But I have to ask, why? At least in this particular instance.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, getting to make money off of a franchise you love and are intimately familiar with is a dream for most fans. But Bionicle is one of a few insanely lucky franchises that even have the luxury to think about making open and accessible fan projects, let alone getting paid to make them.
And we should be thankful for that. I can’t imagine where the community would be if LEGO was as iron-fisted and stifling as Nintendo or Disney. Heck, we have two highly anticipated fan games coming out in the near future.
My only question would be, if Bionicle was public domain, why put forth all of the effort of making money from a Bionicle project when you could put that effort into original IPs and projects that you have full and total creative control over? Sure, public domain would open the doors for fan projects to accept monetary donations and do more high-budget projects, but with the quality you can get from free tools out there today I’d argue it’s not even necessary to get projects funded.
And again, don’t take this as me saying it’d be bad for fans to get some money from their hard-worked endeavors. I empathize with that desire more than most as a creative myself. But I think there’s something to be said about the passion of doing something because you love it and not because you want to make money off of it, and LEGO is currently good-willed enough to allow us to do that today.
Simple: you have less work to do. When you make an original IP, you have to build the setting, characters, and plot up from scratch. Bionicle gives you a lot of pre-decided elements to work with, which saves time, and that’s important when you’re making a project for profit.
This is quite an interesting question. We know there is one upcoming fan game (I forget what it’s called) where Lego explicitly gave the creators permission to use the Bionicle IP. Since they’re probably not making any money off of it, Lego isn’t gonna send them a cease-and-desist letter. But as for losing the rights entirely, well…
Lego was the company that created Bionicle, right? And they filed a copyright for it, didn’t they? And the fact that Lego hasn’t made anything Bionicle-related for some time now isn’t because they don’t want to. It’s because the sales eventually declined, and continuing the line wouldn’t be a very smart thing to do. But here’ the thing: they still copyrighted it. It’s their thing. Until the copyright expires, they can do whatever they want with it. Theoretically, they COULD lobby to have it extended like Disney did with Mickey Mouse, but Bionicle is nowhere near as popular as Mickey Mouse, so I don’t see that happening.
That said, if Bionicle did become public domain, then that would open the door for even more fan works. And, as others have mentioned, the fan works could actually make money without Lego suing them. In fact, Hollywood could make an actual, big-budget Bionicle movie if they wanted to! (Though they may go to Lego to make a line of sets to tie in with the movie.)
I think that also depends on the movie in question. Depending on how popular/successful the movie was initially, the owners of it might want to protect their property, but if it is something they don’t particularly care about anymore, it might surely find its way to YouTube without any trouble.
For instance, the far less popular animated movie Gulliver’s Travels (also released in 1939) is freely available on YouTube.
That’s different, copyright enforcement on something unmonetized(I think) is entirely up to the discretion of the copyright holder, and technically the uploading of those movies is likely piracy. Also, those movies were made by miramax, who licensed the ip from lego, so it’s further up to them to enforce copyright of their work.
tl;dr/summary of thoughts I meant to get across:
thats straight piracy, and it’s only allowed because no one has complained about it yet.
