Question: What do the following have in common? The Death Star, Hogwarts, USS Enterprise, Gotham City

Answer: They are locations, settings, backdrops— all part of a larger body of respective work– that are the copyrighted intellectual property of their creators.

Say you wanted to create derivative work, say, a novel or video game or drawing, and place it in those locations, technically you can’t. You can if you consider fan fiction (’fanfic’ for short), but don’t ever expect to do anything with it beyond your own personal amusement. Build as little as a fan site, one that celebrates a franchise, and you could be beamed up to the USS Litigation. This has a long history and is certainly not new (flashback: Wired, Dec. 1996).

Enter Saijo City. Saijo exists as a newborn franchise that could be any one of those works of fiction. There are characters and there is the place of the city itself. Saijo’s genre is cyberpunk, set in a near future of maybe 60-100 years out.

• Read on at: http://www.ericrice.com/blog/2007/07/19/complicated-simplicity-the-saijo-city-project/
• Submitted by: Sven Neumann
• Submitted: 14 Dec 07