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"people are not experiencing the original." Sure, but they're experiencing an original interpretation of another work, it'll be judged on its own merit. They can still look up the original if they want to. What's wrong with that?. As Newton said: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"

If we were to ban any derivative work you'd need to forget about pretty much any "art" done in the last 400 years (to say a number). As mentioned somewhere else Tolkien's work is not "original" in that case then, it's a mash-up of European mythology. What about music? most modern music relies on samples of other works (check this TED talk by Mark Ronson about it: http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_ronson_how_sampling_transforme...). And TV/Film? Many movie/tv scripts are just a modern version of Shakespeare's works. Anything we do now is influenced by something someone has done before, that's called progress and if we block this with made up "laws" we are going to be very impoverished as a society.

1 comments

You cant swim in the same river twice.

No one can ever experience the original, because the context of everyone's experience has changed. Would your perception of Lord of the Rings be the same before and after reading Wheel of Time or Game of Thrones? Would it even be the same before and after the France-U.S.-Vietnam War? Would it have been the same if written before World War 2?

When a work is created, the intention of the artist is fixed, but as artwork, it is continuously shaped by the perceptions of its audience. Art holds a mirror up to life, and that evolves.

So experiencing the original is quite impossible now. People who did experience the original have already gone on to reshape the culture with their own works, and we cannot, for instance, un-see the Peter Jackson films based on the books.

Yeah, but then the argument that allowing derivative works ruins the original is still flawed. If the way you appreciate art is directly linked to your past experiences (which obviously they are) then the original work is already "ruined" whether you've experienced a derivative work before or not.

The only way a derivative work can truly "ruin" an original is if it obscures the source material or otherwise prevents the audience from accessing it.

There may be a weak argument to be made there in favor of copyrights, since a derivative work could be so much more popular than the original that people are no longer willing to pay enough to maintain it. But it isn't as though a book will spontaneously burn itself if someone writes an unauthorized sequel or translation. The worst that could possibly happen to it is that people stop making fresh copies and forget that it exists.

That's the real ruin for artwork--being thrown into the Lethe.