I think that's brilliant, I think you're right, and I think you need to start accumulating bits from ML to revise for Vol. II of Making Book.

Whatever moves us or matters to us will show up in the stories we tell, whether or not we have a socially approved outlet for those stories.

"But what would happen if...?"

When that question grabs you by the throat, finding the answer is what is important, not whether the context is original.

Personally, I’m convinced that the legends of the Holy Grail are fanfic about the Eucharist.

Possibly enough, yes. Something I noticed as a young'n.

I see it the other way around: Believing that fanfic wrongs you and that it should be stopped is where entitlement comes into play. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of fanfiction based on my work, but I firmly believe it wouldn't be right to interfere ... in the unlikely event that anyone wrote some.

What if characters in this situation acted like real people?

Or, more specifically and more frequently, what if women in this situation acted like real women?

Long ago in the ages of middle and high school a friend and I had a long conversation about a series of books we would write called "Plus one sensible," all of which would be retellings of classic tales with a sensible person either substituted for the main character or as an additional member of whatever cast was involved.

One particularly insane idea was "Ophelia's Oilcan" which was a rewrite of Hamlet with Ophelia as the one sensible character. Things ended pretty much the same (we realized while writing it that "you can't stop Hamlet") but at least someone was present to realize how much things were falling apart.

Of course, this kind of thing is almost omnipresent in modern day parody. Scott Evil from the Austin Powers movies is one of the best examples ever of a fully functional, integrated "plus one sensible."

But then that applies to all myth cycles. They're stories told for instruction, or illustration, or to excite or otherwise entertain as their primary aim, not as pieces of a grand unified story. If you look at everyone's favourite collection of myth, the Old Testament, the stories don't make a lot of sense all bound together, and even directly contradict each other (two creation myths?).

Or the New Testament, what is that but a collection of Jesus fanfic? Okay, maybe not. Maybe the gnostic texts are more like fanfic, while the New Testament is part of the official Bible Cycle(tm), approved by the authors' heirs.

But it seems to me that fanfic is the natural mode for story-telling in our species, that stories (like most ideas) benefit us by being shared. Once you put an idea in someone's head, it doesn't belong to the original storyteller any more, it belongs to both parties. Trying to control what happens to your story when it's in someone else's head is folly, and trying to control the expression of what's in their head under the illusion that you own it is dangerously close to folly piled on folly.

It's the difference between filling in the spaces in a paint-by-number kit and starting from the bare canvas. The thing that's wholly yours is going to contain something that the kit pic never will.

All these books do somewhat of what Leah mentioned above: what if these characters were real people? What if these ideas really worked? What would it really be like?

I'd love to have a canonical list of such works in genre. Can anyone else think of any?

I had to ask a couple of fans NOT to make an online game of my Pit Dragon books because we were in the middle of negotations with a movie company (which like most movie deals, fell through) that wanted those rights as part of the deal.

It is true that playing in pd domains are a large part of writing, both fan and fic, whether those domains are biblical (DaVinci code etc.) or Arthurian or Arabian Nights or Sherlock Holmes. But I would think it only polite that if an author who has invented a world asks you to desist SELLING your fanfic or fangames or desist from posting them in an open forum online, that you take your passion for the place and keep it private.

Satire is, of course, something else, and protected.

Jane

You are not alone in thinking this. Something of the sort was suggested in Holy Feast and Holy Fast, which is one of the leading works on medieval food practices.

In terms of fanfic, I was taught that there are about 12 basic plotlines, and part of the trick of writing well is making that new again, with twists and turns and charecters who make you want more and more. On the other hand, it means everyone is borrowing their plot from somewhere.

That said, and as noted, extending other people's stories isn't anything new. Pepys notes in his diary going to see The Tamer Tamed, which was a Shakespeare fanplay. Who knows what Bill thought of it? I'm sure that through the ages story tellers added on to legends and made new stories with the characters. Maybe Hercules only started out with a couple of labors.

Poppy Z Brite has a comment over on the LiveJournal feed in response to this post that I found just as wierdly self-justifying as all the fandom wank. After disclosing that she's written and published what is essentially RPF (real person fic) and retold a Lovecraft story in her writing life, she then goes on to say, "Personally, when a stranger takes the liberty of writing about my characters, it makes me feel as if somebody sneaked up behind my husband and stuck a finger in his butt."

What I find curious is that it isn't her own butt in question, but one removed. If she weren't married, would there be no problem?

I've got a joke to back up this particular point:

There was once a conjurer who boasted that he had become god-like. One god happened to overhear, and challenged him to a contest.
"Can you do this?" the god asked, scooping up a handful of dirt and making it into a bird. They watched the bird fly away.
"Sure," said the conjure-man, and reached down for a handful of raw material.
"Hey," said god. "Use your own dirt."

Props to any writer who can make a story fly. None of us use our own dirt.

And some of us are merely shameless about it.

Except that it isn't, of course - comparing fanfic to paint-by-numbers is an analogy that just doesn't hold up. It seems to imply that the author is merely phoning in a piece where the work's already been done, and if you think that's something inherent in fanfic, you'd be very wrong.

(If fanfic has a counterpart in the visual arts, I'd say it's collage more than anything else. But that may be another discussion.)

I get the point you're making with a work being "wholly yours," but it seems worth pointing out (as others in this thread have done) that story is never wholly the author's; it's always remixed from bits of other plots, other characters, other archetypes, other Cool Stuff. Makers of story are more or less in the business of twiddling knobs on existing material to see what happens - fanfic is only, perhaps, the most transparent example of this because the writers haven't bothered to change the names and file off the serial numbers. And, objectively - setting aside for the moment the issue of "ownership" - why should they?

Is Odysseus "mine" to play with? Is Hamlet? How about Fagin, or Ahab? Even if I were to accept that no one could possibly write any of them as well as the "original" author (which I don't, but okay), is that enough reason to not use them as a jumping-off place for a new work? And if every other particular of plot and narrative were (somehow) original to me, is that really any less "mine" than if I changed the names and fine details but more or less wrote Moby-Dick?

[tiny, embarrassed cough]

I do understand that copying is the sincerest form of flattery. It's also fundamental: it's how we've evolved. But copyright was invented because copying became easier and easier, and copyright preserved the value of what the creator made for the creator, to encourage more people to invest in what is already a not very lucrative field (for the majority of non-Lucases of the world).

Yes, all writing cribs from previous sources. I also agree that modern changes to copyright laws have put a lock on the growth of the public domain that has been bad for artists. But there has to be a balance between outright stealing what's out there and synthesizing something new out of old. There is a difference.

I'm not sure I'm being very coherent, but in the rush to support a natural phenomena (trying to immitate what we love) I think we have to think about the consequences of wide distribution of the copies of someone else's creation.

Best,
Alice

How? Is literature a zero-sum game?

As a categorical statement this is plainly false, unless you really want to argue that, for instance, King Leir is superior to Shakespeare's reworking. In fact literature is full of people writing characters better than the originators. The fetish of "originality" is a quirk of the modern age, not an eternal human verity. Maybe it's a good quirk. I'd say the jury's still out on that.

As to whether fanfic can be upsetting or hurtful, why, of course it can. Was Teresa saying fanfic is always wonderful, or that its effects are always benign? Of course not. Her point is that discussions of fanfic and its rights and wrongs could benefit from a broader view of how, historically, people have told stories and made texts. She's suggesting we be less provincial. Arguing with her as if the question on the table were "Fanfic: Bad or Good?" is not engaging with the actual matter at hand.

Of what does this "dilution" consist? By what signs can we recognize that it has happened? What are some mechanisms by which it operates? Please give examples.

The traditional claim of Christians wasn't that Jesus was "a nice man who taught us how to live". It was that he was the Author, inserted into his own story, as a Gary-Stu no less.

This makes his fate inevitable, too. Think about it: a Mary Sue is so incredibly annoying in fiction, but in real life...! It's no accident that he was killed.* Now his ressurection - that was necessitated by the plot.**

-r.

*none of his contemporaries disputed that bit, wether friend or foe.
**you know, The Plot.

I guess I don't know what that means.

As to what I mean by dilution, let me start with an aside by using comic books as an example. There you create a set of characters, place them in ever-changing environments, and, if you're lucky, the characters last for decades on monthly installments. Well, actually, they don't. The original characters become stale. The story lines repeat. Sales drop. So the owner of the characters hires new talent to reshape the characters, create new sets of story lines that fit these new personalities, and go from there. Success! Until, after a while, that flags too. So, we repeat, ad nauseum. After enough intallments, the current version of the characters bears only the slimmest relationship to the original. This works in the comic book field, because the characters are not owned by their creators, the audience keeps changing, and this is the expectation.

For a book, where the characters do belong to the creator, and the creator has invested in that personality and that world, the constant "what ifs" published by others makes these characters and this world stale. Unlike comic books, the world created by the author is meant to be finite. There may be sequels, but they fit withing the framework that the author has created. The fanfic dilutes the creator's work, because it can become lost in what others have created.

George Lucas, as I understand it, has been pretty good about letting fanfic flourish. But I think it's up to the creator to decide whether it's okay, or not. And given the wide and fast distribution of fanfic these days, I don't have a problem with the base line being: fanfic is not okay unless the creator says it is.

Best,
Alice

I recieved a number of "dilution" arguments when I suggested a 42 year copyright term. Writers said their original works would be "diluted" if their work went public domain and Hollywood came in after and made the movie version. It would have "diluted" the original somehow.

So, before AliceB is completely scared off by the sharpening of knives and pitchforks, lets be clear that her argument isn't her's alone. It is an already existing meme that is fairly widespread. It isn't personal to her alone.

So is Robin Hood stale now, because so many authors have written Robin Hood stories? Is King Arthur stale? Is Sherlock Holmes stale? (And btw has anyone read Michael Chabon's brilliant The Final Solution? Which is, of course, fanfic?) Dracula? Romeo and Juliet? Red Harvest?

You actually make the point that when a specific character/story becomes old, the best solution is to bring in new writers. Why is that? Because new authors actually can reimagine works in interesting ways. So in the comic book world, it's well understood that many authors can create interesting versions of the same character. The only difference between that and fanfic is a particular contractual legal relationship that says it's okay.

This is somewhat wrapped up in the issue of "canon," I think. I recall a story in which Frank Miller was asked a convention whether Dark Knight had "really happened." "Of course not," said Miller. "It's a comic book."

I assume that the additional volumes have not hurt sales--I don't think fanfic does. To the contrary, it probably is a great vehicle for advertizing the original. But it doesn't help the original story.

It's a value assessment, not an assessment of volume.

Best,
Alice

Don't mean to pile on here (like Patrick, I'm curious to hear how it dilutes). But I think it's the opposite of dilution. Rather than diluting the original product, fanfiction enhances and intensifies it. One function of fanfic is to analyze characters and offer reactions to what they've said or done. Good, insightful fanfic has made me love and understand the original characters more. It's brought characters to my attention I might otherwise overlooked, or shed light on some aspect of a relationship that I didn't quite grasp. It's multiple conversations going on at once, one between the original writer and the reader, and another between the fanfic authors and the reader. The reader comes away with a lot of intellectual riches. There's no down side, unless the reader is reading bad fanfic, and why would anyone want to do that? (Fanfic, like everything else, has good, bad, and awful. The ninety percent of everything is crap rule.)

Alex, rewriting characters can be absolutely fabulous. I don't dispute it. However, I think creators should have a say, while they are alive, about whether anyone can do it. I won't rehash what I've said, but I don't think I'm alone, or irrational, in that belief.

Alice

I had not thought of that, and it's given me something to think about. I guess my concern is that an author may not agree with the fanfic's author's take on the character involved.

See, I don't dislike fanfic, per se. It can, like a lot of things, be both good and bad. But I still think it should be the creator's choice about whether it should be published--and as I have said before, the nature of distribution these days is such that putting in on the web can be the equivalent of a publication (in fact may get more readers in some cases).

Alice

I don't think it works that way, though.

'Dilution' is one of those vague terms that can mean different things to different people. For me, it involves first and second impressions.

F'instance, my first exposure to Buffy et al was through sexually explicit fanfic (most of it bad). Ergo, when I finally saw the series (I didn't own a TV during the series' first run) my reaction was not what the original creators intended--or wanted, I'm sure. I found myself wondering when/why character1/character2 so much that the stories took back seat. I lost interest completely shortly after.

I have no doubt I would have the same reaction to other fanfic/original work, so I avoid the former as much as possible. I consider it the only way for me to be fair to the original creator. YMMV.

I disagree. Here's an alternative: let the market (not so much the commercial market but the literary market) decide. Those works which find an audience will flourish; those which don't will be ignored.

Now, I think creators have a very strong right to be paid for their creations. But I don't think they have a right -- that is, I don't think they should have a right -- to control what happens to those creations.

Which brings us back to a subject which has been brought up in earlier threads about copyright: mandatory licensing. The precedent here is from music: if you want to record another's song, you have to pay the composer -- but they can't deny permission.

This, I would argue, is clearly what should happen with literary characters and worlds. Anyone who wants to write the starship Enterprise should have to pay a percentage of the take to Paramount. But I don't think that Paramount should get to decide what works get written, get published, get sold or get read.

Bad works, damaging works -- as decided by readers, not writers -- will be ignored. How many revisions of Odysseus there've been -- most of them simply ignored in favor of Homer. But those with some real power (Dante comes to mind) add to our view of the character. (And, of course, this is decided on an individual level -- the literary market just being a sum of the individual decisions.)

Copyright should be a vehicle for making sure artists get paid. But it shouldn't be a vehicle for control.

The entire cycle of stories, plays and poems about Troy is fanfic to Homer, including the Aeneid. And then the ghost of Virgil guides Dante throught Hell. Now there's a fanfic touch if there ever one.

I stand before you confessing to fanfic myself, only I got paid for it. In my first book, a fantasy, I had a group of travellers who try to cross a mountain range, get turned back by a magically-induced snowstorm, find a passage under the mountain in which they are ambushed and lose one of their number who turns up again later in another guise, revealed as a great magic-worker.

Nobody's ever called me on it. It might be because it was a different group of characters, doing something completely different for a different purpose, and the lost character turns out to be, well, different.

So what? Well, there's something not kosher about using the very same characters that have been created by someone else, to do the very same things in the same way in the same setting to get the same outcome. Is it still so if you change one of those things? I... think not, tentatively. There's a sort of line, somewhere. I know how Patrick feels about boundary conditions, and anyway I'm not up to defining this one, so I can't say where the line is. It's over yonder, somewhere. I don't think I crossed it. I think it is possible to come a lot closer than I did, and still not cross it. But I think it does exist, and it can be crossed.

(Sorry, a lot of posts popped up while I was composing my earlier comment about dilution)

That's a good example, except that it's a hazard of comics as a medium, isn't it? By the nature of their publishing style, characters get so many writers and retoolings over the decades they keep getting reinvented. That's not necessarily a bad thing, except that it makes comics so cyclical that characters that are readable this decade may not be the next even though they have the same name and costume.

I agree that single-creator books are a different situation.

