It's because the names drive sales. It's the reason groups like MMC, FP and MT have them, after all. They don't need names. They could just sell their product as "shape-changing robot toy" in a plain brown box.

The classic story of the importance of tradenames is Ivory Soap, which is a brand that still exists today. When Ivory Soap came into being, soap was not sold in the same sort of units in which its sold today, it came in giant blocks. Those blocks were a mixture of fat and lye, and when you went to the store, the shopkeep would slice you off a chunk of soap. Soap did not mix very evenly, so if you got an early slice of soap, it would be more fat than lye, and it would feel greasy after washing (dishes, clothes, yourself, whatever you cleaned with the soap). If you came in towards the end of that chunk, you'd get a slice from the bottom, which was more lye than fat, and it would burn a bit, causing rashes, stinging eyes, that sort of thing.

What you wanted was a nice middle slice of the soap, where it was all mixed pretty evenly, just enough lye to get you clean, and just enough fat to keep it from burning. Along came Ivory Soap. They had discovered a way to make the soap mix evenly throughout, so no matter which slice of soap you got, it would be ok. They became hugely successful. Before, soap was soap, so you just asked for soap, but not people had a problem... some soap was better than other soap. Customers learned this, and began to ask for Ivory Soap specifically, because they knew it was better than the generic. Other companies, without the chemical expertise to mix their soap evenly, attempted to use the same name, and people were fooled, and bought old fashioned poorly-mixed soap instead. Lawsuits ensued, and Ivory Soap forced them to stop so that consumers could get what they asked for.

That's the value of a brand. MMC has a strong brand. FP has a strong brand. MT has a strong brand. More people will buy the exact same product from MMC than they would buy from someone they've never heard of, because they have an expectation of quality based upon that brand.

If you come across some KO with a name like 'Super Robot Warrior' or something, that description is shared across several manufacturers of varying quality. You don't know what you're getting, and thus most people will pay less, regardless of the quality of the item.

That, in turn, hurts quality. People might be willing to blow $100 on an MMC Feralcon, but they're not going to spend that on a Super Robot Warrior bird man, even if the quality is identical, because they can't know for sure what that quality is until they've already bought it. That gamble reduces the value of the product to the consumer. If Super Robot Warrior wants to make a top notch 3P quality item, they can't match MMC, because they won't get as many sales, and fewer units moved means a higher cost per unit, which means less profit, which means corners have to be cut... and thus lower quality.

The brand not only protects the consumer by letting them know where the goods came from, it helps the seller by letting them effectively communicate their standards to consumers. In a situation like China, especially a decade ago, where brands are less stable, prices are in the basement because quality is unpredictable.

It doesn't just hurt big companies, it hurts everyone. Wong Faye, the famous pop star, revealed in an interview that (a decade ago, at least), she could only make a profit on her album for three months. After that, everyone had cheap knockoff copies. She was the biggest singing sensation in the most populous country in the world, and had trouble making ends meet. She had to be constantly on tour to make a living, sponsor everything she could, sell more rights to big companies that she would if she were in the US, and couldn't put out new albums very fast, because she was too busy. Worse, all that wear and tear on the performer has health repercussions.

So who made money off of all that? The big companies. Why? Because they sold the discs people used to pirate her albums. They owned the factories where that stuff got done. The guys who owned the venues where she performed made a fortune too. They all benefited unfairly from being able to undercut her sales, and all the man on the street got out of it was slightly cheaper CDs. China does have the weakest IP protection of a major industrialized nation, at least internally, and they're no leveller's paradise - the gap between the haves and have-nots are worse there than anyplace. Stroll through Hong Kong sometime, from the grungier parts of the peninsula down to the glitzy tourist shops and you'll see some shockingly stark inequality. That's what happens. The corruption and the weak IP protection are not at odds - they go hand in hand.

The biggest benefit, though, is medical. Medical discoveries aren't made by bored enthusiasts over the weekend. They require tons of dedicated research, years of expertise, and amazingly expensive equipment. Without a patent system to protect the profitability of all that, no one is going to invest in it. No charity organization comes anywhere close to raising the kind of capital investment needed for these projects, and not one of the various 'race for the cure' groups has yet discovered a cure laying on the side of the road, despite all the people they send searching.

This is hardly news though, it's in the US constitution, as one of the founding articles. It's not even an amendment, which means that to the nation's founders, it actually outranked freedom of speech on their to-do list. From article 1, section 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The issue we face today is not whether their foundational logic was wrong. It was not. The issue is that part about 'limited times'. Certainly granting a corporate copyright on software that lasts 120 years is absurd, but protecting an artist from seeing their work stolen away for the profit of another is entirely just. Middle grounds can be found, but to pretend that the entire system is a mistake is a flawed premise to begin from.

