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.
> 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.
> 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.