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You aren't wrong. Which is why it's so much more remarkable when people do turn away from fame. The example probably most near and dear to myself is Bill Watterson. There is something transcendent about becoming the best, a worldwide sensation, and then walking away and living a nice quiet life in the Midwest. Wikipedia says he has a wife, no mention of kids, but as private as he is I think we only know about the wife from public real estate transactions, since it's only mentioned alongside him buying a house.
I kind of love this. It makes it easier for the art to stand on it's own. I'm not fretting squaring my love for Calvin & Hobbes as a child with Watterson's political beliefs, his support for or lack thereof for Israel, which party he supports, his twitter beefs, outrageous bullshit he said for attention, etc. I know virtually nothing about him except by proxy from his art.
Even more than that, he stood to make millions from licensing Calvin & Hobbes for merchandise, but refused, as he wanted the comic to stand on its own. Every piece of C&H merchandise you've ever seen (including the infamous sticker of Calvin going for a piss) was unauthorised. You have to respect that kind of integrity.
My wife and I had to hand sew a Hobbes stuffed tiger for our son when he was born, it wasn't until that moment that I realized he never merchandized the characters.
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It actually saddens me that after he dies (sad enough on its own) that someone, somewhere is going to roll a freight trains worth of money up to his heirs and convince them to sign the rights over, then we're getting saturated with C & H content.
One of my favorite factors in the comics is that Calvin and Hobbes have no "voice" so every person has a slightly different version of them in their own head.
When they eventually make a CGI movie and they're voiced by Chris Pratt and Seth Rogen it will genuinely diminish the art, I'd argue.
That would depend on how his will is written. Presumably he could transfer the rights to a trust with instructions to not permit anything.
You'll have to wait seventy five years after his death for AI Pratt and Rogen to voice them.
Yes, he can do a lot of things to try and restrict any use of his IP after his death. Most of those things can be circumvented if they're willing to bring freight trains worth of money.
I can say on a professional level that even an extremely well-drafted trust with 'airtight' language still fails if you don't have someone in charge who is truly aligned with your vision.
I sometimes point out what happened to The Ford Foundation which, after Henry and Edsel died, made it about thirty years before its original mission was fully compromised.
What can be done if he transfers ownership of his IP to a trust before his death?
I don't think you can really compare a foundation that has a board of directors etc etc with a law firm administering a trust that holds the IP.
The easiest thing he can do is transfer the IP rights to an irrevocable trust, and dictate that the IP rights are to never be transferred to any entity, nor should any new media be produced, and basically to preserve the IP as closely to the state it currently exists in until the copyright expires.
And fund it well enough that the Trustees can go after any entities trying to infringe on the IP. And it can produce revenue by making new printings of the comics (without editing original content too much) to keep that fund topped off. And I guess extra money over that amount can be kicked off to particular beneficiaries, but make it clear they DON'T get to dictate how the trust property is used or make demands of the Trustees.
And pick a law firm that's been around for 70+ years to act as trustee, and otherwise has minimal financial incentive to milk the trusteeship for fees.
The biggest risk at that point is the Trust depleting its liquid assets and thus being put in a position where it 'has' to start selling or borrowing against the IP rights in order to continue operations, since that is the main and primary asset of value it has.
Even if the trust's explicit purpose is to prevent C & H adaptations from being produced as long as possible, if the Trustees believe that there will not be sufficient funds to carry out that purpose, they can potentially argue that selling off one piece of the IP rights is justifiable since that is the only way they can continue to operations and that is still in the 'best interests' of the trust itself.
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