 

No you're just like "there is no problem for anyone and if there is I don't care." Well, bully for you. If you took a few moments to think about what would happen if nobody owned their intellectual property and everything was immediately public domain you'd see that big franchises like, you know, the Transformers wouldn't even exist.

You wouldn't have nothing. You'd have Dracula. You'd have religions and their mythology. You would have what is public domain. But you would NOT have something like Transformers with an expansive mutli-national toyline and blockbuster movie series that exist solely to fuel a large company's IP. All those things are to fuel merchandise. Without that IP; without the licensing or the merchandise there's no motive to make Transformers as big as it is or even an actual brand.

What you're doing is not thinking through the consequences of everything being public domain after it's published. You seem to think it's all just be like the 3rd party forum here - people making cool shit based on what you like. And that's true to a certain extent. But, like the 3rd party stuff, you also wouldn't get a very big push for any new ideas. And, also like 3Ps, you certainly wouldn't get expansive world-building.

I don't have to speculate on this. There are public domain characters. They are not as fleshed out as ones whose IPs are owned by a company that can profit from them. This is not a coincidence.

And I haven't actually posited any solutions. But it is clearly impossible to have a big franchise like Transformers; you'd be stuck with generic stuff or things based on very old culture (like mythology). And it would be demeaning and exploitive to all creators. You're not wrong about my feelings on that.

The "freedom of cultural property"? Well, that's what IP expiration is about. And, if you want to argue that IPs should expire after a few decades (as was originally intended) that's a different discussion. I don't think I disagree on that point.

Arguing they shouldn't exist at all is just tedious. If you really can't think of any artists I'm referring to at all, then there's no point in even going further on this. You can't think of a creator who became successful because they made something people like. You can't think of a creator that got kinda screwed because of a lack of creator's rights. Very well.

We are not talking about ideas. We are talking about profit derived from ideas. Maybe it's all semantics to you (maybe you're arguing semantics and word choice all this time and not the point), but there's a VERY big difference. It's all the difference.

If Hasbro/Takara couldn't copyright the character of "Optimus Prime", "Megatron", or "Cybertron" and use that to sell toys in a likeness only they own we would not have Transformers. We may have gotten Diaclone and Microman, but it would not be Transformers and it would not be nearly as popular today.

We may not even have gotten Diaclone AS Diaclone. The brand would be worthless because anyone could make something under the Diaclone brand. Branding wouldn't even exist.

 

This discussion got real heavy, real fast. I can't just drive-by armchair backseat CEO anymore. But I'm going to try to anyways.

It can be argued that while IP may hamper "evolution" (improving current ideas), it promotes "revolution" (completely new ideas). To argue that culture is being set back you need good arguments on how hampering the first outweighs gains in the second.

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I was going to suggest the idea that IP exclusive rights expire after a certain amount of time but that the IP owner would still have ownership rights. As in, they cannot stop others from using it, but can still get royalties. Thinking it over though even this ideas has problems.

First, the onus to prove and get the royalties would fall on the IP owner. Is that fair?

Second, people and companies are cutthroat. Let's say DC Superman was free and clear. If I was Marvel, I could introduce a hero called Super-man and slowly show his fall from grace. Doesn't have to be a villain, just unlikeable (basically Sentry in red&blue). DC sees it's brand and profits drop. They responds by introducing a villain called SSpider-mon, a Jamaican, Nazi, mass murdering psychopath. A bitter bash-war ensues bring each other down and we are left with only 'Betty & Veronica' comics. One can argue that DC and Marvel are too smart to get to this, but there's nothing stopping a third company trying to make a name for itself from doing it.

 

Now I don't remember what I researched last time. Some things are typically lifetime of the creator + lots of years while others are typically a couple decades. and I keep forgetting the differences between different kinds of IP, so no surprise most people don't know either.

I don't know. This conversation has become unpleasant, so I'm done.

 

You can find knockoffs of the G1 combiner teams (the ones with the yellow cardboard packaging) and other Transformer toys at Toys R Us in the Philippines.

Walmart's China stores sell knockoffs of the live-action movie and Animated toys.

Multinational retailers' IP compliance policies are largely tailored for whichever market they're selling in.

It's a good thing that we're seeing them go in this direction. I reckon that the others may try too if sales of their third-party Transformers don't do well.