Let it go

When I was younger I remember having a disagreement with a friend about Harry Potter. At the time there'd just been a spate of knock-offs, most famously a series featuring the young Barry Trotter. Trotter got away with it by being a parody, but more generally those knockoffs suffered legal repercussions from JK Rowling and the publishers of the series. I thought this was ridiculous.

Sure, you can own the words on the page themselves, and it is perhaps reasonable to claim that Harry Potter™ and The Harry Potter Universe™ are brands that need protection from imitation, so any knockoffs would need to clearly spell out that they are unauthorised. But to say "no, I own these characters, I own this universe, I own the culture that springs from it" is just crazy to me. I later found out this is a pretty rare opinion.

A related but similar anecdote: Mother's Day (the US one) was invented by Anna Jarvis, who eventually disowned the holiday, protested against it, and in the end "wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control". More generally, you often hear of movements or ideas started by someone who later wishes they could take it all back. The reason is usually the same: the movement changed, it lost its original goals, it's out of control now.

Both Rowling and Jarvis experienced something that many people experience when they create something: a desire to own that thing, to control it, and to ensure it changes in the way they intend – if at all. To me, that seems like the worst kind of overprotectiveness. It's helicopter parenting your ideas. My belief is that the things you create take on a life of their own when they are released. You transfer those ideas into the minds of your audience where they live on, spread, and transform into new ideas, new stories, new movements.

To prevent that is cruel and selfish, not just to the people whose creativity you restrict, but to the ideas themselves. You create sterilised ideas – eunuch ideas – robbed of their most basic imperative: to create more ideas.

Of course, I believe it's necessary to have certain limited protections over the things you create, both in copyright law to protect your commercial interests in a specific work, and in trademark law to allow you to control what can be officially associated with your name. However I don't believe there should be any protection over ideas, characters, worlds, or "look and feel".

I mean this not just legally, but morally. The desire to keep control over things you create makes sense as long as you see yourself as the creation's owner. But you can't own ideas, and you aren't the idea's master. You are its custodian, its guardian, its – dare I say – mother. You brought the idea into the world. You shaped it, You helped it grow until it was strong enough to stand on its own.

And now it's time to let it go.