You think that's cynical? I must be some avatar curmudgeonliness then.
I'm pretty sure that what's actually going on is that everything we think of as a 'profession' is that way, and that people are in fact dying because of it.
If he's the "creator" of record, then he can give away characters, setting, plots &c. The words and concepts, as you suggest. So derivative works based on the concepts would be kosher, photocopies of the existing books wouldn't. New art based on old scripts might fly, though my gut instinct says it wouldn't, but rewrites with new art probably would, that sort of thing.
I think he's pointing out that an anticompetitive cabal already exists, so assuming it would continue to follow anticompetitive practices is not a leap of any kind.
It really isn't. As long as you can watch YouTube and maintain the confidence to ruin some material while you're learning, it isn't difficult to pick up.
And once I tell that to whichever zoomers or younger person I'm talking to (this talk usually happens while we're at whichever Home Depot-analogous store is physically closest to their home, while I'm getting them set up with a Starter Toolbox), they usually take to it just fine.
Thank you for saying it. Bed bugs can go literally three years without eating. Using the mixed-toxin (different bedbug poison for each treatment, minimum 2 treatments) approach usually works, but the only way to definitely kill existing bugs and eggs is to get every part of an object to over 125f. AFAIK, 125f is the instant-death point. That is, any bug or egg the hits 125f at all is dead. Otoh, 113f requires 90 minutes of exposure before the bugs are killed, and the eggs require 118f for 90 minutes.
I've done that (maybe it was fizzbuzz, now that I'm thinking about it) and boy howdy does that get the people you're interviewing with agitated. Saying "I'm interviewing for a architect level container orchestration position. If I'm reinventing the wheel writing algorithms, something is terribly wrong" shuts them up, but doesn't make them any happier.
Lots of examples. 'Thorsons Introductory Guide to Medical Herbalism' is, for example, both required reading for many modern medical degrees and a collection of hundreds (of documented; more realistically, thousands) of years of the medical practice of herbalism.
And if you want some anecdata, I've used plenty of preparations from that text for nausea, fever, menstrual cramps (not mine, clearly), poor clotting, sinus congestion, and likely some things that are slipping my mind.
Plants are where we get a lot of medicines from, and while modern pharmaceutical companies may prefer that information not get spread around (it's basically the whole reason we don't have a widespread practice of western medical herbalism in the US), but the fact remains that if you know how to get the medicine out of the plant, it's still totally possible to do so.