But I still think it should be the creator's choice about whether it should be published--and as I have said before, the nature of distribution these days is such that putting in on the web can be the equivalent of a publication

I think the original creator's wishes do have to be respected. If a creator says outright "please don't write fanfic based on my characters," then I think people need to follow that. A lot of creators don't mind, don't care, or take it as the highest form of flattery. This has more to do with consideration and respect than copyright laws. (fanfiction dot net will not archive works if the author has issued a public statement to please stop doing fanfic.) But that's a separate issue from whether fanfic is intrinsically bad for the original work. I tend to think the original works can stand on their own feet sturdily. The bad fanfic is just so much noise, and the good only adds to the dialogue.

Under the right circumstances, when properly chartered, government can play a positive role in ensuring something approaching justice in the first matter. Its cannot play a just role in the second.

Compulsory licenses that would allow paid fan fiction, from a copyright point of view, would mean that two of the most complicated concepts in literature, characters and worlds, would have to be put on some sort of bureaucratic look up table and a price put to it. What percentage do you pay Lucas to put Chewbacca in your shortstory? Or just a wookie? Or to set a short story on Planet-Wookie? A flat rate? All different rates? And if so, how much? What about action figure wookies?

That's one of the actual beauties of copyright: licensing is left to the copyright holders rather than trying to have some bureaucratic nightmare try to create a single look up table to apply to every possible derivation. THe author decides how much they are willing to accept for their works or to license their works.

At that point, this would still prohibit a lot of current fan fic, because current fan fic is by fans who aren't charging money for their works. I don't believe you can use the "compulsory license" to make a cover of some popular song and then give that song away. I believe the original artist must get some money somehow, some way. Which means most current fan fic would still not be allowed by "compulsory licenses".

Compulsory licenses would solve the derivative problem. The only problem is that it would create a nightmare of bureacracy. It's the modern day equivalent of communism being the worker's paradise. In theory, sure, in reality, never.

OK. Is the discussion about "dilution" one of justice or asthetics? I was thinking it was about "justice" but perhaps you were thinking "asthetics"?

Greg, you're generalizing writers' motivations on copyright again. I still disagree with you on a copyright term that ends prior to the death of the author, and yet I have no problem with the idea of fanfic. As far as I'm concerned, the term of copyright has more to do with fair compensation than anything else.

Fanfic falls under the debate about what constitutes fair use, and where spin-off works fall. There's a reason it seems to be at least partly the authors' will whether fanfic is a good thing, or a bad thing but not worth pursuing, or acceptable, or flat out not wanted under any circumstances.

I certainly don't think that fanfic, even bad fanfic that misinterprets the characters or the feel, 'dilutes' the original work, any more than a badly-made but legally-agreed-to movie does. If someone is concerned that it will do so, that someone doesn't read the fanfic, or watch the authorized film, for that matter.

There are stories whose fanfic, or even movies or anthologies or other legal tie-ins I haven't perused, or watch/read while mentally rewriting the character names to something saner, because I honestly can't see the connection. (This latter includes bad Arthurian films that make more sense set in Ruritania than even an idealized ahistoric Britain, as well as at least two damn good fanfics which could have worked far better as "original works" than some original works do whose serial numbers were inadequately filed off. Again, not the legal/copyright aspect of fanfic.)

Some works seem to be whole and intact on their own.

But some seem to work best in interaction with other things, with a sort of busy, messy, chaotic whirl of activity. I can't explain why I choose to read the fanfic of some universes but not others, except that some universes seem to be improved by the byplay.

And on those rare occasions a work really does seem weaker and worse after reading its good fanfic, I don't blame the fanfic writers....

(For me, when I fantasize about those far-off days when my own books are out there and some crazy kid writes fanfic, you know what my greatest fear is so far? Reading one that so completely screws up and miswrites my characters and their motivations that I can't stop myself and I say something stupid and mean to the hapless kid. Who won't deserve it, and I'll get a reputation as one nasty -----.)

Yup, single creator comic books are a different animal. For example, in Japan, you have the same writer-artists working (sometimes) for decades with the same pool of characters, with the same basic plot premise. (See: Ranma 1/2, Oh My Goddess!, etc.) Of course, the kind of repetition and variations you get there is different - you can take the same basic awkwardly funny scenario, and treat it in several different ways, and at greater length. (It can be equally bad, as anyone who's ever read Dragonball Z will tell you.)

Our continual retoolings and retconnings in American super-hero comics are as good an example as you can get of the need to arbitrarily change stuff in order to be original. (Combined with a really odd production model that doesn't lend itself to stable creative teams.)

And as long as I am on this tangent, this is probably one of the explanations for why manga is so popular right now: kids love long, complicated stories about their heroes* that are internally consistent. Heroic people + engaging plot + cliffhangers. You know, genere fiction. American comics aren't really good at much outside the cliffhanger bit. I mean, when was the last time Superman saved the world...but it took 36 issues to do it?

*sorry, kids don't like real anti-heroes, Mr. Miller and Mr. Alan Moore. Those are for grownups. Fake anti-heroes are much better.

That would make an interesting anthology. Anonymous works of erotica from famous authors. But we're not telling who.

Greg, scratch my grumble at the top of my last post: Patricks' Aesthetics vs. compensation is a much better summation of what i was trying to say there. The whole dilution debate here is *aesthetic*. So, I'm sorry about the grumble. If I could write as brief and pithy as he, well, maybe I'd be published.

The culture in which you grew up is a big part of who you are, and a big part of any culture is its mythology.

For instance, the Greek heroes were a big part of the imaginative life of 19th-century kids. That's still true to some extent today, but I'd argue that the positions formerly occupied by Zeus, Hera and Hercules have largely been usurped by Superman(TM), Wonder Woman(TM) and Luke Skywalker(TM).

I'm not arguing that creative minds aren't entitled to financial reward for their labors. However, the trend for effectively perpetual copyright seems to me excessive and actually slightly dangerous. When was Superman's first appearance? 1936ish? When did Jerry Siegel die? 1992? I dare you to post Superman fanfic on Amazon--he's got a movie coming out this summer, and the lawyers are liable to be testy.

At this writing, the character of Luke Skywalker has been part of the public consciousness for over a quarter century. He is an important component of the childhood imaginative life of an entire generation. It's darn nice of George Lucas and his minions to have come up with him and I don't argue that Lucas entitled to his share of the wealth and (to a lesser extent) kudos, both of which he has in abundance.

However, at the risk of incurring yet more wrath, I will say that my reverence for the rights of intellectual property holding corporations is somewhat limited.

Bear in mind that when we talk about intellectual property rights, we're usually not dealing with individual human beings, but rather with holding companies. Take Marvel as an excellent case in point. When it emerged from bankruptcy, Marvel comics came back with a stated business model of being a holding company rather than a creative force. Since then they've zealously sued any number of (to my mind) innocent geeks who dared use any of Marvel's characters without permission.

I see perfectly well how Marvel might think its ability to squeeze profit from, say, future video game franchises is affected by existing games that let users tailor the interface to appear suspiciously similar to Marvel's IP--I just don't give a shit.

If we as a culture have gotten to the point where the average citizen seriously values the right of Avi Arad (Marvel CEO) to buy himself a bigger jet over the right of creative kids to express themselves, then we, as a culture, are really dumb.

I'm not going to read Another Hope because the writing is painful. I agree that the author was breathtakingly naive to hope that she could get away with it. But Christ, Star Wars has been part of the public consciousness for close to three decades. It's part of the imaginative life of a generation. When, exactly, does it stop being a @$^%ing felony to play with George's toys?

I would argue that if we, as a culture, continue to insist that the right to profit trumps all other rights then we will inevitably strangle ourselves intellectually, competitively, and spiritually. Actually, I'll go even farther and say that it's already happening.

Software patents, anyone? Grr. Argh (tm)

Revisting my actual post, adding emphasis where needed:

[paste]
Mention to some authors the notion that copyright terms should be short enough to the point that they might expire while the author is still alive, and you'll hear all manner of "dilution" arguments. some of them quite forcefully, pounding of tables, etc.

I recieved a number of "dilution" arguments
[/paste]

I believe I managed to avoid using the phrase "all authors". And I sprinkled "some" and "a number of" qualifiers in my post. So, I don't believe I was generalizing for "all authors".

That you support FanFic and oppose 40 year terms is your business. But your opinion does not generalize to all authors. Some authors oppose both FanFic and any term less than Life-Plus-70 and defend their views using "dilution" arguments among other things.

I apologize if I misunderstand you, but fanfic isn't writing the same story with the same characters--it's more about expansion.

For example, perhaps I became with enamoured with the idea of the teenage Marauders in the Harry Potter series. Except they are only spoken of in flashbacks. But the imagination runs wild, and I want to know more about the Marauders. So I make up stories about young James and Remus and Sirius and Peter. I'm not writing about Harry finding the Philospher's Stone all over again. Sure, eventually James is going to meet his fate later on somewhere (unless I'm writing alternative history), but that's not what I'm writing about. I'm writing about misadventures of side characters that inspired me.

Or, maybe I follow the line of the original storyline, but deviate somewhere along the way--what it really was Snape working for Voldemort instead of Quirrel? Sure, it's a tangent, even a cannonical change, but why not if that's where my imagination wants to run?

And maybe I don't care about getting something professionally published; I just want to show it to my friends or keep it to myself. It's what I do for fun because the story given inspired me to explore something.

That's what fanfic is generally about--at least in my experience.

A different Patrick responds:
While I don't necessarily disagree with this, your argument seems to me to have little to do with fanfic generally, and more to do with quality of writing. Some fanfic is horrible, some is absolutely sublime. (A friend wrote unauthorized fanfic based on an anime series. The anime series treatment of the characters was mediocre at best, but my friend's treatment was excellent and fun to read. To compare, I found the authorized prequels of the Amber series published after Mr. Zelanzy's death to be terrible.)

See, I don't dislike fanfic, per se. It can, like a lot of things, be both good and bad. But I still think it should be the creator's choice about whether it should be published--and as I have said before, the nature of distribution these days is such that putting in on the web can be the equivalent of a publication (in fact may get more readers in some cases).

It seems that you are trying to join this argument to the dilution one. However, they seem to be two different things. Even with an author's permission, the fanfic created could be bad and make the series lose "some luster because of it."

Not just the Holy Grail, but I'd say all story cycles from pre-literate times are a form of fanfic. I first realised this when thinking about Hercules, of all people. When I look at the Labours and the other bits of myth he's involved in, they seemed to me to have the quality of somebody literate trying to paste up a bunch of stories that others just made up about their favourite hero while gathered around the campfire. Those in the oral tradition can tell tall stories without a lot of regard for continuity or the other fine sensibilities of the literate, because they're more concerned with immediate audience reaction to Hercules' bad-assedness.

Kristine, if all fanfic were as you describe, I wouldn't be defending it.

Jane, not that I don't believe you, but how can a fan own a piece of the author's fictional universe, unto being able to sue and harass the author?

Making an online game from a copyrighted work is outside anything I'd defend. So is offering fanfic for sale. I won't say I couldn't change my mind later, but for now I'm firmly of the opinion that this stuff belongs in the gift economy.

Sisuile: Thanks for letting me know I'm not the only one who thinks so. It seemed logical to me that the storymaking imagination would move from "real presence in the Eucharist" to "really real presence in the Eucharist."

Will A., that's an illuminating story. Reload the front page.

Alice, I agree that poor-quality imitation can dilute the original, but how is that unique to fanfic? Third-rate Tolkien imitations don't put a dent in my love of Tolkien, but they sure do sour me on second-rate Tolkien imitations. That's exactly the process you're describing, and it's all taken place in the commercial market.

dlnevins, the case you're talking about is Rowling vs. Stouffer, which was discussed here at length. The situation had no resemblance to fanfic. Stouffer was falsely ownership of "muggles" by right of prior use. I absolutely disagree that it's reasonable to conclude, on that basis or any other, that there's no way "...a writer can ever be completely safe from the possibility of someone popping up and attempting to claim ownership over part of their work." Mind, it's a good idea to check and make sure you haven't inadvertently duplicated something; but that possibility aside, if it's original work, it's yours.

Anyway, what's that got to do with fanfic? Most of what I see starts out with an explicit disclaimer that says they don't own the characters or setup.

Melannen, I fixed your link.

Of course, most current fan fic is illegal now, too. The only difference is that under a compulsory licensing scheme it could be published legally.

As for the bureaucratic mess... I dunno. I'm not a lawyer. So I could be wildly wrong here. But it seems to me that some fairly simple rules could be established, with some sort of arbitration board to keep costly litigation to a minimum. (Of course, we'd have to guard against creeping elimination of fair use... but that's a big problem now; this would be -- presumably -- part of a more general push-back.)

And again, the question is: as against what alternative? At the moment we have complete control by the creators -- or, all too often, by corporations. I think a bureaucracy would be better than that. I think that some of the works that might be written (or that have been written and might be published) in other's (currently-under-copyright) worlds or with other's (currently-under-copyright) characters might be wonderful -- just as many works people write with out of copyright worlds/characters are wonderful. And I'd like to read 'em.

If your first exposure to, say, Batman is the sixties tv show, then that can become your framework for interpreting what's good about the premise. The essential "batman-ness" has become fixed in a particular way, which leads to bafflement when you see the movie Batman Begins. Suddenly your understanding of "why people like this stuff" doesn't work. It's not camp, its...something else.

TruFans of course, become endlessly divided over what the real "batman-ness" is, but the problem is that multiple takes on a given work tend to lock people out who would assume that there is only one true way to understand what something is. (Director's cuts anyone?)

Fanfiction presents a special problem: trufans produce it, because they love the world-work so much, but at the same time they are multiplying the possible ways of understanding it.

(Sorry, I feel like I'm not tying this together well.)

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that the Western idea of a one to one coorespondence between the author's vision and the one true authorized work is part of the problem. Its like the Western idea of a one to one coorespondence between any idea and a physical reality, e.g. purity=virginity, democracy=voting, etc.

Right, so the reason why fanfiction upsets us is the reason why we produce it: we fell in love with a particular interpretation of a story-world**, and want that to be the entry point for everyone, or the canonical way of understanding that world.
At the very same time, we love that story-world so much that we want to play with it. (The second case, love producing fanfiction, is misleading, because not all creative borrowing is motivated by love of the original work.)

-r.

*sounds like there should be some fancy German word for that. Any takers for Weltarbeit?
**Story-world? Howabout Geschichtewelt? Anyone?

One might argue that right now we have de facto compulsory licensing for anything produced by individual creators. And full protection for corporations.

The case I'm thinking of here is the Italian writer who rewrote Lolita from Dolores Haze's point of view. This was bitterly opposed by the Nabokov estate (basically, his son Dimitri), on the grounds that it was a bad novel, copyright violation -- etc. But in the end they lost -- because they don't have money to fight it out with lawyers, because it was a fait accompli in many countries so it seemed ridiculous to ban it in other countries, etc.

I bet the same would not be true of Star Trek, Star Wars or the like. It would've been shut down.

A system of compulsory licensing would be used mainly by individuals against corporate owners -- i.e. precisely against those owners whose claim to moral ownership (as opposed to legal ownership) is weakest.

