It makes the rest of us who mark you as enemy for life look less special 
(mods, fbi, cia, the one creepy guy who lives outside my bedroom window, twas just a funny tee hee please do not skin me alive 
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You are on a Bionicle forum, a defunct theme manufactured by the LEGO company, which hasn’t been produced in ten years. This website and the community around it could not exist were it not for the dedication and time (and money) of a small group of friends who liked the original product and the intellectual property it was based around.
This question is a bit unfair. The dollar number validity will continue to be valid because unlike Robin Hood and Beowulf, the primary way to enjoy this property is through the purchase of goods - toys and trinkets. The only way these particular toys and trinkets can be massively available for purchase is if a company has the manufacturing capability and financial investment to do so, and the legal ownership of the brand.
The Bionicle community continues to live because people remain in love with the story and characters, but the attraction to the theme was for nearly everyone the products LEGO sold. You can’t make a fan version of that without landing in jail for a few years.
As for Star Wars, the primary way to enjoy this intellectual property is through the format of a theatrical film. Try to make a Star Wars theatrical film without Disney lawyers gnawing off your fingers.
The Bionicle community is a tremendous exception to the rule, due to the medium intended for the public being an interchangeable and immensely versatile buildable figure system of pieces mostly compatible with every other product LEGO has ever released (and continues to release), but most of the time, if the IP holder wants a franchise to die, it dies. A new generation is rising that has no memory of Battlestar Galactica, and in the future a generation will rise that has no memory of Bionicle.
But why do things like Robin Hood and Beowulf continue to live on? Are the whims of a single person all it takes to decide what lives or dies?
Here’s where the distinction lies.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster created the character of Superman for Action Comics in 1938. Both Action Comics and Superman are (were) their intellectual property, but there’s a difference between the two, and it’s not just that one is a fictional person and the other is a company.
Intellectual property is not some inherent human right intrinsic to nature and the history of the world. It’s a modern legal safeguard to protect the individual concepts and ideas of the people who come up with them. Calling Robin Hood an intellectual property is inaccurate; the term IP is only for whether or not someone takes you to court. Stories like Robin Hood were also not made with the intent to make money off of them, they were never a product to sell. In modern times there are products to purchase for whoever can spin the most appealing version of the legend, but it remains exactly that - Legend, above all else..
The character of Superman is part of an intellectual property and an intellectual property by himself, but he’s gone beyond the idea of being a brand. Whether through resonating with the American public, the power of the character’s appeal or marketing, or through the energy of the stories themselves, the mythos of Superman has transcended the hands of his author and become something truly timeless, something that lives or dies not by the high hand of the company that runs the property, but the people who choose to follow the legend.
That’s why Robin Hood has lasted for so long. He, and other characters of legend like him, may have had some origin point in the form of a real person who did notable things - but his existence has boiled down to the legend of Robin Hood and in that form has lived for so long that noone can remember anything about the original person or the original work. Countless influential works in both the past and present have maintained those legends, be it Monkey King or Beowulf.
There are other real people who we know, either through historical accuracy or general recency, did exist and have also wormed their way into legend - Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Homer, Gilgamesh, but also far more recently with George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. It is hard to conceive that any living person could have a ‘tall tale’ constructed around them potentially having chopped down a cherry tree.
But that’s the state of the world we live in nowadays. Well buried are the worldviews and outlooks that allowed people to craft from thin air the ideas of Paul Bunyan and Robin Hood. Well buried are the men and women that crafted these ideas with grandiose stories and epic tales to cement them in the minds of generations centuries after. Now in the massive onslaught of ideas due to endless global communication, an idea can hardly be an idea on its own before it’s taken and diced a million different ways by others who, for better or for worse, are out to make a quick buck.
That’s the real distinction here: Intellectual properties are the legal ownership of an idea or set of ideas, be it story or character or world, with the right to produce and profit off of goods with direct regard to those ideas, instituted due to the rapidly changing world demanding protection for simply coming up with a concept. Legends are ideas that, through one means or another, transcended the medium they existed in and have become something far greater - an ideal rather than an idea. Something to look up to or be inspired by, a story that demands to find its home inside your mind and write itself.
The legend of Star Wars may be strong enough to survive the end of its protected period under law. The brand of Star Wars, that may easily die tomorrow, and it depends on whether or not the IP will be renewed with new (and good) content to convince people to consistently engage with the expansion of the story over and over again.
But the legend lives in you, not in the IP. The companies may collapse, the authors may die and decompose. But if there is a legend, it will carry on as long as you are willing to hold it above the rest of the world, to be inspired by the stories that came before, and to bring it into the future.
And the legend only dies when you let it.