[magpi3]

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.

[komali2]

> 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.

[Anonyneko]

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.

[glamourpetz]

> 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.

[close04]

> 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?

[happymellon]

> Inventive ideas like Pokemon may not exist if people could just reuse other people's IP to make a buck.

Ironic.

Pokémon drew inspiration from a number of areas including Ultraseven, which had the concept of the main character having number of capsules containing miniaturized monsters, which come out and return to their original sizes when the capsule is thrown into mid-air.

Pokémon initially was named Capsule Monsters.