I guess my concern is that an author may not agree with the fanfic's author's take on the character involved.

Interpretation happens every time someone reads a book. Any author who's uncomfortable with that is screwed, because there's no way to stop it.

Of course, fanfic is only one of the ways that a particular interpretation can be spread. I've never seen an author argue that they should have the right to shut down fan essays, reviews, or English courses that are "distorting" their work.

Alan Moore's Watchmen, arguably one of the best superhero comics ever made, was based on the old Charlton heroes with the serial numbers filed off.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman, likewise on many people's Top N lists, is a pastiche of other creators' comic book characters, folk heroes, and mythological figures.

There are very few American comic book characters that haven't, at some point, had something brilliant done with them by someone other than their creator. I would tend to think of comics as an argument for the potential aesthetics of fanfiction.

But somewhere there's still a line. On the other side of that line is work that is so dependent upon an earlier source that it retains almost no originality of its own. How much originality must it have before it's legitimate?

As I said, I don't know.

As we say in the business, that's a matter of fact for a jury to decide.

If we restrict the conversation to justice for a moment, it's a mistake to try to encode into law the precise barrier between allowable inspiration and infringing derivation. That's why there are juries.

If we turn to aesthetics, then I don't see why originality has anything to do with legitimacy. Then, the question is how original does it have to be to be good?

if the commercial and authorized Darkover stories to which AliceB refers were not good, that's a failure of the editors, IMO. The short stories set in Gaiman's Sandman series were quite good. The stories set in the Aspirin- and Abbey-edited Thieve's World, a shared world with multiple writers, were generally of even quality, though they varied in style. Editing is everything.

OTOH, what first drew me into fanfic was finding stories based in Star Trek Voyager that did a far better job than the series writers with the potential in the characters and situation set up by the creators. What kept me reading fanfic was the same impulse that had me re-reading Dune and LoTR and Heinlein as a kid - the desire to revisit the setting. Good fanfic is like that, with the added bonus of new stories. I don't read some fandoms (Dune, LoTR, Babylon5, etc) because, for me, fanfiction stories generally don't add.

OTOH, I absolutely do not think unauthorized fanfic should be publishable for monetary gain. Many fanfic readers and writers are horrified by the idea of a fan writer asking for money because in general their impulse for writing is quite different from original fiction writers. Some of them are insulted when one suggests they might, in fact, try their hand at original stories.

I know exactly what you are talking about, and I have seen it. But I can't define it either. I think it is held in common with another characteristic of bad writing that we all recognize. You know, the one where, er... well, for example, for some people the idea of a hero enacting revenge is so compelling that they will read any book that has the revenge plot. Or, if they are a writer, will fill a book with bland characters with no inflection, no backgrounds, no scenery, because the idea of revenge (or love, or sex) is so potent in their minds that it lights up everything else.

Frankly, I was that way about elves when I was 11, and had just finished the Two Towers. Even seeing the word "elven" gave me quite a jolt in the psyche.*

The same motivation comes up in slash fiction, I think - the idea of a certain pairing is so compelling that one reads blindly (or writes blindly). So if you Star Trek fanfiction needs to be about Han and Leia, because it's about them, then you've got a problem. If it's about a princess and a scoundrel, and it
would be cool if it was them, but it doesn't carry all its emotional charge from it being them, then you are okay.

-r.
*in my psyche! I was pre-pubertal, thank you very much!

Copyright is effectively a bargain between society as represented by government and creative artists (as represented by publishers) wherein to encourage the public good of the creation of art and the addition to the cultural discourse, artists are granted certain limited rights for a set period of time. Society gains in that at the end of the rightholding period, the works become our collective property. Without this bargain, some art wouldn't be created at all. With it, we can count on a continually refreshed pool of cultural artifacts to play with and artists can plan how they and their descendants will be compensated over the commercially viable life of their work.

That's a commercial bargain, a public good for created right, where both sides win. It's not the recogintion of a moral obligation, where absolute control is granted because it is objectively right. However, it's an old bargain and people are emotionally attached to it. It's also become subject to erosion and regulatory capture. Additional protection of (for example) Mickey Mouse was valuable enough to the Disney Corporation that the large amount of lobbying money they spent on retroactive copyright extension was strictly a prudent investment, even if getting the bargain changed was harmful to the culture (in that it was not getting an infusion of public domain art and characters).

I have a lot of respect for free and anarchic movements (fairtunes.com was the big one, but it got shut down) that try to get illegal downloaders to send money directly TO THE ARTISTS. Their position is that the record labels, not having done any of the "creative" work, don't have any MORAL right to be paid regardless of the legality of their position, whereas the creators DO have a moral right to be paid for their creations.

I understand this is almost certainly a really irritating position to those of you in the publishing industry -- and i'm not saying i AGREE, entirely, with it.

But the sheer magnitude of the legal difference between "who holds the copyright" and "who MADE THE THING" may go some way toward explaining why a number of fanfic authors, illegal downloaders, and other "pirate" consumers of culture don't care much about arguments based on legality.

If we as a culture have gotten to the point where the average citizen seriously values the right of Avi Arad (Marvel CEO) to buy himself a bigger jet over the right of creative kids to express themselves, then we, as a culture, are really dumb.

JK Rowling seems amazingly level-headed about the (admittedly insane) fandom community which exists around her work. For example, there's one well-known website full of explicit Potter erotica which was contacted by representatives of Rowling's. It wasn't a Cease and Desist, though, just a request that the site institute password protection to keep kiddies from stumbling across the fics. (Of course, by "request" I mean "do this or else we will bust out the C&D," but that's not the point.)

The site locked down its contents and is still running today. So on the subject of Potter porn: JKR knows, and is either unconcerned about it, or bothered yet still willing to let fandom tiptoe into those creepy nooks and crevices. Either way, I'm impressed.

As for me - I was part of a long-running RPG based on Rowling's series, and it has improved my writing by leaps and bounds. All writing flexes the same muscles, and keeping them in shape did wonders for me.

Yes, the general quality of fanfic can be pretty low, but then, most completed manuscripts don't get published, either. What's that saying again? 90% of everything is crap?

I have long thought Milton was basically Christian midrash. But you know, midrash is fanfic, and Milton works much better defined as fanfic. I mean, geesh, he turned Satan into this fascinating sexy (anti-)hero; if that's not fanfic, what is?

I've gotten to speak in schools about writing a few times; once I found myself trying to explain to a bunch of twelve-year-olds why Barry Trotter was legal but fanfic without the consent of the creator was not. It does not, honestly, make a whole lot of sense from a legal perspective, and it makes even less sense if we're talking about the ethics of writing about someone else's characters.

I'm defining "fanfic" here as "new stories about existing characters and settings, written by someone other than the original creator or their designates." So Dave Luckett's snitch of a fragment of plot from Tolkien isn't "fanfic" by my definition.

Fanfic can be a way for new writers to learn their craft by relying on existing characters, character relationships, and settings so they can focus on plot, prose, pacing, and all the other aspects of writing. Certainly, there's no reason that such stories can't be entertaining and emotionally valid. But I find them unsatisfying for the same reason I find most series television (and tie-in novels, and many sequels) unsatisfying: because the characters and their relationships are already established, they can't grow or change much (unless the fic is prepared to violate canon to an extent that most of the fics I've read don't).

Also, many fics are weak because they rely too heavily on the crutch of the existing characters (and the reader's knowledge of those characters), sometimes to the extent of omitting character description completely. The characters become merely labels, or puppets, animated more by the reader's existing knowledge than by the writer's craft.

I'm a plot-focused writer. I want to see things happening -- things with consequence, things that change the characters' understanding of the world. Most fanfic fails for me because it is, instead, focused on the reader's involvement with the characters -- the purpose of the fic is to enjoy another hour or two with old friends, or to deepen existing relationships (often taking a non-sexual relationship to a new or more intense sexual level), rather than to create new situations and change the characters' lives.

So I have no moral objection to fanfic. But it doesn't turn my crank.

For a time, there was a notion that if a writer was aware of fanfic, and didn't pursue action, they were in danger of losing rights to their work. I see less concern about that now, but is this still an issue?

I think having one's work ficced is more an honor and homage than otherwise, but are there legal issues involved with noticing and not taking action? (The solution being, of course, to carefully not notice in the first place.)

What I always end up wondering is *why* they end up reading fanfic for something whose original they haven't sampled?

Someone recommends it and gushes over it. Or they come to a smallish multi-fandom archive for one set of stories and then explore that archive's other offerings. Or they're asked to beta.

A friend gave me the first two HP books so that I could become familiar enough with the setting to properly beta her fic.

I can't explain why I choose to read the fanfic of some universes but not others, except that some universes seem to be improved by the byplay.

I'm drawn to writing and reading fic primarily in two situations: the setting has room for other stories besides the one the author is telling, often with other characters, or the characters and/or scenes are generally sketchy enough that they practically beg to be fleshed out.

This is pretty confused. Except in the case of certain very well-defined exceptions (for instance, movie novelizations), book publishers almost never acquire authors' "copyrights". That's why (to choose a random example) the copyright page of Ken MacLeod's Learning the World (Tor, 2005) says "Copyright 2005 by Ken MacLeod", rather than "Copyright 2005 by Tor Books." Our contract with Ken doesn't convey his copyright to us, nor does any aspect of his copyright "inhere" in us for any period of time whatsoever. What our contract with Ken conveyed to us was the exclusive right to publish his book in the English language in a certain set of territories, subject to certain conditions. In effect our contract is a license to make use of his copyright in certain ways. It's fundamental that the copyright itself remains the possession of Ken. This is absolutely bog-standard practice in fiction book publishing. So I don't know how it's sensible to claim that "copyright inheres in the publisher for several years on a lot of authors' contracts" unless we're talking about movie tie-ins, computer-game novelizations, and other edge cases. In the broad middle ground of fiction publishing, we don't traffic in copyrights.

but if it was obvious, I wouldn't have asked. And I'm not being flippant in saying that.

I mean, if AliceB thinks that fanfic "dilutes" the original work from a purely asthetic point of view, isn't that like me saying I don't like seafood? I view asthetics as personal taste and you can't really argue with someone about their personal taste. It took my wife, who's father was a lobsterman, a couple of years to stop asking me to try a bite of whatever seafood she was eating at the time. I just don't like seafood.

If AliceB thinks fanfic dilutes the original from a purely asthetic point of view, isn't that the end of it? That's what she thinks. That's her experience of it. To argue with her about her personal experience seems to be yelling at someone for putting pepper on their steak. "My god, why did you ruin a perfectly good steak with all that pepper?"

The thing for me is that when people start talking about fanfic "diluting" the original work or whether fanfic actually "improves" the original work, the original work is owned by the author, and it is really up to the author to decide what is best for his creation. It's sort of like the guy in the restauraunt telling the chef that cooking with a wood fire will make the steak "better". Well, that's the chef's choice at that point.

When we're talking about what a derivative does for the original, aren't we talking about what is "fair" for the original author? What is just? What we should allow and should not allow?

The basis of copyright is that the author is empowered to do what's best for their creation, to get rewarded for their work. To talk about whether a derivative created by someone else is for the benefit or detriment of the original author, even from an asthetic point of view, implies a connection to what is fair for the original author. That's the way I see it anyway.

Does that mean that a lot of historical novels are fanfic written by history fans? I mean, what's the difference between writing novels about the rifle lieutenant you've made up meeting Wellington, and writing novels about the Jedi you've made up meeting Yoda?
And if you write historical novels in which an invented character sleeps with a lot of historical characters, is that slash? Or Flash?

Which is interesting, because I would have said that lifting a fragment and incorporating it into your own work was more creatively lazy than using an existing framework to tell your own story.

Another thing that gives me pause is the existence of fragile creations. Middle Earth and Bordertown and The Dreaming look like wonderful toys to play with, but they have inobvious and necessary built-in constraints. It wouldn't take much messing-around to break them -- and when you break part of a story, you weaken the rest.

My current sense is that writers will play with such universes, and that it's no great matter if they quietly exchange their stories with each other. Putting the full turbo-charged mechanisms of commercial marketing and promotion behind injudicious additions to those universes could do real damage.

42 year copyright terms. Give the author control of their work for 42 years, let them make all the money they can make off of it, then put it in the public domain for all the fanfic you want.

No, it doesn't solve it completely, but it restores a lot of balance in a simple and straightforward way.

For a time, there was a notion that if a writer was aware of fanfic, and didn't pursue action, they were in danger of losing rights to their work. I see less concern about that now, but is this still an issue?

You probably see less concern over it because people are gradually realizing that it's not true.

You can (under certain rather hard-to-achieve circumstances) lose a trademark by failing to aggressively defend it. Somehow this got warped into a widespread belief that you can "lose your rights" to a literary creation if you don't sic a lawyer against every transgression of which you become aware. In point of fact, under current US law, it's extraordinarily difficult to alienate a copyright.

(You can--again, under very hard-to-achieve circumstances--wind up limiting your ability to collect damages. But tolerating a 12-year-old's web-published fanfic does absolutely no damage to your ability to, for instance, sue a book publisher that pirated your work. Rather, to limit the damages you could collect from that publisher, it would be incumbent on them to show that you'd been engaged in a persistent pattern of letting comparable book-publishers repeatedly pirate your work, and the bar to them establishing any such thing would be roughly 5,271,009 times higher than "you let someone write fanfic on the web".)

Bottom line: It's not true.

I think it started in Europe around the time the Berne Convention started. ~1860? I'm guessing from memory. Before that "moral rights" didn't exist anywhere on planet earth. They still don't exist in teh United States the way they do in Europe.

Personally, I think Moral Rights is protection against a modernday boogeyman. But that's just me...

Oh yeah ... because you're mixing universes here!

Most of the fanfic I've read has been either new/different characters in an established universe, established characters in a different setting (say, a different ship or different planet) or established characters and situation being looked at from a different point of view (different character or different endpoints in the storyline). Probably legitimate, as far as fanfic goes, and if done well, it's fun to read too.

Right then.
-r.

But I agree that's a tangential point to this overall discussion.

And then P J Evans said:
Oh yeah ... because you're mixing universes here!

My reply:
Oh good Lord, I am a blithering idiot.
-r.

This may be true, and maybe I've been in that mindset myself. However, my first exposure to Batman was "Superfriends" and the 60's TV series. Batman: The Animated series gradually opened my eyes to another way to portray the character. B:TAS led me to some of the comics. The comics led to more comics. And then more comics, until the character completely shifted in my view from funny and campy to a dramatic, complex character. And that 60's TV show still makes me laugh, I enjoy it even as I feel incredibly sympathy for him as a dramatic character in the comics.

I'm not saying that one portrayal couldn't damage the character's rep. But Batman's part of modern mythology. There are literally an infinite number of stories that could be told about him, and an infinite number of Elseworlds and approaches and tones for those stories, whether they've got the DC logo stamped on them or it's fanfiction done for no compensation and read by a few people.

Fanfiction presents a special problem: trufans produce it, because they love the world-work so much, but at the same time they are multiplying the possible ways of understanding it.

