"FAN GAMES CAN STILL RUIN YOUR LIFE. PLEASE STOP BELIEVING OTHERWISE."

author=kory_toombs
The country I live in is more complicated because many countries don't recognize it as a country. It does not hold Berne membership, for example.

"Taiwan grants national treatment under several bilateral agreements, thus allowing copyright upon creation to US, UK, Spanish and Hong Kong nationals. Works by nationals of other countries are not protected in Taiwan. However, such works may be protected if assigned to a US national within one year of creation of the work."

But even though these laws might exist in Taiwan, being prosecuted for this sort of thing is actually quite difficult.

God bless Taiwanese bootleg game development.

author=zeello
That sounds like a pretty basic thing to patent.

ugh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrWqz1IcetE

I remember reading something really compelling that made an argument that trademarks on stories/characters is ultimately detrimental to cultural progress past a certain point.

Basically the idea is, once the original creators/their estate has reasonably had their opportunity to capitalize on a name of a character, work, or story, then that trademark/copyright should expire and that thing should just pass on to the overall cultural mythology, like make other stories and concepts before it, that we use today. Otherwise, you're just keeping a piece of potentially vital cultural mythology just locked up, doing no good to anyone.

It presented a really good example by asking how different society would be if culturally significant things like Shakespeare, Huckleberry Fin, or Frankenstien were protected works and people were sued for using them.

This probably doesn't apply to the relatively very new properties that would be a likely subject to a fan game, but you know, an interesting conceptual thought.

author=zeello
the best ideas are the ones that catch on.

Not that I disagree with the rest of the post, but this statement is not actually true, as seen by a single glance at human culture at any point. Unless your definition of "best" is "most attractive to our shitty, kludged-together meat computers."

I mean, from what I've seen, if we just went by majority consensus, a buttload of properties would end up with "This character and that character fuck. The end." :V

Or, as is happening with creepypasta mascots, "This character and Literal Generic Self-Insert fuck. (Also all the mascots live together in a mansion and have Wacky Shenanigans.)"

Which is not in itself bad, because it's people having fun with stuff they like, but it's definitely not what I would consider "best."

(Full disclosure I tend to agree that the Mouse's stranglehold on public domain expiration needs to go, like, ten years ago. At the very least, make it easier for things that aren't, say, brand-central or actively used to slip into PD, instead of letting companies sit on them in perpetuity and just sell the same original piece year after year. But that's an issue that requires massive overhaul that the moneyed interests wouldn't like, so it's unlikely to happen anytime soon.)