B1C7

Copywrong

I started reading the mystery novel The Devotion of Suspect X recently, only to end up really annoyed a few chapters in because I realized I already knew how the book's mystery works. Turns out that a movie, Drishyam, I watched a few years ago was an (unauthorized) adaptation of the novel.

The movie keeps the mystery's gears mostly intact, but does make changes in the setting that boil down to "replacing abstract Japanese values of loyalty and honour with fuzzy Indian beliefs in kinship ties." I could leave it at that, but because I'm mad my reading experience was ruined, I'm not going to.

No spoilers ahead. I will talk about the setup of the book and movie, so if you don't want even that much detail, skip to the next section.

In the book, a math teacher has a crush on his neighbor. When his neighbor and her daughter murder the neighbor's ex-husband, the math teacher steps in to help them get away with the murder. One of the sources of tension in the book is not knowing how deeply the math teacher is willing to get involved to save his crush. Their relationship is fairly new and shallow, and the reader is always aware that the math teacher could walk away at any point and leave the neighbor to suffer the consequences of her actions.

The movie fucks this up. In the movie, the main character is protecting his wife and adopted daughter. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why the movie took the idea of "man protecting someone he has a weak tie to" and applied it to the relationship between a man and his wife and daughter. Those are not weak ties. Those are the strongest ties possible. There is no tension in the movie at all that he will walk away from them to save his own skin.
The neighbor who commits the murder is not an innocent newborn foal. She has had two failed marriages, she used to work at a nightclub, and she considers a dalliance with a married man. Again, this adds tension to the story because the reader is never sure whether the math teacher's crush fade away in the face of these imperfections.

The movie makes the wife and daughter perfect paragons of angelic innocence. The daughter gets involved with the to-be-murdered classmate because he secretly takes a nude video of her and then sexually blackmails her with it. When her mother tries to intervene, he sexually blackmails the mother too. Neither the mother or the daughter have any past marriages, relationships, or even jobs. They arrived on this Earth unblemished, to be sexually blackmailed and then protected.
In the book, the math teacher struggles a lot with how to portray his relationship with his neighbor to the police. Should he pretend they are mere acquaintances? But he gets lunch at her shop every day and it's pretty obvious to the other workers that he likes her. Should he talk to her regularly to make sure she's holding up okay? But then someone might notice that they talk a lot. Should he call her from his phone? But their phone lines may be tapped. The math teacher flexes his ingenuity by answering these questions.

In the movie, all these sources of tension are gone. The main character is the husband/father of the murderers, so their relationship is clear-cut.
The book is one in a series of books about Detective Galileo, who is a police consultant working on this case. Detective Galileo (a nickname because he is so smart) is an honorable and intelligent man.

In the movie, the person trying to catch the main character is police inspector Meera, who is also the mother of the murdered guy. She isn't particularly honorable or intelligent, and doggedly pursues this case because it's her own son who got murdered. Because of this shitty choice, Drishyam 2 can't be about Meera solving another interesting case, because she's not the kind of cop who would care about solving a case that doesn't directly affect her. So the sequel has to be a rehash of the first movie, in which some aspects of the fake alibis from the first movie fall apart but then are patched up again.
In the book, the math teacher is a genius who went to a prestigious university to study math and uses his reasoning skills to come up with a plan to save his neighbor. The author himself went to a good university to study engineering and used his reasoning skills to write this amazing book.

In the movie, the main character is a wannabe scriptwriter who watches a lot of movies, and uses his knowledge of other movies to come up with a plan to save his wife and daughter. The movie's writer is a ______ [left as an exercise for the reader].

In summary, the book is great, and I wish I could be reading it without knowing how it ends.

Copyright

You won't guess it from the above, but I'm actually in favor of letting people copy and remix other people's works.

I mean, in the above case, I'm not in favor of it because our society has a rule that "authors have copyright over their work and no one can adapt it without their permission" and I believe people should follow rules.

But in general, I would be happy to, and would indeed prefer to, live in a society where the copyright regime was shorter and narrower, where people generally did not assert copyright over their work, where it was pretty accepted to take pieces of other people's work and mix them into your own. What is true for open-source software, I wish was true for all creative works.

For example, one of the most popular software licenses is as follows (slightly edited for brevity):

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell copies of the Software.

This is my personal pledge of allegiance. I hear the flag flutter and the eagles squawk when I read it.

The justification for copyright is that it ensures creators receive compensation for their work. I don't fully buy this.

Authors are notoriously poorly paid.
It is pretty common for very valuable pieces of software to be made open-source, and yet software engineers receive great compensation.
Clothing designs also can't be copyrighted, and yet fashion houses rake in money.

The argument for having less copyright is that people would generally create more art if they were less worried about getting sued for infringing on others' property. It is natural to be inspired by art to create similar art, and it is bad that our society has outlawed this.