Imagine someone writing a story where, for example, Christopher Robin kills someone, and profiting from it? Would you be happy having your childhood memories of reading Winnie the Pooh tainted like that?
Interesting that you chose this example, because it has already happened in a commercially-released horror film. The result wasn’t in any way damaging to the legacy of the original work; all the books, adaptations, and such that kids love are still available. All that ended up happening was that people who like that particular sort of thing gained a new movie to watch, people who don’t like it can ignore it, and pop culture as a whole keeps chugging along undamaged. All our childhood memories of Pooh are still the same ones we had before this movie came out.
We are already seeing this in the real world, where Disney cartoons are public domain, but the characters, having been used in consecutive works, cannot be used by anyone other than them.
Nobody’s legacy is “tarnished” or otherwise damaged by things other people create. The original is still there, while new things get to express their take on the characters and/or the rest of the material. Derivative works add to the sum total of culture, they don’t subtract from it, and the Public Domain denotes the part of culture we all own together and can develop new works about freely. The freedom to do so is a good thing for everyone including cultural creators (who get to enrich their own work using our shared property) and consumers (who get more stuff they might enjoy, and if they don’t the original is still there regardless) and everyone wins. Your scenario would make nothing better for anyone.
If you restrict reuse of the characters in new work, the original would not be in the public domain. Something is either one’s property or it isn’t, and something in the public domain is everyone’s property. You can’t have the original as part of the collective repository of freely-available information and culture while still trying to make bits of it (such as its characters) not part of that.
The public domain period is when the law has agreed that the original authors no longer have exclusive rights to the material they put into the world. Trying to still, after that period has elapsed, declare the characters are still that author’s property but only if they turn up in other people’s work is a truly bizarre suggestion and I fail to see what would be gained by society in that scenario.
The original work becoming public domain, sure, but write your own characters.
I don’t understand what you’re suggesting here. How would you reconcile the original work being public domain with still wanting to restrict the use of its characters?
I had a great old typewriter I’d found at a yard sale decades ago and which was purely decorative, but my absolute favorite use for it was when I gave it to an old friend who had just helped me move apartments. That person was really happy to have it, and being able to gift it with gratitude fulfilled me far more than owning the thing ever had.