Cerberus into "fluffy?"  So much myth is around us and part of our lives.  Rowlings succeeds because she weaves the myths into a story of a boy growing from a child to a man, more the stuff of myths.  Berne convention, which applied here in Australia says 50 years after the death of the Author and the work becomes public domain.  In the EU is 90 years.  Regardless I think there should be a time when things pass into the public domain.  It would be unwise for us to be paying some descendent of Rowlings forever.

[Franko]

To be honest in the world of computers everything is a rip-off of someone else's work these days in my opinion. Only the first people to ever write some code that perform a specific function be it say GFX editing or Audio editing for example for a new computer can really lay claim to the IP/Copyright...

Everything else that comes after is merely taking those ideas/code and improving upon them, which isn't a bad thing I reckon...

When it comes to stuff like the Amiga, well that's a different story altogether if you ask me. What are we meant to do, leave all those wonderful old games and utils to rot and gather dust because they no longer make money or the original author no longer cares or has interest in them anymore...

Nah... when it comes to old stuff like that, then as long as no-one is actually still actively selling it and still making money from their work then I say put it in the public domain where those of us who can still put it to good use can easily obtain it and make use of it and shut those stupid buggers up once and for all who scream piracy and blue murder about old stuff like this...

At the end of the day which is better, to have your work still being used and appreciated by folk or left on a shelf somewhere to be forever forgotten in annals of time...

[gertsy]

...At the end of the day which is better, to have your work still being used and appreciated by folk or left on a shelf somewhere to be forever forgotten in annals of time...

Agree 100% Franko.  And I am sure the actual creators of these works would too.  They don't make the decision though.  It's the corporates.  And they would rather a product dies lest it distracts people from buying new products.