Is 20-30 authors per year making it big really worth the massive suffocation that prevents tens of thousands of authors from writing the stories that are in their hearts?

They do that anyway today. You really think authors, book writing being the lucrative industry for writers that it is, are suing Universal/Sony/whoever to prevent their IP being infringed?

I do really want a world however where fans/communities can riff on and make derivative works of culturally relevant material without being legally nuked from orbit. The last few weeks have been amazing in the gaming world, creativity abounds and there seem to be no limits as to what we can redesign to our own whims.

I've always found that defending laws that don't benefit people to be a stange attitude on a place called "hacker news".

Creative people should be able to create. Trademark/copyright laws, protecting assets for the great-grandchildren of who actually created the art, has never been a positive. The only people who benefit, are themselves not creative (or else they would create, instead of defending "rights" and "image").

>but how is using StarCraft and its assets in your random AI game okay? How is it not ok? What is the issue exactly? From what I can tell it's totally free, and has an indication it is a fan game on the bottom of the screen.

>Copyright sucks, and Disney is bad etc, but how is using StarCraft and its assets in your random AI game okay?

Because it's cool.

> creators should be allowed to exert control over how their assets and brand are used

I hate to be glib, but no they shouldn't.

Creators should be allowed to create things and sell them. No one, whether the creator, or the company the creator worked for when they first created the thing, should be able to stop someone else from creating something.