But I think the middle piece, the addition of the professional creative resources, or the addition of commercial distribution, is important. A big part of how our culture is creative is how it tells and retells stories. And we can’t do that with very many of our stories, and those we can are so old that they’re not always going to translate and resonate and we’re being hindered in our storytelling because of those restrictions. There are derivative works all over, some of them absolute genius, some of them yes are derivative of derivatives. But when they’re illegal and when they’re restricted, I don’t think we’re better off for it. And absolute crap that exists in the Austen genre doesn’t really change my mind about that, which I find kind of interesting :-)

Derivative works exist whether their sources are copyrighted or not. Certainly, the smooth production you get from an editor working on a commercial work can make it more successful. So one possibility is that a commercially successful (and copyright-compliant) derivative work is going to beget more.

Or perhaps it isn’t a work’s derisiveness that makes it successful, perhaps it’s just genre. Jane Austen is fun to spoof because she was a satirist herself. She’s popular today because her central theme of love’s power to overcome class and wealth resonates with our cultural obsession with free will and ‘the american dream’ – it is up to us to work hard and do right, and everything will work out.