I just don't see a down side to that. I'm a bit of a purist, ironically, so I believe is going to the source material for reference as much as possible. "Canon" matters to me a great deal. Yet starting with canon as a starting point, it's then possible to explore off in all directions.

Of course, canon gets very sticky when you're talking about comic book characters. Multiple corporate sanctioned versions can be considered "canonical" in Batman's case and everyone has a different opinion, as you said, on the "true Batman-ness." But again, I don't see this as a problem, it's just how it is and part of the process of reading stories as a culture.

I think there's a subtle shift in emphasis here. The motivation to write the fanfic might be "what if these guys were on another planet", but the story needs to have a life of its own that doesn't depend on these guys getting all their emotional weight from some other story that you already have to love.

-r.

The new set of feasible options open to him includes not only the option passively to sit in the theatre or in front of the television and watch the images created by George Lucas, but also the option of trying his hand at making this type of film by himself. Jedi Saga will not be a blockbuster. It is not likely to be watched by many people. Those who do watch it are not likely to enjoy it in the same way that they enjoyed any of Lucas's films, but that is not its point. When someone like Cejas makes such a film, he is not displacing what Lucas does. He is changing what he himself does--from sitting in front of a screen that is painted by another to painting his own screen. Those who watch it will enjoy it in the same way that friends and family enjoy speaking to each other or singing together, rather than watching talking heads or listening to Talking Heads.

Of course fanfic writers have been doing this for a long time before new info technologies made it easier - but I think the basic point remains (and the distinction that Benkler draws between what Lucas is doing and what Cejas is doing fits well with Teresa's argument about this really belonging to the gift economy.

The moral being, if you as an author become aware of fanfic for a universe you have any intention of continuing to write in, for crying out loud stay away from the fanfic. This is also reportedly why the Babylon 5 newsgroup spawned a moderated subgroup, so JMS could participate with some level of protection against random passersby lobbing episode "suggestions" at him that he would then be obligated not to use.

... *tilts head and tries to parse that paragraph again*

I think there are serious problems with this model: among other things, works by different authors which happen to be set in a given universe are not necessarily interchangeable for economic purposes; and it is not clear to me that normal supply-and-demand rules apply to works of fiction in the first place.

But I also suspect that this model is operating in the minds of many of those who talk about 'dilution'.

If that's done to me, then my right to profit from the labor I've put into the 5 already published volumes and the labor I've put into the not-yet-published legitmate 6th volume has been violated.

To me, that should *clearly* be illegal. If it's not a legitimate part of the series that it's claiming to be a part of, then it's not. And you shouldn't be able to claim that it is. And you *really* shouldn't be able to make money from claiming that it is.

However, if Twyla T. writes "The Amazing Adventures of Abigator" or "The Astounding Adventures of Abby" or decides that it would be fun to write a story (clearly labelled as "not a part of the real series, the characters, setting, etc. are not original to Twyla T.") I might get a bit grumpy up there on my pile of dubloons, but as long as Twyla's not claiming that this stuff is part of my series or (heaven forfend) written by me, where's the harm?

If the story's good enough (pace Renee) it will weather almost any amount of good, bad, indifferent, G-rated or X-rated fanfic.

If the fanfic's good enough, it might be Mistress Masham's Repose.

This analogy would hold true if fanfic writers were sending changes to the publisher, who would then use them to alter the next printing of the original novel. Nobody here is proposing that.

The chef gets to make his dish his way, but that doesn't mean other people can't add their own condiments, make their own side dishes, or whip up their own home-cooked versions.

I think there's a parallel here between objecting to fanfic on aesthetic grounds and the idea of "cultural misappropriation" (and indeed, a lot of the same language gets brought in: "That's not yours to use," talk about rights and respect and dilution, and so on). I recently speculated that it's all mostly a way of saying "Don't be tacky and pretentious." But for good or ill, tacky and pretentious are 1) utterly subjective, and 2) almost certainly here to stay. (And turning that impulse into a set of rules about what you shouldn't ought to do is a really excellent way to raise the hackles of hairy little syncretic anarchists like me.)

Teresa- I think that the gift economy is about the only thing encouraging the arts these days. Artists/authors should be paid, but through the practice of the craft and the gift of those works to the public for critisim is the only way some people have to refine their talent to the point that it is publishable. Oh, and Fast and Feast has a chapter on the change in the perspective about the eucharist.

Randir- I like your terms. Using them.

The one major classical piece of fandom that I haven't seen mentioned yet is a piece of fanart. What is The Last Supper other than an incredibly beautiful piece of fanart, fashioned after similiar works of DaVinci's predicessors, all based on a scene from a really well-known book? Does that painting 'dillute' the story or enhance it?

You said it well:
I'm not saying that one portrayal couldn't damage the character's rep. But Batman's part of modern mythology. There are literally an infinite number of stories that could be told about him, and an infinite number of Elseworlds and approaches and tones for those stories, whether they've got the DC logo stamped on them or it's fanfiction done for no compensation and read by a few people.

And its precisely that multiplicity that causes (other) people problems. People who are used to fixed categories of how things should be don't respond well to multiple adaptations of the same story. Usually unliterary people are the culprits there, but I've noticed movie reviewers and others who should know better getting baffled by it too. Bad (poor quality) adaptations don't help the matter.

Fanfiction gets caught in that conflict because it seems to have a ready made label of being illigitimate. Perhaps it would be really handy to be able to automatically tag deviant, imagination polluting, diluting stories, but the label fanfiction isn't going to help. I call "category error"! :)

-r.

p.s.
When I said "fanfiction presents a special problem" I meant in the intellectual, "this is a neat situation" sense. I shouldn't mix senses in the same post. Oops.

*when I was a kid, my favorite batman comic was one that was almost solely about Comissioner Gordon and a strange twist of fate that had him chasing down into the tunnels under Gotham the son of a criminal...that he had chased down into those same tunnels as a young patrolman. Batman only really shows up at the end. Hmm. I'll have to look that one up.

Re: Why some fandoms and not others:

I considered the "Big open spaces in the story" possibility, because Buffy has them, and Harry Potter has them, LotR has them (The film-world and the Book-world both) ... but then I realise that many of the stories I like but don't want to see fanficced still have room for other stories, but I want the original author to write them if anyone does.

(Not that I could or would stop anyone writing that fanfic, it just means my chances of reading it drop. But I'm a sporadic reader of fanfic at best, a drop in the bucket of their audience.)

Well yes, but if it's good it's not really fanfic.

David Levine, are you by any chance sneaking up on the "if it's good, it can't be fanfic" formulation?

Damn. I've been spotted.

Okay, let me restate and amplify my remarks for the record. Most fanfic fails for me for the same reasons most series television (and sequels, and tie-ins) fails for me: it emphasizes exploring and deepening the reader's existing relationship with existing characters rather than changing and growing the characters. But there do exist exceptional TV shows (e.g. Babylon 5) and exceptional fanfic (e.g. a rewrite of Buffy or Alien III that rewinds the original work and has a completely new take on the plot, avoiding the original creator's stupidities) that do much more than that. These I like. However, because the majority of works in both forms are unsatisfying to me, I avoid the form unless I have multiple personal recommendations for a specific work.

I would have said that lifting a fragment and incorporating it into your own work was more creatively lazy than using an existing framework to tell your own story

I didn't say that lifting a fragment of plot (while making up your own characters) isn't lazy. I just said it didn't fall within my definition of "fanfic." Forbidden Planet isn't, to me, a fanfic on The Tempest, although it snitches the entire plot. But Paradise Lost is a fanfic on the Bible because it is a new take on the established characters.

My attitude here comes from my own personal strengths and weaknesses. To me, plot is easy and characters are hard. So making up a new plot with someone else's characters would be less work than making up new characters for someone else's plot.

Although I say that writing fanfic is "lazy," I can't deny that it's hard work. One of the reasons I've never attempted fanfic myself is that I would have too much trouble working within the limitations of canon -- it's much easier to write in my own universe, where I can change the "laws of physics" if I need to.

I probably shouldn't have used the word "lazy". What I really mean is that I'm more impressed by people who do the hard work of creating a new universe and characters than by people who do the (different) hard work of creating new stories with an existing universe and characters. It's similar to the way that I'm more impressed by people who are really good at designing bridges and buildings than by people who are really good at running and jumping. Athletes certainly work hard, but I don't have as much interest in the results.

And that wasn't what the analogy was for in the first place, but thanks for the nonsequitor.

The point was that when talking about whether fanfic is "good" or "bad" for the original work it is really a discussion about fairness rather than asthetics.

the chef makes his version, and then whatever people *can* or *cannot* do with that version is a matter of what is fair, not what tastes good

Holy twisted analogy batman. Fanfic is perfectly legal in all cases where the work is never distributed. So, you twisted my analogy so much that it is actually saying somethign true about something completely unrelated: You can write all the fanfic you want, as long as you read it at home.

It's when your "home-cooked versions" leave the home that you start having problems.

No, it doesn't solve it completely, but it restores a lot of balance in a simple and straightforward way.

I agree that if copyright terms were 42 years, this would lessen the problem somewhat, as it would move things into the public domain more swiftly. But it would leave large parts of the problem untouched -- as, e.g., Star Wars & Star Trek would still, to this day, not be available for fanfic. So from the point of view of the actual material we're talking about, it wouldn't solve anything.

(And I'm not convinced that 42, pace Douglas Adams, is some magic number here; in previous threads lots of people have made solid arguments for other lengths, including ones based on an author's life. I know that you, Greg London, seem committed to a circa 40 year term, but even among those who believe in shortening copyright terms it's far from agreed upon.)

The compulsory license idea would grant immediate access -- with copyright length being a separate issue.

Teresa, I guess my question is could the don't-break-stories problem be dealt with with moral rather than legal force. I think we should feel somewhat queasy about the idea of enforcing aesthetic views -- which it seems to me your idea boils down to (don't do this because it will hurt the art) -- with the power of the state.

I do think that writers could and would say, "I am asking people not to publish/buy/read stories by others in my worlds" -- and people could do it or not. For instance, I haven't read, and probably won't read, the Italian Lolita-from-Lolita's-POV for essentially that reason (taking Dmitri to have the moral authority to speak for his father) -- but I don't think it should have been banned. Sometimes, however, one would go the other way -- I don't think that The Wind Done Gone should have to call itself a parody to be legal, and I think that the moral authority of the Margaret Mitchell estate is weaker here (in part due to the racism of the original work). But of course others would judge these matters differently.

Ultimately, I suppose, it is an idea of what should be legally enforced; plus a question of how much aesthetic damage stories by other authors can do to a pre-existing story -- does a badly written Oz story hurt Baum's books? Would a badly written Middle Earth story really do anything to Tolkein's -- particularly if people simply ignored it?

Ah yes, "Marion Zimmer Bradley's situation."

Did anyone actually google "marion zimmer bradley" "fanfic lawsuit", as someone suggested above? Did anyone notice the extraordinary variety of stories thus elicited? In some of which, Marion "lost a book"; in others, she was "forced to sue" to protect an existing work; in others, a contract offer from DAW was rescinded.

This should be a clue that perhaps, just perhaps, this is one of those overheated rumor-mill stories where the truth is perhaps a little more complicated than it's being made out to be.

Then there's this and this. True? Who knows? It seems as plausible as the insistence that "Marion lost a book! Because of fanfic!"

Do I have any idea what actually happened? I do not. Evidently, though, the difference is that I know I don't have any idea. And I know how to recognize the signs of what Mormons call a Faith-Promoting Rumor. Pending more reliable information, I think a moratorium on using the MZB tale to prove anything would be very much in order.

Well, argueably Baum wrote some badly written Oz stories. And Tolkein abandoned his sequel to the Lord of the Rings because it was turning into a banal spy thriller.

-r.

I used the same joke to illustrate much the same point in an academic paper last year, when I set out to poke holes in Rise of the Novel theories (the idea that the novel sprung fully formed from the foreheads of a few 18th century Englishmen, which ignores stuff like Don Quixote, The Golden Ass, and anything written by women at any time before 1750--or else dismissing such things as "romances").

This doesn't have much to do with fanfic - just more evidence of a disconnect between the cult of originality and the way stories actually get told. Also good to know that anti-genre sentiments go way back.

Stephen, the thing is that 42 year terms solves numerous other problems far greater than Star Wars not being available for fanfic. fanfic seems to be going along just fine without any legal protections, simply because it usually flies under the radar, no money changing hands, just posted on some quiet corner of the net. I'm not immersed in fanfic though, so if someone can explain how exactly fanfic is stifled by the law, and how this stifling restricts the "Progress of Useful Arts", I'm all ears.

The way I see it is this: yeah, star wars isn't available for fanfic, but if it was released in 1976, and terms were 42 years, then in 2018, it would be, and that's good enough for me. In the mean time, if there are any works that can be made, I'd say let Lucas make them.

Are there any tales of woe that explain why the law needs to be changed to protect and nurture fanfic above and beyond the level that it exists today? It isn't expressly allowed by law, but it is also left to the copyright holder to enforce copyright, which means the authors generally treat their fans with a bit of respect and a bit of slack, yes? Has anyone been thrown into the gullags for a perfectly harmless bit of fanfic?

If so, I'd appreciate a URL so I can get up to speed on it. If not, I don't see a problem with the system as it is such that copyright law actually needs to be changed to fix it.

Allowing noncommercial fanfic might solve one minor problem, but it still prevents plenty of major problems such as infinite copyright preventing commercial derivatives of copyright works, and leaving "Fair Use" and the courts to sort it out on a case-by-case and on a who-has-enough-money-to-go-to-court basis.

Here's mine:

Asthetics: I haven't read any fanfic that I really liked. but I haven't read a lot of fanfic.

Justice: I don't think the law needs to be changed to protect fanfic, but then, I don't know of any horror stories of any poor unsuspecting fan who wrote something and then was made penniless by the lawsuit that followed.

The point was that when talking about whether fanfic is "good" or "bad" for the original work it is really a discussion about fairness rather than asthetics.

The point was that this analogy makes no sense in application to this discussion, and that the existance of fanfic is in no way unfair to the author/chef, as the original work is unaffected. The only place such an argument might be made is in regard to aesthetics (not that I'd agree with it there either). In that argument, it's irrelevant whether the fan-created work is legal, illegal, for profit, or shared with a chosen few.

When I said "fanfiction presents a special problem" I meant in the intellectual, "this is a neat situation" sense. I shouldn't mix senses in the same post. Oops.

As soon as I posted, I realized that's what you meant. My bad. You raised a really interesting point.

People who are used to fixed categories of how things should be don't respond well to multiple adaptations of the same story.

As I said upthread, I can be a purist, so I can see how people get locked into "there can be only one" version of anything. But I do believe in reading being a participatory process.

What *really* I don't understand is how a society that shells out money for movie remakes (King Kong, Poseidon, Ocean's 11) doesn't understand why fanfiction is all just part of the story reading/telling/absorbing process?

(Side note: that Jim Gordon comic sounds interesting, I love Jim Gordon-centered stories. Hope you find it).

OK, just to keep things straight, could everyone prelude their posts with a marker saying whether they're talking about whether fanfic is "good/bad" (Asthetics) or whether it is "fair/unfair" (Justice)?

