[Micah Davis]

A cultural close parallel until the invention of Parachronics, Derivative on Q5 diverged with the failure of the 1835 Copyright Act in the United States to increase the duration of a copyright. The term remained fourteen years. The one optional renewal was abolished by the Radical Republicans, caught up in the ideology of free labor. Iterative fiction, building on its predecessors, grew to dominate American literature and eventually its film industry. Derivative's America produces a wide variety of movies, TV shows, video games, and novels that would in other worlds have been illegal and science fiction and fantasy are the dominant genres. On the downside, much of Derivative's fiction is dominated by a handful of milieus and mythos.

Ordinarily, White Star engages in a tidy cultural product exchange with other high-tech parallels, but Homeline's own restrictive copyright laws make it difficult to turn a profit on basically any popular fiction from Derivative - For example, "Imperial Folly", a Star Wars based movie directed by Christopher Nolan, is hailed as a critical masterpiece on Derivative - But it's illegal to reproduce for profit on Homeline. With plenty of other exploitable cultural wells more useable, like Gallatin or Cherokee, White Star wrote off Derivative (hence the name). Without any particularly strong reason to do so, the patrol itself has historically maintained basically no presence on Derivative.

The massive, dominant fan cultures of Derivative, however, produce truly remarkable volumes of low cost, high quality goods within fandoms that are also prominent on Homeline. Swagmen and freelancers with a conveyor make good money smuggling these goods back to Homeline, where they can be sold for a tidy profit.