I think it's a bit weird that our society is designed such that Palworld can be sued for making a game depicting Pokemon.
For about ten thousand years, humans invented and traded stories that often contained characters and environments they didn't invent. You've heard of some of these characters - Zeus, Persophone, Hades, all recurring characters in stories, mosaics, paintings, statues, carvings. Nobody got sued for it, these characters just functioned as analogues for emotions and elements and conditions, universally recognizable figures that didn't need introduction, they could just be used when you needed e.g. a horny character that liked to change people into animals and then have sex with them.
Just very, very recently we aren't allowed to do this anymore. Despite the fact that Pokemon are a shared cultural experience for millions of people from different countries and languages, an opportunity to have a universal symbolic story telling language across borders of nations and languages, we can't do it because that would harm the ability of a single corporate entity to extract value from it as it sees fit. Never mind that we have our own stories we might want to tell from this shared cultural heritage.
And do we ever have stories to tell! Look at any fan fiction site. Among all the smut you get gems like book 4 of the three body problem, written by a different author than the original. Look at the incredible art created from out of copyright works, like Lies of P for pinnochio or House MD for Sherlock Holmes. I want more of these, for things that were invented in my time!
As you noted, fan fiction is legal. You just can't make a profit from it, which I think is fair. Also, IP laws force people to come up with their own characters and their own twists on old stories. I would argue this is a good thing. Inventive ideas like Pokemon may not exist if people could just reuse other people's IP to make a buck.
> Inventive ideas like Pokemon may not exist if people could just reuse other people's IP to make a buck.
This doesn't make sense because people invent ideas all the time without intention of making money off it - such as the plots of fan fiction, which you yourself noted. Fan fiction represents untold tens of thousands of human-hours of effort.
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Depends on the country. Many countries don't have fair use laws; thus, fan fiction is technically illegal there. In practice though you're not likely to be sued unless you're making a significant amount of money or damaging the brand value somehow.
> fan fiction is legal. You just can't make a profit from it, which I think is fair.
The term "fair" is intellectually imprecise.
In a policy context, appeals to "fairness" often serve as a rhetorical proxy for subjective preferences rather than an objective moral framework.
When centralized systems attempt to institutionalize "fairness" as a primary directive, the resulting information-calculation problems and rent-seeking often lead to catastrophic externalities.
Consider the extreme end of state-mandated equity:
- The Henan Plasma Scandal: In the 1990s, a government-backed "plasma economy" intended to alleviate rural poverty through "fair" compensation led to the pooling and reinjection of contaminated blood, infecting an estimated 1.2 million people with HIV.
- The One-Child Policy: A "fair" distribution of population growth led to forced abortions, mass abandonment of female infants, and a 30-million-person gender imbalance.
In the specific context of IP, the "fairness" of restricting profit from derivative works is a misnomer. US copyright law (17 U.S.C. 107) relies on Fair Use, which is a balancing test of market harm and transformative value, not a moral judgment on what an author "deserves".
Denying a creator the right to profit from their labor is simply a protectionist market intervention; calling it "fair" merely obscures the economic trade-off.
> When centralized systems attempt to institutionalize "fairness" as a primary directive, the resulting information-calculation problems and rent-seeking often lead to catastrophic externalities.
Sounds like you’re focusing on Eastern society examples and some are a stretch. If you believe “institutionalized fairness” is unequivocally wrong, what do you think of the more Western “DEI”? It’s a standout example of “equity”.
Is your opinion that DEI results in the same kind of bad outcome? Do you think that Western societies can pull off “institutionalized fairness” better than Eastern ones? Are you drawing a biased picture by highlighting the failures without putting them in the larger context along with any possible successes?
DEI is fine. The problem isn’t the goal of treating people well; it’s the structural error of trying to institutionalize "fairness" as a top-down directive.
Whether it’s an AI or a government, centralized systems are remarkably bad at optimizing for vague moral proxies because they lack the local feedback loops required to avoid catastrophe.
