Comment by komali2
Comment by komali2 a day ago
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.