Let My Characters Go

[flwyd]

The opening scene of my dad's favorite book, At Swim-Two-Birds, features the insight The modern novel is largely a work of reference. The main character goes on to construct a story using several characters from the Irish story collective.

I find it a very strange that our culture believes that the original teller of a story can exercise control over the stories other people want to tell about the characters the first introduced. I find it sadly ironic that the poster child for character-copyright is a company whose most famous stories are based on characters and stories in the public domain.

Conflating copyright of a work and copyright of characters is like claiming ownership of all dogs fathered by your dog. It's an unnatural damming of the stream of human cultural evolution.

(elevated from a comment on a recent post by grenacia about Kindle Worlds)