Hypothetical that I'd like to explore:

If a person were to try to create some piece of fiction that took place in, say, Gotham City, or on Gallifrey, or Tatooine, they'd have their asses sued off by DC, or the BBC, or Star Wars/Disney, because those locations come from movies that are copyrighted. You can't use those settings until the copyright expires.

With the release of the recent _Backrooms_ (2016) movie, we have this interesting piece of commercial media that is based on a culturally owned story. The Backrooms as a concept is not copyrighted, because Kane Parsons (the director) didn't invent it. The concept comes from a collection of several unnamed nobodies, who made stuff, put it on the internet, and then it entered into the shared folklore.

If somebody wanted to write a companion film, say, "The Backrooms: Revisited", set within the same setting, and using many of the same tropes as were established within the Kane Parsons film -- the backrooms being a "copy of a copy", memories of the past, passing through walls to enter the backrooms, gateways appearing all across the world suddenly, etc -- what copyright rules might stop them?

Elements which existed within the folklore already surely would be seen as fair game. What about elements that are natural extensions of the existing lore? (it seems the place being a "copy of a copy" of the real world is new, but it doesn't seem a big stretch from the existing folklore)

Sure, we couldn't include Clark or his furniture shop. That's obvious. We couldn't tell their stories.

But it's very curious. To see a piece of fiction so commercially successful despite drawing so heavily from a contemporary piece of collectively constructed folklore, no?

It seems to me that this kind of work almost puts into plain view the contradiction between the creative energy of the folk tradition and the restrictive powers of our rigid copyright system.

Thoughts?

#folklore #storytelling #backrooms #theBackrooms #copyright #copyleft #creativeCommons