this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2025
47 points (100.0% liked)
chat
8523 readers
204 users here now
Chat is a text only community for casual conversation, please keep shitposting to the absolute minimum. This is intended to be a separate space from c/chapotraphouse or the daily megathread. Chat does this by being a long-form community where topics will remain from day to day unlike the megathread, and it is distinct from c/chapotraphouse in that we ask you to engage in this community in a genuine way. Please keep shitposting, bits, and irony to a minimum.
As with all communities posts need to abide by the code of conduct, additionally moderators will remove any posts or comments deemed to be inappropriate.
Thank you and happy chatting!
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
wouldn't no copyright make that specific case worse? there'd be 50 ghostbusters knockoffs instead of two
Media is profitable because of the artificial scarcity created by the enforcement of intellectual property rights. Getting rid of IPR would accordingly make media unprofitable, which would in turn get rid of the only incentive to give things confusingly similar names.
There's still an incentive in that a concept might be popular enough to warrant a number of projects. Capialists monetize this already in the real world with IP-free concepts like Sherlock Holmes, Jane Austen novels, and Robin Hood. You might argue that these don't often attempt to confuse the buyer but the Disney knockoff trend of the VHS/DVD eras did just that, with hastily made cartoons of Beauty and the Beast or Tarzan
half of asylum's business model was making adaptations of the same public domain works as movies you might actually want to see
Disney still has a copyright on their versions of public domain stories, though. Whether a particular copyrighted work is entirely original or adapting public domain material, the fact remains that the copyrighted work is an artificially scarce product, and that that's where the profit comes from.
And if they didn't, knockoff companies would gladly give Beast and Tarzan the exact designs seen in the Disney versions to exploit the confusion even better
If Disney movies didn't have copyright, I'd think that "knockoff companies" would sooner just sell the Disney versions outright than go through all the effort of making knockoffs.
Okay, that makes sense actually
See, I'm not crazy! I've thought this through!
one of the things copyright law purports to do is prevent products in the same sector being called similar things, ostensibly reducing consumer confusion. i don't think pointing to a case where it failed to do that extrapolates into your proposal. we can look at fanfiction instead and i think that deluge is a better reflection of what people would do unless you want to try to extrapolate a culture that is generations removed from our IP laws.
There is no "instead": I absolutely think fanfiction is what people should look at to get an idea of what a world without copyright would be like. I'm not necessarily an avid reader of fanfiction but I don't exactly get the impression that fanfics are known for being named confusingly similarly to each other, nor for trying to pass themselves off as "canon" — again because there's no real reason to.
You should also look at piracy: "no copyright" means that anyone is completely free to distribute anything under any title, which means that there's also less risk for the consumer to begin with (prices massively decrease if they don't disappear entirely), and that things will presumably be called whatever name catches on for them, instead of being stuck with whatever trademark the rightsholder insists upon.
The final point is in any case that just like any other law "for the consumer", intellectual property exists ultimately only for the sake of profit for capitalists. Capitalists are generally incentivized not to have confusing names, but the moment a capitalist sees their chance, the whole "no confusion" thing goes out the window: rights for me but not for thee. So the "no confusion" line is, as we see, a farce.