Western history is littered with these feedback failures. The British government’s commitment to an ideological "fairness" in market non-interference during the Irish Potato Famine led to 1 million deaths. Their wartime resource distribution in the 1943 Bengal Famine killed 3 million more. Even the American eugenics movement was framed as a "fair" optimization of the population; it sterilized 64,000 citizens and provided the foundational model for the Nazi T4 program.
In the context of IP, claiming it’s "fair" to deny a creator compensation for their labor is just a way to subsidize an abstraction at the expense of individual incentive. When you replace objective market signals with a bureaucrat’s (or an algorithm’s) definition of equity, you don't get a more just system- you just get a system that has stopped solving for reality.
The stated goal is always to treat people well. The unstated goal, if there is one, is hard to determine.
So you cherry picked some bad outcomes which just happen to be from the same part of the world, didn’t provide context for your reader to understand if that outcome is the rule or the exception, when asked about other things that fit under your wide brush “argument” your comeback was a weak “except that, it doesn’t count” (half of Americans voted for the guy who stomped on DEI so your “treating well” argument isn’t shared by a democratic majority for better or worse). This on a fresh account screams hidden agenda.
And n the wider topic of fairness, it’s hard to formally define what fair or unfair are. But you know it when you see it. The way copyright law works today is a prime example of unfair to “everyone else”.
Back then everybody made a little money, now some make a shitload and others nearly nothing.
We see that in a lot of businesses especially thanks to the internet.
>You've heard of some of these characters - Zeus, Persophone, Hades, ...
>Just very, very recently we aren't allowed to do this anymore.
From the beginning of monotheism we see strong attempts to monopolize the character of the right and the only God, dating back at least to Samaritans vs. Judeans. Some actually see the appearance of monotheism as a result of such a successful monopolization attempt. And the last 2000 years that monopoly has been enforced by sword and fire.
> Palworld can be sued for making a game depicting Pokemon.
at least not declared heretic and burnt at stake like it was 400+ years ago for unlicensed fan-fiction produced by Luther and the likes.
> From the beginning of monotheism we see strong attempts to monopolize the character of the right and the only God, dating back at least to Samaritans vs. Judeans.
1) Samaritans and Judeans do not disagree on which God they worship (it's YHWH), they disagree on much more subtle points that are largely unique to the Israelite religion like the location of the temple mount, the correct version of the pentatuch, differences in how to practice some of the rituals, etc.
2) Zoroastrianism predates the Israelite religion and is usually considered monotheistic (although some scholars disagree). If you loosen your definition to allow henotheism then some eastern traditions were first by about a millennia.
3) WTF does monotheism have to do with trademark law? I'm sure you think it's a deep argument but it just came off as a total non sequitur to everyone else.
I'm not sure if it makes sense to compare the two. Only one is openly fiction.
An early form of domain squatting
> Changes to the United States trademark law in 1946 allowed publishers to register a trademark with an intent to use instead of a finished product
I wonder if this came with some provision like publishers who didn't actually publish within a certain time after registering a trademark would have their trademarks invalidated.
Currently it sounds like an unfortunate change, in the same way that non-practicing entities are able to get patents and extort money from people who actually make stuff.
Am I doing it right [1]?
[1] (LLM-created "Ashcan Comics!") https://imgur.com/a/gTSvSp2
(Hopefully a like-named comic doesn't already exist, ha ha. Also, seems the LLM thought "trashcan comics"?)
> Am I doing it right
No.
My first ashcan was a mini-comic sized Atari Force promo that came, I believe, if you were part of the Atari fan club. Based on the size it could have come packed into the box of an Atari game, so I could have gotten it that way.
Trademark trolls
Amazing to see this on Hacker News. I've recently begun a startup called Sweet Shop, meant to fill the hole that Comixology left when they sold out. Comics are amazing, and they continue to hold an important place in global culture. Ashcans are still called that and most publishers still distribute them at cons.
Comics or graphic novels or manga, or however you were introduced to them are becoming the defacto literature for good reason. People work hard to create them. Ashcans are a nice way to ease that burden of getting someone interested.
(https://sweetshop.app if you're interested)