>>598
>The characters have been around for nearly 60-80 years and something original could be made
Could be. And original things are made. Unfortunately, many original works are held back by copyright making them illegal because they would use some element that isn't wholly original.
>it's extremely naïve of you to think that making something good means that someone won't Jew you.
They jew you either way. But copyright is a very useful tool to jew you and the rest of society. At least take away that tool. You can get paid to actually make the work. If someone wants to print it or distribute it or whatever, that's a different job. You might be mad about not getting a cut, but that's frequently how it works anyway, so copyright doesn't help you enough there. What it does is help them stop other people from competing against them.
>>599
>Bram only owned the copyright over Dracula, not the entire concept of vampires altogether. Also, part of what made Nosferatu so remembered is that it was Weimerian horror.
I never claimed Stoker owned vampires. Nosferatu is a full on ripoff of Dracula. The story is so close that many prints swap the title cards to change the characters' names into the names from Dracula, and it works perfectly. It's actually one of the more accurate film adaptations of Dracula out there (not that that's saying very much). It's still an excellent very influential film, and it's good that it exists.
>Majority of ancient mythology was actual history, exaggerated to mythological proportions over the centuries.
One could make the case about a great deal of fiction. It's irrelevant. We don't know the true origins of most of these stories. We just keep tracing them back further and further. Would certainly have been a shame if whoever did them first stopped others from adding to them later.
>Majority of those artists were starving unless they appealed to the aristocrats.
And they still are, only now the aristocrats are corporations staffed by SJW HR departments, and then the artists end up starving either way.
>The only time the peasants were ever given the pleasure provided by art was whenever the forest bandits in China overthrew the current emperor.
Peasants always had stories and songs, even if only orally. But if copyright faggots had their way, they'd all be stopped from passing on those works unless they were the ones who wrote them, or rather, the ones who hired the people who wrote them.
>Are you making the whole "There are only seven basic story plots" argument?
No, I mean that he full on read other books with the same fucking stories and just retold them in the form of a play with (mostly) rewritten dialogue. Go look it up. This applies to many of his plays. But people appreciate what he added to his versions, and it's good that they exist, even if he didn't create the core original concepts.
>If the work was really that good, then the creators could have removed all the similarities from the work that would potentially get them sued, and then publish it as an original work.
No, because sometimes there is a point to using the elements from other works. Not only can you comment on the work (which is supposed to be protected, but in practice, that protection is much too narrow), but those elements can come to mean things to the wider culture. You can use those meanings for wider purposes. Again, many stories use characters they did not create for good purposes. When Hercules appears in a story, people understand who he is and what he represents, and you can use that to help tell a new story. And many, many artists have done exactly that for thousands of years. And yes, Superman can be used in the same way. Or could, if it wasn't for copyright.
Of course, note that changing the name and appearance isn't enough to avoid getting sued. See Nosferatu. The names and appearances were changed. Doesn't matter. It's obviously the same story. Or you can use characters to tell new stories, but that will get you sued too. But all sorts of elements could be expanded upon to create good art, if we weren't artificially limited from doing this.
>What your argument is based around is that people won't buy art unless it has a brand attached to it, and THAT'S why "copyright should be abolished".
No, it's not about the brand. It's about the elements being used. If anything I'm saying the fact that things like this have been turned into brands is what's bad. Disney's adaptations of Snow White and Pinocchio are legitimate works of art, regardless of what you think of the company later. But of course those films are not original stories. Removing the original stories from them would result in a vastly different work.
And yes, Robert Fortune did nothing wrong.