Are you misreading “preparing” as literally any writing

“Prepare derivative works” means not just any writing, but literally anything creative. If you paint a picture of a character from a book, using specific details described in that book such as their appearance and name, you are creating a derivative work.

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/78442/what-is-considered-a-derivative-work

Even that Wikipedia article goes into fair use.

Fair use carves out an exception for parody, criticism, discussion, and education. “Entertainment” or “because I like the series and these characters” are not one of those reasons. Fan fiction might qualify as parody though.

What effect on the market can there be for a fan remaster of a 20 year old game that isn’t for sale anymore? Hard to argue that doesn’t fall under fair use.

This is not how “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work” part of fair use works.

A company can create a work, sit on it for literally 100 years doing nothing with it and making not a single cent from it, then sue you for making a nonprofit fan work of it. Steamboat Willie is 95 years old and until just this year you could have been sued for drawing him. Note that, in the eyes of the law, Steamboat Willie is effectively a different character than Mickey Mouse.

Again, I cannot stress enough how it doesn’t matter at all whether you are personally profiting from something or whether you are affecting a market. The word “potential” in that quote above is doing a lot of work:

A father in the UK wanted to put spiderman on the grave stone of his 4 year old son who loved the character. Disney said “no”. Disney does not make tombstones. You are not eating into their profits by putting spiderman on a tombstone. And yet in the eyes of the law Disney has every right to stop you since they might decide to start up a tombstone business next week.

Nothing I have written here is legal advice.

EDIT: I am not a fan of any of this. I think you should be able to write nonprofit fanfiction without worrying that some corporation might sue you. I am on your side on this. But this is the reality we live in.

People are allowed to write fanfic and make fan movies and whatnot. The line isn’t crossed until money changes hands.

This is completely wrong. A company is fully within their rights to issue you a cease and desist for fan works. Some companies, like Disney and Nintendo, do this all the time (though sometimes people are able to fly under the radar).

If you see a free fan game or fan work of anything it’s completely at the mercy of the company that owns the IP. If it’s not taken down it’s either because the company is cool with it, not aware of it, or can’t be bothered to deal with it.

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction

People really have no idea how overbearing IP laws are. Technically even recordings of people playing video games (let’s plays and the like) could be infringing. This hasn’t been extensively argued in court because most game companies don’t want to deal with the PR backlash that forbidding let’s plays would cause (in addition to the free advertising they get). Though, once upon a time that didn’t stop Nintendo from using YouTube’s copyright system to claim videos of their games.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/16/nintendo-enforces-copyright-on-youtube-lets-plays

https://www.slaw.ca/2024/02/07/lets-plays-a-copyright-conundrum/

Well, Fromsoft had a good run.

Maybe we’ll get one more game out of them.

Redfall being a prime example. We kept hearing how Microsoft was happy to leave those studios to it, to give them the time and resources they needed and they still released dog shit.

Yeah, the studio that developed Prey (a dumbass name that zenimax forced them to use) went on to develop Redfall after Microsoft bought them.

Clearly they were a bunch of idiots before the acquisition who had no idea what they were doing, and the only problem afterward was that Microsoft didn’t boss them around enough.

Huh?

https://xkcd.com/963/

Fortunately I haven’t had to open it in a very long time.

While I agree that it’s somewhat bad that there is no distinction between lossless and lossy jxl in the file extension, I think it’s really not a big deal compared to the present situation with jpg/png.

The reason being that if you download a png file you have no idea if its been converted from jpg, if it’s a screenshot of a jpg, or if it’s been subjected to lossy reencoding by a tool or a website upload process.

The only thing you can really do to try and see if the file you’ve downloaded has suffered encoding loss is to do an image search on it and see if there are any better quality versions out there. You’d do the exact same thing with a jxl file.

One apple (223 g) is supposed to be 116 calories.

The SSN system is one of the more moronic things the US does, which is really saying something.