The point you make here is about the control of the flow.
If there are no knock offs at all the entire flow is centralized from the source.
However with hundreds of thousands of knockoffs the power is distributed among persons.
And this translates to views, ads, subscribers, popularity. Which translates to strengthening a brand.
Such as for example we all know about the classic case of where the internet killed the traditional newspapers and tv. This is because it disrupted the flow of information.
Now I notice that the current trend that goes on the very last 10 years or so and keeps getting even bigger. Is that artistic and technical people disrupt the notion of branding and IPs massively.
Such as for example the most notable cases:
- Mass effect female character was purposefully designed not to look good enough (or at least exactly as the same as the reference model) and some modders took the initiative to fix the design.
- Also some fans were really unsatisfied with that Mario game and it only took a simple sketch to make that “Bowsette” character go viral. And currently is the most popular character on the series, not even created by Nintendo at all.
- Some person created his own Tomb Raider game in Unreal (Dagger Of Xian), as a straight derivative from the classic TR2 series. And people loved it far better than the current direction of the series because it brought that original look and feel that now is lost.