Those aren't the questions. The aesthetics issue doesn't hinge on whether fanfic or mainstream fic are good or bad; Sturgeon's Law applies to both. The question is whether the existance of fanfic inherently has an impact in the aesthetic appreciation of the original. The justice issue is about legal mechanisms, which are not identical to issues of fairness.

But on the other hand, even excellent fanfic can... distract me from my enjoyment of the original canon material. The best example of this is some (really good) Harry Potter fanfic I read before the sixth book came out, which also happened to be slash (i.e. had a significantly different cant on many of the characters from the canon portrayal, to put it mildly).

And then, when I actually read the sixth book, I was intensely annoyed to realize that the fanfic versions of those characters were intruding on my picture of the canon versions. It's not even that the fanfic versions were less compelling or less believable than the canon ones; it's that I wanted to experience what Rowling's take was on the characters that she, after all, had created in the first place. I realized I didn't want other people's interpretations messing that up.

On reflection, perhaps the reason the HP fanfic bothered me and the Buffy fic didn't is because the canon Buffy story is (a) finished, more or less, and (b) seriously flawed in a lot ways, whereas canon Harry Potter is neither of those things (in my opinion, on the second item, of course).

And, um, that's what I had to say about that. To be slightly less tangential to the discussion, I would venture the opinion that fanfic is unkillable and ubiquitous, and always has been, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I have Issues with the notion of changing copyright law to accommodate it.

I think everyone has the right to write any kind of stories they like, based on anything they want; I don't think everyone - or anyone - has the right to make money on/get credit for those stories if they are clearly fanfic. Originality may be difficult to define, but it does exist, and should be protected and rewarded.

Aesthetics: a subset of fanfiction is bad writing.
A subset of that subset is bad writing because it is derivative in a particular way: it needs the original story-world to exist to make any narrative/emotional sense.

To test to see if it falls in this sub-sub-category, file off the serial numbers (change the proper nouns) and see if it still makes sense.

Justice:
Authors have a moral right to object to what is done with their work.
Actual rights vary by circumstance. Actual rights are enforced by social pressure: internal moral standards of fans, the implicit social contract between storyteller and audience, reputation, critical discourse, academic institutional stances, legal systems, etc. In other words, authorial moral rights are mediated by our entire society and its behavior!

a) Get enough exposure and be accessible enough for people to know about it. This one's self-evident, and fairness or quality don't necessarily enter into it.

b) Be big and complex enough to support lots of variation and reinterpretation. One of the reasons Harry Potter fandom is so, so huge*, IMHO, is that in addition to the simple question of vast numbers of people being exposed to the books, there's this large cast of characters, all with hinted backstories and family histories; there's a system of magic and a number of locations which are available to be played with and easy enough to add onto.

3) There has to be something the fans feel is _missing_. This isn't necessarily a reflection on the writer; what could be missing is just _more books_ or movies or episodes, or whatever. Which is quite likely not something the creator has total control over. *cough* "Firefly" *cough* Or, on the more-easily-mocked side of things, what they feel is missing could be teh hawt gay smexx. *cough* "Smallville" *cough* But there has to be _something_ fans feel should be there and isn't, to give them that need to fill the gap.

---

* My brother and I have similar tastes in literature and pop culture; as his degree relates to children's lit, he tends to analyse the works we both like from an academic perspective while I dabble in fannishness. Barring the occasional awkward "but those characters _hate_ each other! Why would they have sex?" discussions, it's a good dynamic. Last year he went to the big HP conference in Salem, and I got several phone calls asking, "What does 'OTP' mean?" and "some girl just asked if I 'shipped' anyone. Do I?" Also: "There was a fistfight in the 'is Snape good or evil' panel! These people are _great_!"

You might also have been bothered because (IMHO) Buffy slash picks up and runs with the many many kinky naughty sexy storylines/jokes/comments/implications/energies of the original Buffy. Rowling, otoh, is quite careful to keep sex out of her books almost entirely, (There's been a little kissing, hasn't there?) so slash fic feels, perhaps, a little less appropriate.

That noted, though, anyone want to weigh in on Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls? Or have I just wrenched the thread so far off course that to call it drift would be a ludicrous understatement?

That doesn't mean the questions aren't legitimate. I'm just not sure how far authorial intention ought to be privileged in trying to answer them.

Personally, I think the existence of this body of folklore grows out of the traditional auctorial fear that someone will steal their work.

(Remember, calling it "folklore" doesn't mean it has no historical basis. It means it's a story that gets passed around, in variant versions, between folks.)

(You don't have to stop. I'm just complaining because it's been driving me entirely bonkers for 100 posts now. Also, when I get home I want to talk about the issue of how fanfic could maybe-somehow lead to an author losing control over certain aspects of their creation via nonenforcement. Discussing that will hinge on dilution, and I'd like to introduce the idea of that term being overloaded into the discourse now, rather than later.)

I guess it's a sort of continuity problem.

So which is that, aesthetics or justice? Probably both. The existance of fanfiction is 'transgressive' because it offers alternative views of the authorized work. It is harmful to reader's ability to respond to the authorized work, but only sometimes. Therefore it is <omninous voice> morally suspect! </ominous voice>

No, seriously. Morally suspect. Just like erotica. Or alcohol. Transgressive plus dangerous to an authorized relationship. I'm not saying that it's bad, mind you. Just that it breaks social norms and can be hazardous to the user.

Just what we should do about such a dangerous substance that is illicitly shared out of public view is, of course, an interesting question.

-r.

Alright, so take "asthetics" and split it into two. "Asthetics of fanfic" and "Asthetics fanfic has on original".

"Asthetics of fanfic"

I still haven't read any fanfic that I really really liked. But it's been only an hour since I posted this before.

(I think this is a valid category. Even with Sturgeon's Law, I still don't like seafood.)

Could someone a bit more pedantic give an inclusive definition of what fanfic is, exactly? One straightforward sentence would be nice.

"Asthetics fanfic has on original"

I can't answer this because I haven't read enough fanfic to know. I do know that I try avoid reading about or looking for too much information about a movie or book before actually watching or reading it. I'd rather not have previews on TV or reviews in magazines affect my asthetics of the original, so I'm sure fanfic can do the same.

After I've seen the thing, fanfic about that doesn't bother me. After I see a film or read a book, I'll usually go looking up all the reviews about it to see if I missed anything, to see if I got suckered into some fundamental flaw, etc.

But seeing Saturday Night Live make fun of the Matrix after I've seen The Matrix doesn't bother me in the least. I assume that for me, the same attitude can be extended to fanfic, and that reading fanfic after reading the original is not a problem.

Having read a number of folk here say they read fanfic before seeing a movie, I'm surprised that the fanfic didn't have spoiler alerts or that the fanfic culture in general hasn't adopted some similar type of warning.

But that's just my personal taste. I don't like seafood, and I like corn-fed beef cooked medium rare with no condiments or sauce or spices on it.

But I can't imagine eating something that would spoil what I ate the day before...

Reading a great deal of slash as a young easily influenced thing has given me a kind of double vision, not just in relation to (say) Harry Potter, but in relation to any text where characters of the same sex are intimate in platonic ways with one another, especially when the characters aren't all that interesting in themselves.

Which is why I read Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants while thinking it would be much more fun if the characters were lesbians.

But I don't know that that's a bad thing, either. I could argue that it's a good thing inasmuch as it short-circuits the assumption of heterosexuality. I could even say that it adds something even as it distracts; I get two versions of the story, the more obvious reading and the less obvious hawt one.

One of the things that fanfic does is that it adds another layer of interpretation in ways that non-academic readers can understand. One the one hand are papers that advance a psychosexual reading of Louis Sachar's Holes, but there's a relatively small audience for that sort of thing. Fanfic allows you to spin a theory about a story, an interpretation, in a format that's dramatic and engaging. "Here's why I think that Snape isn't evil," the essay, is not going to get through to as many people, or be as persuasive, as a story that dramatizes that theory...

"justice fanfic has on original"

I don't see the need to change copyright law with regard to fanfic. Fix term-length problem and it fixes a number of (but not all) fanfic problems.

The problem I see with allowing fanfic to be distributed under NonCommercial purposes is that NonCommercial is un-f**k*ng-beliably difficult to define. CreativeCommons has been having a bear of a time trying to nail down what is and is not allowed by their CreativeCommons-NonCommercial license. It's a friggen multipage flowchart you have to step through.

Also, and this is even trickier, is that noncommercial distribution can be used as a loss leader to make money indirectly. So, even if noncommercial is nailed down, allowing non-commercial distribution can create a loophole whereby people make money off of other means from the work.

It doesn't fix the problem, it simply moves it to a location that many people haven't looked at yet.

Absolutely. I also have a moral right to object to anything, including Another Hope, the baggage retrieval system at Heathrow, or my dully elected congresscritter. No one is obliged to listen or act on my objection, of course.

rhandir -- Actual rights vary by circumstance. Actual rights are enforced by social pressure: internal moral standards of fans, the implicit social contract between storyteller and audience, reputation, critical discourse, academic institutional stances, legal systems, etc. In other words, authorial moral rights are mediated by our entire society and its behavior!

Exactly! And I would add that they are currently based on implicit social contract that was most appropriate for a society with twentieth century distribution and publishing technology.

Mmm... I don't...think so. Because the HP fic I'm talking about was what they call a "futurefic" - set years after the projected endpoint of the canon story. In other words, grownups involved only. (Slash doesn't bother me, at least not on principle; pedophilia, on the other hand, is seriously Ew, and I would never have read it if that had been the case.)

Also, the fic was only slash in the sense that two characters of the same sex were involved in a relationship, not in the sense that it was filled with torrid homosexual sex scenes. In fact I would say that what on-screen sex was involved barely rated a PG-13.

I can't see reading fanfic before seeing a movie you want to remain spoiler-free on, personally, but any fanfic writer ought to know to include spoiler warnings in their author notes.

There is a system. Look at those little blocks of text at the top of any fanfic, with the title, fandom, pairing/characters featured, rating, synopsis and the "these characters don't belong to me" disclaimer: omitting that info will get you flamed or very loudly ignored. The reason they wouldn't be included (assuming the writer isn't just a complete n00b...because there's just nothing you can do with some fans) is that the writer assumes that anyone interested in reading the fic would already know about the spoilers. If, for example, the movie was out of theaters and the DVD release was over a month ago. There's an assumed shelf life on spoilers, but the last thing most fic writers want to do is spoil the original for you.

Sarah S: There's been some kissing, and there's also been just a hint of things here and there. She gets some pretty risque jokes past her editor now and again. (Such as in divination, when Lavender finds Uranus on a star chart, and Ron asks loudly, "Hey, Lavender, can I see Uranus too?")

Ron and Lavender, incidentally, become a couple in book 6, and were seen snogging quite enthusiastically in public and sneaking off to more private locales afterwards. So the series isn't quite as innocent as it may seem.

BSD: trademark dilution was discussed in detail upthread. And if your argument is leading from the dilution concept as defined there, I would say that the Potter fandom has a preponderance of fanfiction, none of which has lessened anyone's desire for the actual canonical works. See, for example, the release information on Half-Blood Prince.

(1) asthetics:

(a) fanfic itself: not much taste for it. Not much exposure to it either, though.

(b) fanfics affect on original: I generally avoid until after I've seen original. After the original, no affect.

(2) justice:

(a) fanfic itself: I see no need to change copyright law to encourage fanfic. I see problems with trying to carve out a "NonCommercial" space for fanfic.

(b) fanfic affecting original work: I don't see current fanfic having much impact on original works, but I'll defer to the original author to decide whether to enforce copyright for their work or not. I haven't seen abuses in this area.

Err, it does. For one, it is highly improbable (I know better than to speak of impossibilities, I do) that someone read a fanfic based on a movie or novel with no indication what movie or novel it was based on, as most stories list "fandom" in the header and/or are sorted by fandom category on their archive or website of origin. For TV series or movies-and-books-with-sequels, there's usually a spot for a notation such as "Spoilers: up to and including Clone Wars" or "Spoilers through season 5, episode 4."

I'm surfing at the office and so maybe haven't been reading as closely as I should, but I don't recall where anyone here mentioned reading a fanfic before seeing the source by accident.

If I publish something as "Harry Potter" fiction, it arguably dilutes the public value of the term-in-trade "Harry Potter." Whether or not I have a commercial impact on J. K. Rowling's sales, whether or not I have violated copyright, whether or not my work is any good.

"Star Wars" is, in addition to a copyrighted body of work, is also a brand. As is "Star Trek," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," etc. Trademark law is just at play as copyright here -- perhaps more so, since fanfic *isn't* literal copying or even paraphrasing, but it most certainly is using sets of marks of commerce clearly owned by others.

The way I understand trademark dilution is to use the term "Han Solo" to refer to something other than the character played by Harrison Ford in the Star Wars universe. If the term is used to refer to that Han Solo, then it shouldn't dilute the trademark.

If someone writes fanfic about Han Solo from Star Wars, it shouldn't dilute the trademark.

It is a use of the trademark that would be similar to a movie review that uses the terms and then closes with the disclaimer "All trademarks property of their respective owners. (list follows)"

I am not a lawyer. this is not legal advice. that is a time release lock. I can't open it. please don't shoot me. ACK!

I considered the "Big open spaces in the story" possibility, because Buffy has them, and Harry Potter has them, LotR has them (The film-world and the Book-world both) ... but then I realise that many of the stories I like but don't want to see fanficced still have room for other stories, but I want the original author to write them if anyone does.

Harry Potter falls into both categories, actually. I've seen quite a few fic writers lose interest in the fandom as the peripheral characters become more three-dimensional.

I can't speak to Buffy, but I've never thought of LotR as being wide open space. It's always felt very finished to me, like a high thread count fabric that's hard to push a needle into.

Perhaps that's why you don't want to see some settings ficced, a sense that only the original author has enough of the world's backstory to avoid "breaking" the world. I've certainly seen some world-breaking stories, along with the drama queen antics that often followed an innocent question about where the foundation for their interpretation could be found in canon.

I'd be pretty comfortable taking that dilution argument to a jury.

If I'm grasping the wiki'd discussion of (trademark) dilution correctly, the application is to some existing mark -- eg, let's say Mary Sue's trademarked VioletEye Plot Twister Juice -- to a product in some other area of commerce --eg, Ravyn Darkflayme starts selling VioletEye eye dye. Under other parts of trademark law, this would be fine and dandy, because there's no way the average consumer would confuse Plot Twister Juice with eye dye. But with dilution coming into play, Mary Sue gets to say Ravyn is totally coming on to her mark, the bitch, because VioletEye being associated with some skank ho's eye dye is totally going to bring down the perceived classiness of her VioletEye mark.

