The case against extensions of both Copyrights and Trademarks

As always the case, a majority of both entertainment corporations and middlemen abuse an idea and its extensions, to the point of their subsequent works becoming outright train wrecks. Another scenario is that both profit from an idea for a short while and sit on it very abusively for a long time, even hundreds of years after an actual live creator creates it for both, or has sold it to both and passes later on.

Then, there is the fairly agitating problem with visibly orphaned and abandoned works. Not only are such orphaned and abandoned works not in the public domain, they don’t have any of the original human owners left remaining. Fortunately, some of these works are already in the public domain for most nations, regardless of how recent their public domain status is, while various others have become what I can call ‘adopted works’. 

A surprisingly good (though rarely reported) example of a franchise being adopted by a huge fan of pulp fiction is the Kaspa series, much of which has only recently been released in an online paywall by its current owner, the Cajun editor Camille Cazedessus, aka Caz, while only the first two were being released within the original author’s lifetime. However, I am not allowed to scan the books as they are on the paywall much of the time, and I also only own the first Kaspa sequel instead of the original. Not helping is that the first two published Kaspa stories aren’t becoming public domain until 2036 in much of the world. That, and the franchise’s titular character being both registered and trademarked by said current owner, so nah. 

Another awesome example is Isamu Of The Wilderness, which originated as a prototypical graphic novel series distributed by Shueisha in the early 1950s. Unfortunately, such a graphic novel series consists of only three bland volumes, mostly due to Souji Yamakawa being a considerable perfectionist who begrudged a lot about the (somewhat wrong) executive meddling. Only in 1971 did a much more popular (and technically superior on all levels to the original) manga version appear in Weekly Shōnen Jump to last for three years. It was Souji who was gradually softening his still demeaning stance on manga, just by the time that Noboru Kawasaki met his own idol and thereafter drew the manga version, while Souji himself wrote it all along the way of the Rio Grande River. The manga itself spawned a considerably much lighter and softer, denser and wackier anime version made by the esteemed anime studio TMS entertainment, a few decades before it got acquired by video game giant Sega. By the time Souji Yamakawa died a week before Christmas Day 1992, Noboru Kawasaki technically owns his own studio, while Shueisha still owns and distributes the rest of it.