Is that more-or-less correct, or is my understanding of this somehow misleading? Because if I *am* getting this concept, I'm very confused by its application to fanfic. Is the argument that Mary Sue's classy original novel Torn in Love's Throbbing Arms is getting somehow blurred together in the reading public's mind with the TiLTA fanfic that Ravyn posted at the Pit of Voles? I mean, if Ravyn were commercially publishing it, it'd be a whole 'nother pit of throbbing love-weasels. But I'm really wondering how it'd be possible to prove that fanfic published online is causing damage to Mary Sue's career. I'm not convinced that people are likely to blur unpublished fanfic with published novels, and I'm not convinced that the fanfic has a demonstrably negative net effect. I'm only one datapoint, but fanart and fanfic got me to shell out for Veronica Mars and Battlestar Galactica on DVD.

Aesthetics: For those who don't believe fanfic can be good, I refer you to A J Hall's LOPiverse, which I was introduced to by the Namarie Sue post on this very blog. (Especially Relly.)

How did I miss hearing about this fistfight at the Witching Hour?

For those who don't believe fanfic can be good, I refer you to A J Hall's LOPiverse

Funny you should mention that one...

You would probably be unable to do that, since it is trying to be similar to "Harry Potter". That is the point of trademark, to keep the identity of things distinct so as to not confuse the consumer.

You probably couldn't get a trademark for "Appple" computers, or "Samsunng" electronics, either. Again, that is the point of trademark.

(well, you might be able to get them, but you'd lose it as soon as the original copyright holder took you to court.)

And now I feel irrelevant, as Mr. Cohen as made the entire long post I was brewing for later (when I can make a long post) in two lines.

I'd be pretty comfortable taking that dilution argument to a jury.

You could shut it down based on copyright violation alone. It would be a derived work. Trademark dilution doesn't apply. or even if it did, copyright violation would be a no-brainer.

*g* Don't know. It was in the audience, not among the panelists, of course...though that would have also been awesome. I understand there was actual hair-pulling.

Also, gjules is not going to let me live in peace until I read that story. Not even if I tell her that I'm writing, dammit.

That being said, Las Sergas de Esplandian was the pulp novel the conquistadores had on board when they sailed around and encountered the Baja peninsula. What's more, when the Portola party went up the coast, thinking the descriptions in LSdE were based on actual travelers' tales, they thought the California condors were Queen Calafia's big black man-eating griffins.

And so on to the present day where California is ruled by Conan the Barbarian.

I probably shouldn't have used the word "lazy". What I really mean is that I'm more impressed by people who do the hard work of creating a new universe and characters than by people who do the (different) hard work of creating new stories with an existing universe and characters.
Are you equally less impressed by non-SFF writers as compared to SFF writers, for dealing solely in the real world?

Summing up an old essay of mine, writing in an existing universe (whether creating fanfic or historical fiction) isn't easier, it just uses a different set of skills. What the author saves in worldbuilding and character creation is compensated by the amount of research necessary for accuracy.

Oh, and 3rd rec for AJ Hall's LOPiverse -- I was also thinking of reccing that for detractors on the aesthetic level.

Oh, what fun. Fancy-sounding German compound word neologisms. That's "tiefsinnig klingende deutsche Wortzusammensetzungsneologismen" to you!

"Weltarbeit" sounds more like "world labor" and evokes images of international socialist movements.

You mean "fictional universe as a work of art," right? The translation for "work" you're looking for is "Werk."

A fictional universe can be called "Welt," but "Weltwerk" doesn't sound like this meaning of "Welt" is intended. Hmmm.

Let's try to find a word for "story world" first and then try tacking on "-werk" to the end of that. :-)

Okay, first of all, Geschichtewelt is grammatically incorrect. You're looking for Geschichtenwelt. (This is for "story world;" if you wanted "history world," that'd be Geschichtswelt, even though both "story" and "history" translate to "Geschichte." Languages are funky, aren't they?)

But "Geschichtenwelt" isn't quite right, because "Geschichte" doesn't sound so ... respectable, in German. It has a certain association with "children's story", at least to me. "Geschichtenwelt" sounds a little like a world where bedtime stories take place.

How about "Fiktivwelt"? The German Wikipedia uses the term "fiktive Welt", which fits the bill except that it's not a single word. "Fiktivwelt" sounds like -- hmm -- an imaginary world that someone pretends to be real, perhaps. But it seems ok. And since "fictional" is the translation of "fiktiv" that pretty much all English speakers will default to, I expect, it seems pretty good to me for our purpose. ("Virtual" is a translation conveying a different meaning of "fiktiv," but I expect that English speakers will conveniently not notice that subtlety.)

Ah, and I know what to do about "world-work." "Gesamtwerk," literally "entire work," is actual academic German and means one author's entire corpus; e.g., "Goethes Gesamtwerk." I hereby declare that from now on, it also refer to the entire corpus of works set in a particular fiktivwelt.

[Note that I'm not forgetting to inflect "refer." I'm inflecting it to be in the subjunctive mood.]

You have my permission to use "Fiktivwelt-Gesamtwerk" if you want to make clear which meaning of gesamtwerk you are referring to.

- Benja

It's an interesting circular situation (but probably not unique): fiction... influencing fan fiction... influencing fiction.

I do make that analogy quite often.

By now I've read over 30 fictional portrayals of Christopher Marlowe (hey, it's a hobby). The variation is impressive. Even when they cover the same period in his life, the interpretations can be quite different. I've read Kits who dabble (or more) in magic, and those who are Doubting Thomases until the end. And both can be justified in the historical record.
I've also seen (though not read) at least three vampire novels involving Kit, and plenty of straight-out smut, given his purported homosexuality.

As far as dilution goes, I also read a lot of Harry Potter fanfic, and haven't noticed it diminishing my pleasure in JKR's novels. [And I started fanfic before Book 5, so I've gone through the comparisons twice.] I do more close-rereads and analysis than I might otherwise have, but I don't mistake JKR's Draco for anybody else's.

For a more... approchable analogy than Marlowe, how many versions of Cinderella have you seen/read? Disney's? Rodgers & Hammerstein's? Drew Barrymore's Ever After? Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted? [Robin Hood is another effective example.] And how much do you confuse one portrayal for another? I can contain multitudes.

Now in these cases, there's not really one true canonical original, as there is for modern copywritten material -- but if I can separate these in my own mind, the same holds true for derivative works.

And if you write historical novels in which an invented character sleeps with a lot of historical characters...
Forever Amber? :D

hm, did I mention my hypothetical detector went in the shop yesterday?

So, he writes a story called "Cohen's World" (tm) and (c). This loser called Greg writes fanfiction called "Kohen's World, a Fan Fiction Site" dot com, riffing endlessly about all the underage boys in Cohen's World having explicit gay sex.

It is still a copyright violation and he can still shut it down based on copyright as a complete no brainer. It is impossible to be Fan Fiction that isn't based on the original work. that is the point of fan fiction, unless I missed the memo saying otherwise. It is a derived work and he can shut it down by sending a letter to the ISP for the site even. End of story.

additionally, please stop conflating copyright and trademark.

I hadn't. it is an obvious copyright violation. A derived work created without permission, and can be shut down without further adu. (wasn't someone complaining a bit ago about foreign words getting mispelled in english?)

Copyright is (well, should be, DMCA aside) weak and stupid. Trademark is mighty and cunning.

Still, neither one is any match for Rikki Tikki Tavi. Now, be nice or I'll sic my mongoose on you.

In any event, there are the four flavors of asthetic/justice crossed with original/fanfic.

This is all discussing the idea of "dilution" regarding the justice+original combination. and it is clear that fanfic is illegal. its simply left to the author to decide whether to enforce it or not.

The question remaining is the idea of "dilution" regarding the asthetic+original combination. does fan fic impinge on your experience of the original?

What makes a work special in fanfic, just as in genre writing or novelizations, is what the writer can bring to the table. New insights, new twists, new interpretations of what could easily be (and more often than not, is) standard fare.

A Raising in the Sun.

There are actually three novels (2 completed, one in progress) and a bunch of short stories in the author's 'verse; here's the index.

Have they? I haven't. There are circumstances where it is a civil offense against the copyright laws, and possibly a criminal offense, but there's nothing inherently illegal about it. If the Geraldine Brooks novel listed above is objectively fanfiction, then the Pulitzer Prize was given to an illegal work.

The Laura Burchard post you linked to is pretty close to the version I heard via Mercedes Lackey's announcement to her fandom when it happened. I'm not clear at this remove if it was a submission to one of MZB's anthologies or a zine someone sent her as a courtesy, and ISTR it being more a case of GMTA where the fan had written something very close to a part of the outline for the then-current book.

If I had any idea where my GEnie archives snuck off to, I'd dig up ML's original post. I'm afraid I remember the upheaval in the Tregarde fandom over the new disclaimers, the disappointment over the ending of the Darkover anthologies, and the hysteria that seemed to tinge the whole incident better than the details of the actual case.

The question remaining is the idea of "dilution" regarding the asthetic+original combination. does fan fic impinge on your experience of the original?

And the obvious and unhelpful answer is: it depends.

Because it seems clear that that is such a completely subjective judgment call. In my case, as I pointed out earlier, the answer was "yes" for one fandom and "no" for another. So what does that mean?

Well, for me I'd agree on that without reservations for the books, though the movies have more straggles. But I was using Lord of the Rings for Tolkien's entire created world; I've noticed that it seems like he kind of fen who write non-slash LotR fanfic have taken the Silmarillion and the Lost Tales as their springboards (Of which I've read about one, so I may be overstating. I've just noticed their presence).

Writers have an emotional investment in their characters. This may lead to a defensive and rabid protectionism, especially if they see or are afraid of fanfic writers taking a character in directions that are offensive to them.

But if the characters are well-written, readers end up with an emotional investment too, and this can lead to a kind of emotional appropriation of the characters.

It is when a sense of emotional entitlement gets conflated with practical legal entitlements that things get really messy, and respect and basic courtesies (legal or otherwise) get lost.

As pericat said to me, another factor is that fanfic readers and writers reinforce each others' emotional investment until that sense of entitlement achieves a life of its own. I've seen fans froth at the mouth about the direction that authors take a TV character in, because they Know That It is WRONG. (Think of what are to begin with only mildly irritating characters in a TV show: in the fan world, that irritation can be reinforced and amplified into a hatred of them that can develop until the fans are incredibly resentful toward the writers. Why hasn't this !@#$% been axed?—we TOLD you to get rid of them, why didn't you, you idiots?) That kind of self-perpetuating emotional miasma in a self-contained world can lead to a situation where fans feel nothing but anger and contempt toward official writers... and, of course, vice versa.

Emotional factors like this can generate a great deal of stupid and/or bad behaviour on all sides. But they go a long way to explaining why the urge to extend stories is so strong and so hard to suppress.

sigh. it is so nice of you to be pedantic right up to the point of discerning the differences between civil and criminal law among other things, but then failing to acknowledge the simple fact that Louisa May Alcott died in 1888 and therefore her works are all Public Domain, at which point, copyright don't apply no more. i.e. the pulitzer prize was given to a book based off of another work that had entered teh Public Domain, so legalities don't enter into it...

And to answer your closing question, no. Leaving aside legal concerns and moral concerns regarding creator control of creations, I consider, say, Sally P. Fangirl's magnum opus "Sallia P. Witchypoo Goes to Hogwarts" to be fundamentally equivalent to Grant Morrison's upcoming stint on Batman (the internal quality of those two works aside).

That sounds familiar. This is why when I tell someone I'm writing a story about, oh, ferinstance, deep-space goat farming, and they respond "oh! cool! You know, Vonnegut wrote a story about deep-space goat farming too (although it's not actually that Sci-Fi stuff you write, it's, you know, literary), and it's cool and you should read it," I immediately make a note to not read that story until long, long after my own is finished and rejected.

Now in these cases, there's not really one true canonical original, as there is for modern copywritten material -- but if I can separate these in my own mind, the same holds true for derivative works.

I can separate them, but I've also noticed a tendency in msyelf to eventually choose one work as *my* version of that story. So, for Example, I've read dozens of stories based on Rumplestiltskin, including Jane Yolen's superb Granny Rumple and others... but "The Girl who Spun Gold" (Virginia Hamilton and The Dillons) is Canon.

I think the human brain is trained to imprint on particular versions if we run into a multitude of takes on the same thing. This might be part of the problem with reading fanfic first. One imprints on the "wrong" take on the world, and therefore the oen everyone else accepts as Canon reads wrong.

Are you equally less impressed by non-SFF writers as compared to SFF writers, for dealing solely in the real world?

C.A. Bridges:

Writing in a genre can also be considered lazy writing. If I decide to write a book about vampires, most of my work has been done for me. Readers already know about vampires, what they're like, how they act. I don't have to invent anything at all.

These are the points that I'm finding most interesting when people refer to fanfic as "training wheels" or "lazy" or in some other way not up to the level of "real" original work.

See, I write fanfic based on RPG settings. I don't use characters already written into the seting: I don't feel comfortable writing someone else's characters, and besides, it's more fun to make my own. (Making characters is always the easiest part of writing. Plot's the tricky bit...) What I get out of the setting is exactly that, the settting. A handy-dandy supernatural world where someone's already worked out how all the fiddly bits work, so that I don't have to do it myself. And it's usually modern fantasy, so I end up doing research on everything from the spring weather in a particular part of Colorado to how a particular power worked in the book.

I've also occasionally written stories written in the "real world". These generally take as much, or sometimes slightly less, research to make plausible. Which means in my experience, writing fanfic is exactly as hard as writing historical fiction, modern "real life" fiction, or "well, everyone knows what vampires are like so I don't have to explain it in the story" fiction.

I suppose one might argue RPG fanfic is a different type than fanfic based on movies or books, as RPG settings explicitly encourage you to go make your own characters and stories in the setting. (This becomes more complicated when one is using an RPG that's based on a series of books or a television show...) Still, I'd strongly object to fanfic being categorically marked "easier" or necessarily requiring less creative effort on the part of the author than "real" fiction, unless we include all fiction based on the real world in the same category.

Sorry if I'm appearing pedantic. The act of writing a fictional account of another author's work is legal in some circumstances (such as when the work is in the public domain) and illegal in others. The Louisa May Alcott example was TNH's. She said "Can you see a particle of difference between that and a work of declared fanfiction? I can’t."

I can't either, and yet I was responding to a commenter who was convinced that everyone agreed that fanfic was illegal.

I probably should have left the civil/criminal part out, as it wasn't immediately relevant to my point. Noncommercial fanfic is a derivative work, and when that is illegal it is illegal. It's just not criminally illegal.

"this comment" doesn't actually link to anything....

don't mind me. I'm still a bit of a grouch today.

You don't have to write fanfic or even read it for this to happen, however. There are several movies on a list my husband & I call "Hit Stop Now" — movies that are great up until a certain point, after which it all just goes horribly, horribly wrong. ("Horribly wrong" meaning untrue to the spirit of the movie, inconsistent and incongruous with what's already happened.)

For instance, in the movie Strange Days, when Lenny looks in the mirror and says, "Does this shirt go with this tie?" just HIT STOP. Whatever ending to the movie you make up, it'll be better and more satisfying than the just. plain. WRONG. one the moviemakers chose to use.

And I've never encountered any Strange Days fanfic. I don't even know if it exists.

This explains why we have developed the legal definition of "fanfic." Taking one scene, as you did, and using it for a different reason was not over the line, even though you got paid for it. As so many have said, writing involves using bits of what has gone before. Yours was just a larger bit. For an example of crossing the line, one needs only read Brook's Sword of Shannara. Had he wrote that as an honest (unpaid) fanfic exploration of LotR done in low-epic style, it would have been interesting and even enjoyable, instead of merely infuriating.

Oops. I was referring to, and attempting to link, the comment in which you talk about Appple Computer and then talk about "Copyright Holders".

Mr. Cohen did speak of "children's novels. Call it "Perry Hotter."" I believe "copyright holders" is still an appropriate term and doesn't neccessarily imply a conflation of terms...

I am not 100% sure it would even get to a jury on dilution. Dilution requires commercial use of the allegedly diluting mark, and unlike normal trademark infringement, the courts seem to be more strict on making sure the allegedly diluting mark actually is used in commerce, i.e. selling some good or service.

Further, it requires the allegedly infringed upon mark to be famous. I'm not willing to stipulate that "Perry Hotter" is famous, although I don't know that you can question "Harry Potter"'s fame, at least with regards this topic.

Yes, dilution is a term of art in the trademark arena, but most of the legal concerns of fanfic are within the copyright arena, and the two do not necessarily interjoin.

I likes the fabric image, and Rings gives me a similar feeling of completeness. On the other hand, Tolkien set out to create a living & breathing mythology that others would subsequently contribute to and expand (though I think he had music and poetry and dance in mind rather than Gollum/Smeagol slash fic, and I doubt the ol' professor would approve of scandinavian orc bands).

That's what I was referencing when I said that fanfiction is illegal, and that no one here was disputing that. Not the works that can be considered historical fanfiction - just the stuff which is commonly referred to by that name. That's all.

Yes, actually. I'm one of those genre readers who finds "realistic" fiction boring. <irony>I mean, how much can you really say about the human condition without the extended metaphors available in SF/Fantasy?</irony>

Writing in a genre can also be considered lazy writing. If I decide to write a book about vampires, most of my work has been done for me. Readers already know about vampires, what they're like, how they act. I don't have to invent anything at all.

There's a certain amount of truth to that (as in the joke upthread, we are all building our birds from the same dirt). And those works that simply use the existing tropes, without adding anything new to them, are not as exciting as the minority that take the existing tropes and twist them unmercifully.

For the purposes of literary merit or justice, drop the "copyrighted" part. "Amateur" is to indicate a writer of unpaid, unrequested stories, not "inferior."

(1) At 0917, Jane Yolen said:
Satire is, of course, something else, and protected.
I must beg to disagree, lovely lady. I wish it were not so; but the courts have, in their infinite w/i/s/d/o/m/ folly, determined that "parody" can be a fair use, but that satire cannot be a fair use. (Then the courts nearly inverted the definitions, but that's an argument for another time.) The best example of this is The Cat NOT in the Hat, a 1995 book on the OJ Simpson trial done in the style (visually and verbally) of Dr Seuss. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that this was at best "satire," and therefore was not fair use.

I don't defend the courts on this; I think they've got it wrong; but, nonetheless, that's the law.

(2) At 1045, dlnevins invoked the notorious Scholastic v Stouffer matter. That's actually a much more insidious comparison than it might seem, because:
* Stouffer's books were vanity/self-published
* Stouffer was sanctioned by the court for submitting forged documents to the court as a critical part of her case
* It was more a trademark matter than a copyright matter.

(3) May I respectfully suggest that y'all stop using the term "dilution" in this manner? The concept of dilution is a technical aspect of trademark law, and has no place in a discussion that veers off into copyright. (I think trademark is actually a better framework for understanding fanfic than is copyright, but that's a 15,000-words-plus-footnotes-long argument.) If you keep throwing that word around, you're just going to end up confusing things at some point. May I suggest using a term that does not have a specific meaning in another area of law, such as "undercut" or "vitiate"? Please? I'm afraid that if I were to weigh in here—using "dilution" in the course of my comments, since I'd inevitably end up somewhere near trademark law—we'd all end up more confused than we started.

Sadly, though, "dilution" in the trademark sense is exactly what is at issue. "Dilution" occurs when an infringing trademark use could cause an unsophisticated consumer to transfer his/her conception of the quality and characteristics of the infringer's goods or services to the markholder's. In this context, it means that an unsophisticated consumer would evaluate Star Wars fanfic, decide "this is bad," and therefore decide that all Star Wars fiction must be bad. This is distinct from "disparagement" only through the infringer's intent; but that's something we really don't want to go into.

The problem that Jane described—the fanfic potentially blocked the markholder's ability to enter a specific market niche—is not strictly a matter of dilution, but is more generally a matter of unfair competition. That makes it no less a trademark issue; it's just not "dilution."

(Well, except I'd bring in tarnishment as well as disparagement, but as Petit says, it's a longer, more involved argument.)

I'll probably end up chiming in again soon. I have a novel/horrible idea about the patentability of worldbuilding concepts, but that's another discussion entirely.

Kipling said it too:

When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea;
An' what he thought 'e might require,
'E went an' took -- the same as me!

I don't think most of the people here who are using the word "dilution" are trying to use it in the sense of trademark law, nor that they're using it because they incorrectly think it has some meaning in copyright law. I think most people are using it as part of the aesthetic discussion. It may not be a great term, but I do think it describes a real phenomenon and I don't think we've come up with a better term for that phenomenon.

Certainly none of us has their own dirt, but there are degrees.. John Gardner's Grendel seems to me fair use, where Brooks' novel is distasteful.

I guess my concern is that an author may not agree with the fanfic's author's take on the character involved.

Once a work is finished, the author's 'take' on a character is of little consequence to the life of the character/book/story. After the initial creation of a character, the author has little control over how a character is received/interpreted by the reader and therefore, it would seem to me that it's the readers take on the character that becomes important.

Not that those holes are missing, per se. The author goes down this path but not that one, and obviously, the author can't tell every story in every framework, or the shortest book would be an encyclopedia. But sometimes, your mind pipes in with, yes, but what's over there?

Example: Just before Hamlet begins, Queen Gertrude marries her dead husband's brother. Why? Did she love him? Did she fear losing the throne? Did he threaten her? Seduce her?

Example: What happened at Romeo and Juliet's joint funeral? Did the clans blame each other, or pledge to start over through their tears? Did one side hold out an olive branch and the other trample on it?

Example: Did the third little pig know that the other two were going to crash at his pad all along? Did he roll his eyes and make up the spare bedroom, or was he honestly ticked that they hadn't listened to him when building the house?

Any of those could turn into an interesting fic. Because sometimes you just want to peel back the curtain and see what's happening offscreen, and if no one will tell you, you'll just have to write it yourself.

I want people to do fanfic from my stuff. It means they're reading it and they care enough about it to want to play in my world. A six-figure contract and a major publishing house can't buy you fans. All it does it put your books on the shelves.

Those of us asking everyone not to use "dilution" are asking because it makes things terribly confusing. It's like complaining about the margins of a book being to small and calling this "poor spelling" (ok, the metaphor's not perfect, because dilution is actually quite a good term for the phenomenon being discussed, but I think it makes my point.) The word's overloaded, not wrong.

"...what I'm intrigued with is the idea that some fanfiction exists to plug holes."

What makes a good novel is more than just believable characters, a cool world and a good plot. The style of writing, the quality of the storytelling, the details chosen, all those things that make up the author's voice are part of the book as well. (This is also true for movies, but I'm less fluent in movie jargon.) An author choses what to say, and also what to omit. It's part of what makes the whole story.

Once this book is published, the author has no control over how people read it or understand it--that's between the reader and the book. However the author retains the way in which the characters, world and plot are presented: s/he wrote them, and the presentation s/he gave is the one that exists.

Fanfic changes this. Now new authorial voices chime in with the same characters/world/and/or/plot. The presentation is not the one the author devised. I can see how someone wouldn't want that to happen, especially if it's widely distributed.

What I'm really hoping to get at is the difference between the moral and ethical arguments.

I think there's an ethical case for a difference between fiction based on Public Domain works and protected works, but I don't know if there is a moral case.

If there's a moral case, then there's shouldn't be an arbitrary time limit. Something can't magically turn from right to wrong because it's now 2006 instead of 2005. Brook's Pulitzer Prize winning novel based on the late Ms Alcott's characters and setting shouldn't be different from Jareo's no-prize lusing novel based on Mr. Lucas' characters and setting. Phillip Jose Farmer's Riverworld uses Alice Liddell as a central character. "Kilgore Trout's" Venus on the Half Shell was written by Vonnegut's fictional author, without Vonnegut's permission. What's the difference, in terms of moral rights?

"Another point to think about as far as "legal" versus "moral" rights -- a lot of us have a lot of difficulty respecting that "authors have a LEGAL right to own their creations; OMG you're STEALING THEIR LIVELIHOOD!!!!" when most of them DON'T hold their own copyright."

i can only guess you are referring to work for hire, a small subset of fiction writing. MOST fiction writers do own their own copyright. Not sure where you are getting your "facts."

And how would most people feel if they were told that their family farm or business or house would--after 20 or 50 years--suddenly be taken from them and given to whatever squatters wanted them? My books ARE my family farm. I work/toil there daily. I want to leave it to my children who can then decide to work it, rent it out, or sell it entire.

Jane

"pnh says 'Props to any writer who can make a story fly. None of us use our own dirt.'"

Appropriately enough for this thread, pnh didn't in fact say that. WillA said it (follow the indentations) and TNH appended it to the original post as a quotation.

That's some complicated dirt.

That's exactly the economic bargain that copyright protection offers. In exchange for [56/life+70/52/some fixed and therefore predictable] years of your control over the use of your farm, you agree to turn it over to the public domain at the end of the period, where Dover Thrift Editions and Project Gutenberg can keep it alive or not, but your literary heirs can't stop them.

This may be bad for you, personally, but it's the collective bargain that exists.

Thanks for the clarification. (Which I shall promptly forget and need reminding of a day or two hence in some other discussion.)

Jane

I dunno. How would you feel if we had a system of permanent copyright, and it turned out that dozens of Jane Yolen's stories and novels infringed on the rights of the heirs to (for instance) Hans Christian Anderson?

I suspect you feel there's a reasonable middle ground between those two conditions. So do I.

The key here is that they're authorial voices, but not authoritative voices, and most of fandom knows that. They treat canon (the copyrighted and trademarked product, which they shell out money to buy) very seriously. Are there idiotic and vocal exceptions? Sure. I don't believe they compise the majority.

You're entitled to use amped-up figurative language, but you can't really expect the rest of the world to play along to the extent of granting your literary creations the same level of social protection granted to, you know, actual living breathing children.

I'm a fan-fic-reading PBEM*-playing writer of reverse-license** stories. (And published original stuff.) And I'm going to defend the right of other kids and folks to do exactly what I'm doing. Especially if they do it badly.

Because I have not seen much published hide nor hair of the writer of my source material since 1999...and the other stuff I got paid for.

~
* PBEM stands for play-by-email, and it's a type of fan-run role-playing-game.

** a reverse-license is what my editor said I had when she paid me to write about her characters.

Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake makes intense allusion to / satire of Harrison's Viriconium novels: Harrison deploys Scottish place-names in The Pastel City, so MacLeod brings us to the real Scotland which has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland. There are other twists, but I won't spoil MacLeod for you.

Paul McAuley's Confluence trilogy is a transfic of Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (including Urth), often with what seem to be deliberately parallel episodes, but SF instead of "science fantasy."

If I wanted to translate LoTR into a Indiana Jones setting, as SF, does it become an independent work and not fanfic?

@jane: In the analogy, the only reason you had the farm in the first place is copyright. You (or your ancestor) didn't buy it, although you did put a large amount of labor into making it a productive farm. Copyright gives you the land, lets you work it, and when you die, it takes the land away and gives it to someone else.

I'm all in sympathy with using anything that inspires you as grist for your creative mill. I'm less in sympathy when you try to sell something you don't own.

One could argue that fanfic writers are simply more honest about their sources.

Or one could take the perspective that the real differences relate to the quality of the fiction, whether it is defined as "original" or "fanfiction".

Very amused by that. I've actually sold a couple stories set on the Isle of California, one of which is currently reprinted on Fictionwise, The Croquet Mallet Murders, as well as A Formula for Chaos, the novel I started in high school, finished in college, and shelved lo these many years ago.

Which might apply except for the fact that most fanfic authors I know aren't going "Behold, I am following in a mighty literature tradition, and now the grown-ups will let me sit with them." We're not riding coattails to anything; we're not interested in sitting at the Legitimate Important Writers table, at least not while wearing these hats.

Most fanfic authors I know are going, "I write smut where Hermione Granger services Professor Snape under his potions desk. No, it serves no Higher Purpose. I just like me some smut. Wanna see?"

In many ways, I've always thought the early gospels resemble Jesus fanfic. You all get one character who was cool, and some canonical events, but how it proceeds after that was up to the individual writer--virtually all of the gospels were written long after the historical events, so historical reality didn't neccessarily intrude much on art. And eventually the New Testament was assembled when a bunch of people got together and read everything over and said "Oh, hell no, Jesus/Judas is totally NOT canon!"* and threw it out. They did this for a LOT of writings. This is not neccessarily a bad thing, because if all the early Christian texts were incorporated in the Bible, it'd be the size of a Robert Jordan compendium and you'd need a handtruck to wheel it around.

*We will assume the slash here stands for a totally platonic disciple relationship. Put down the torches.

so, the first and foremost problem with this "family farm" metaphor is that a farm is physical land that is also a zero sum game and so, when you start with a physical property metaphor, you end up with a physical property conclusion for intellectual works.

And the problem with that is that intellectual works are abstract and the complete opposite of being a zero sum game and therefore also the complete opposite of property.

So, if you want a metaphor that honestly portrays the abstract thing that writers create, you need an abstract metaphor. Writing, as it happens, is actually a service industry, not a manufacturing industry. Writers don't manufacture physical property like automobiles, they provide a service through their labor and the nature of their labor is such that the labor immediately benefits everyone (without artifical legal entities, of course)

So, the closest and most simplest metaphor for writing is actually told in the story of "Bell that Cat". A cat is terrorizing a group of mice, and the mice figure that the cat is too stealthy and the way to fix that is to put a bell on it. So, one brave mouse puts some time, energy, and risk into sneaking up on the cat and tieing a bell around its neck.

Once that is done, every single mouse immediately benefits from the act.

This reflects the abstract nature of written works. Once written, it is almost no cost to put it on the web and transmit it to the world.

So, copyright is a reward system to encourage writers to write, the way the mice might design a reward system for mice to go out and bell new cats as they arrive on the scene.

Copyright rewards the author by letting them make money off their work for a fixed period of time. This repays them for the time they invested in creating the work in the first place.

And arguing that copyright on a single book is like a family farm to be passed down from generation to generation for all eternity is like a mouse arguing that he and his heirs should be paid a monthy sum for all eternity for belling a single cat.

If you start with a physical metaphor like farmland, you end with a justification for treating copyright like a physical thing that it isn't. If you start with a metaphor that more accurately portrays the abstract, labor-involved nature of writing and the works it creates, then you actually end up with a fair copyright reward system.

Lenora Rose: OG answered your question about 'why read fanfic before the original'. I'd like to add that when everyone around you is gushing "OMGit'sthebestthingsinceslicedbreadwithpeanutbutter!" you begin to a: feel left out, and b: find the culture changing around you. People refer to characters you've never heard of, let alone are familiar with, and events/places/things which you have no access to. It can be like walking into a room that you think is full of friends and find them all speaking Merovingian French. You end up with a strong incentive to find out what's up for sheer survival's sake. In my case, without a TV, the only ingress to the Buffy-verse I had was through fanfic.

It wasn't a good ingress. The signal to noise ratio in fanfic is crappy (I blame the lack of editorial oversight, not any individual works.) Your later comment about imprinting is cogent here; the fanfic was my introduction and therefore was my strongest impression of the 'verse... and it wasn't a positive one. Also, by the time I actually saw any episodes much of the character suspense had been spoilered out for me (Who is this mysterious handsome stranger? That's just Angel who's gonna be Buffy's SO and she'll stab him and he'll come back to life for his own series....)

I agree with Greg London that reading fanfic after you've seen/read/experienced the original is much less damaging. That's what I want for original authors: I want them to have the right of the first impression. I want them to have the opportunity to show their audience *their* take, unfiltered through other people's preconceptions and wish-fulfillments and blather. It's theirs; they thought it up. Let the audience see their creation as it was intended to be seen. That's fair.

Fanficcers are wannabes. Their draw is reliant on the original creator's draw--without that crutch, would anyone read them? Should anyone? Just because you want to practice your writing with an audience doesn't mean you deserve one--especially one that someone else has assembled. It isn't truly fair to the original author--even if it doesn't damage him.

All this said, no, I don't advocate banning fanfic entirely. It has its good sides--bringing fans together, keeping them interested in the fictional world between books/movies/whatever, letting them practice writing skills. I refuse to take it seriously though--it doesn't matter how good the piece is. It's cribbed.

I don't take cribbed essays seriously, either. YMMV.

"until he heard from the Tolkien estate about the Orcs..."

More likely hobbits. Hobbits were called just that in early editions of D&D. Later, they were referred to as "halflings." The description of the race, in recent editions of the "Players' Handbook" is not very much like Tolkien's creatures.

There have been orcs in there all along.

TSR had several licensing run-ins. The first edition of "Gods, Demigods, and Heroes" has Lovecraftian beasties. I had this and foolishly returned it to the store!

There's an even more fabulously rare set of TSR rules for simulating miniatures combat on Barsoom. (The reference page that came with the original D&D rules has stats for thids and such.) There was a line of Barsoom martians and monsters too, I forget from whom.

That's partly personal taste (who is a deep, and who a wide), and partly just untrue; Potter/Snape was certainly growing the characters when it was new.

Illustration: what's the advantage that a tie-in has over fanfic? It's approved as fitting the originator's model of the universe (e.g., including all of the behind-the-scenes pieces that were implied or not shown at all). What's the advantage of fanfic over a tie-in? The fanfic isn't filtered for approval, which lets it illuminate weaknesses the originator would cover up, go for logical consequences the originator would prefer you not think about, etc. I've heard Mike talk about his tussles with Paramount when he wrote two ST books that damn near broke the mold; IIRC they resulted in much text added to the "bible" (prescriptions for the tie-in writers), and I specifically recall a scene he was ordered to take out and did, but pointed to in a way they either missed or couldn't/didn't object to.

One of the interesting things about the original-ST tie-ins was the number of mainstream SF writers who wrote them, and the obvious differences between people who already knew how to put a story together and the ones who were learning (or even not learning) their trade on Paramount's nickel. I've read very few tie-ins since then, at least partly because very few of the authors I respect do tie-ins; I don't think much of Karen Traviss's attitude in her Emerald City article, but I thought enough of her work that I \might/ try one of her SW books.

I don't sneer at fanfic, but I'm not fascinated enough by the idea to give it much time. (People's fascination with the familiar varies; I don't think I was the only person in my chorus who looked at a schedule 13 years ago and said "Beethoven's 9th? Again??") I've got well over nine yards of unread mostly-originals (I'll admit to following Benjamin January) already, not to mention what happens when Amazon actually sends me the results of the 4-for-3 sale mentioned here a few months ago.

We don't have to respect those rights unless bound by law or social custom, the same as we don't have to respect any other rights unless bound by law or social custom. Your right to own the proverbial "family farm" and hand it off to your heirs is based on a legal nicety called a property deed. Giving someone perpetual copyright to a piece of literature is messier to define and harder to enforce than a parcel of land, but isn't much different in concept.

It's also interesting to note that as late as the early 20th century, the practice of writing pastiches and unauthorized sequels (including crossovers) was fairly widespread. Garrett P. Serviss wrote Edison's Conquest of Mars, an unauthorized "sequel" to War of the Worlds, with nary a repercussion. Maurice Leblanc cheerfully wrote Sherlock Holmes into his Arsène Lupin novels (completely botching his characterization, I might add). When Conan Doyle objected, he simply changed the character's name to "Holmlock Shears" or "Herlock Sholmes" and kept right on writing.

Not too much further on, the early comic books shamelessly cribbed from pulp novels. Superman was Doc Savage with maybe half of the serial numbers filed off (Man of Bronze, Man of Steel; both had an arctic Fortress of Solitude; both were super-scientists (in the pre-retcon versions of Superman); both had a female cousin who fought crime with them, etc.); likewise Batman was just a little less psycho version of the Shadow and/or the Spider (who was himself a rip-off of The Shadow). The Shadow had a sidekick reporter named Margot Lane whereas Superman had a sidekick reporter named Lois Lane. (Who was subsequently played by Margot Kidder, but that's just coincidental. As is the fact that Ron Ely has played Superman (in an "infinite worlds" episode of the Superboy TV series), Doc Savage, and Tarzan, the latter two of whom are "related" via Philip José Farmer Wold Newton biographies. But I digress.)

It's only been recently, with the rise of the corporation, the extension of copyright, and so forth that "fanfic" has become more derogatory. If fanfickers today had lived a hundred years ago, writing about the franchises that had been around then, they would very likely have been publishable instead of sueable.

(Oh, and Farmer wrote those Vonnegut's-character books that someone alluded to above, but according to author's notes in his Riverworld short story collection, he did it with Vonnegut's knowledge and permission.)

Yes, they would - just like many people read King Lear or the Aeneid without caring about the original stories they're based on. There are plenty of people who read fanfic regularly, and even write fanfic, without actually liking the original very much. (Try taking a poll in the currently-thriving Stargate fanfic community of how many people actually think the show is good. From the conversations I've seen on livejournal, I'd guess there's a substantial portion of them who started watching and/or continue watching the show only for the sake of being able to read or write the fanfic. If that's true, then it's the original show that's reliant on the fanfic community for its draw.)

All that can be said about fanfic writers is that they probably saw something interesting about the source material. It could just be one minor character; it could be that they hated the original so intensely that they felt driven to prove they could do something interesting with the characters. And faithful readers don't even always need to have seen the source to enjoy fanfic.

And I really don't think this is related to my age. My generation, maybe. But I really don't want to grow out of this (upthread) belief.

ok. Hiding my head in the peanut gallery again.

Well, first of all, I'm aware of contingents within at least one TV fandom where the vision of the original writers was ultimately rejected and the show was no longer watched by a substantial number of disenchanted fans (an attitude and practice I did not share, but there it is). Those fans created an alternate self-contained universe, given form through fanfic. So in that case the original creator's draw simply did not exist for a large number of people.

But hang on, more to the point... wannabe whats? What are fanfic writers trying to be? Wannabe writers? Good writers? Entertaining writers? Those are all the kind of "wannabes" that apply to any writer, presumably. And for which success is determined by the writing, not the wanting.

Wannabe "authors?" In the sense of recognized, published, royalty-earning, respected in the wider literary world? Ironically, although other kinds of writers can be want to be "authors" in this sense, that is the one thing that fanfic writers are disqualified from being—and that disqualification is generally recognized among them—by virtue of the fact that the characters are appropriated and the distribution generally fits within the "gift economy".

Wannabe storytellers? Yeah, I'd go with that one. And a few (as in the larger writing world) do a fine job of it.

Arbitration is not free. And if we could all happily agree to follow simple rules, we wouldn't need lawyers in the first place.

Actually, I would contest this. If I were to, say, write a fusion of Farscape and Casablanca in which John Crichton takes the Ingrid Bergman role, that story has no effect on what actually did happen on the show. The dvds won't change; John and Aeryn did their thing and Braca never shot Grayza or teamed up with Crichton to fight off the Nazis--er, the Nebari.

The show is still the show. The canon is unaffected by anything I write, whether I write well or poorly.

This is not to say that I can have no effect on the audience--but I can't touch the canon. And the bulk of the audience, believe it or not, is perfectly capable of distinguishing between my entertaining bit of fluff and the story that was told by the Henson Company and the rest of the cast and crew. The canon remains untouched unless the producers themselves bring the fanfiction into it.

Fanficcers are wannabes.

That's something of an overgeneralization. Many ficwriters write fic not because they want to be television writers (yikes!) or because they want to be novelists, but because these are the stories they like to tell, about these characters. There's nothing "wannabe" about it.

Which is not to say that some ficwriters don't want to become professional writers--but everyone has different reasons for what they do, and it's impossible to assign valid motivations to such a vast group of people with very varied agendas.

What do you think they want to be?

Just because you want to practice your writing with an audience doesn't mean you deserve one--especially one that someone else has assembled.

I don't read fiction to reward the deserving, I do it to reward me.

It isn't truly fair to the original author--even if it doesn't damage him.

Joss Whedon has said, I believe, that people not only can but should write Buffy fanfic. Perhaps he is being terribly unfair to himself, but I think maybe he knows what he's doing.

Now, I think creators have a very strong right to be paid for their creations. But I don't think they have a right -- that is, I don't think they should have a right -- to control what happens to those creations.

Which brings us back to a subject which has been brought up in earlier threads about copyright: mandatory licensing. The precedent here is from music: if you want to record another's song, you have to pay the composer -- but they can't deny permission.

This, I would argue, is clearly what should happen with literary characters and worlds. Anyone who wants to write the starship Enterprise should have to pay a percentage of the take to Paramount. But I don't think that Paramount should get to decide what works get written, get published, get sold or get read.

Amen, yea verily. Frankly, there are a fair number of fanfiction writers who do a better job than the original writer. The Harry Potter universe is full of inconsistencies and moral ambiguities--and many longtime fans found the latest installment repulsive.

Are they her characters? Yes. Should she receive credit for them and a share of any money that's made using them? Absolutely.

But her lawyers are scary and her really committed fans are scary and I don't want to see things like [link deleted at commenter's request] go away because there was boykissing in them, or because somebody actually dared to question the morality expressed in the books.

(By the way, in future posts I'll be calling myself Azalais Aranxta; I've mostly left the HP fandom.)

The other thing that I want to bring up is that a lot of original novels basically are fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off. It might be nice to be able to acknowledge that and credit the sources of one's inspiration, even after putting all the characters through Witness Protection, rather than having to hide it and pretend it doesn't happen.

[Part one, in which a person posts a defence of Fanfic on teh intarweb, a place where fanfic flourishes, and fanfic writers defend themselves and their lifechoices]

[Part two, in which fanfic writers read the defence of fanfic, and post their agreement. Any dissenting voices are comfortably drowned out by the overwhelming sound of mutual backslapping]

[Part three, in which everyone involved lives happily ever after, and nothing changes in the world]

fanficcers are wannabes.

And you're not? I don't mean that as an attack; I just wonder whether you are at the top of every field you are involved in, both for work and for your hobbies. Say, do you play a sport? Are you Olympic quality at that? No?

That's what I want for original authors:

Presupposing that there is such a thing as an original author, but.

I want them to have the right of the first impression.

Ah. So, you never read reviews of works you go to see? You never talk to others about works?

Cause, see, if you do, then the author isn't getting their first impression.

I want them to have the opportunity to show their audience *their* take, unfiltered through other people's preconceptions and wish-fulfillments and blather.

Well, there's always going to be one person's preconceptions and wish-fulfillments and blather in the way: yours. At the very least, you are not them, and you will never see what they saw. Of course, this presupposes a single creator. In the case of TV, there are dozens of people involved with the work, each with their own blather to go with it.

It's theirs; they thought it up. Let the audience see their creation as it was intended to be seen. That's fair.

So, we should never look at most of Lichtenstien's works, because, after all, Takka Takka will pollute your viewing of the original panes of that strip.

And do you always view art works hung as the artist intended? And, if you do, what do you think of the curator's art and craft?

What about short stories? Afterall, something published in Interzone is going to have a different feel if it is republished in an anthology; should the book use the particular font that was used by the author on their computer? The font used by Interzone?

I don't take cribbed essays seriously, either. YMMV.

Let me take a maths researcher, working in the foundations of maths, specifically in defining axioms, and what you can and can't prove with those said axioms. Would you expect him to prove Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, in every paper of his that mentions it? Or do you let him take that, and work from there?

It's cribbed.

So is all of civilisation: Is there any thing whereof it may be said, see, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

Keith:

There’s quite a difference between using standard tropes and techniques and writing fanfic. One is purely derivative by definition, the other is making use of the basic stock storytelling elements of our language and psychology to tell a story.

Purely derivative? So, if it is purely derivative, then how come the characters act in original ways?

I’m not dismissing fanfic altogether, it serves a vital role in the creative ecosystem. I just don’t buy the argument that Virgil, Dante etc. are antique fanfic. That broadens the definition to the point of uselessness.

Well, it is stretching the definition a bit, esp. in the case of Dante. Not that much however. And Homer was writing fanfic, by any modern definition. (Which, as Teresa says, would have to be a modern definition.)

Even if I could get behind that idea, we don’t live in antiquity, where every variation on the Hercules story is a valid expression of creativity.

I'm sorry, but `valid expression of creativity'? There is no invalid expression of creativity! Did you miss Dada, and Pop Art? Did not Duchamp display his fountain? There is no `invalid' art. There is good and bad art, but none of it is invalid.

We live in the modern world where companies with deep pockets and mean lawyers protect their entertaining property.

In 1901, women didn't have the vote in most parts of the world. Didn't make it right.

It strikes me as self serving of fanfic authors to try and ride the coattails of giants into better company.

Heh. Do you know any fanfic writers trying to wrangle invites to posh New York cocktail parties? On the whole, they aren't trying to `ride' any coattails', they are just telling stories. (Oh, and read Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier on `highbrow literary authors. Chapter 10, Pages 143-145 in my Penguin edition.)

Just a final question: What do people think of Lichtenstein, in terms of `fanfic'? After all, he was surely just as bad for `cribbing' as anyone else.

And, David, I'm not a fanficcer, but I know that quite a few people who comment here are. I also know that quite a few professional prose authors, editors, and poets comment here. I believe that most people here just want a free and frank and polite exchange of ideas. I don't think that Making Light is intended to be an exercise in groupthink.

But I want someone sheparding my stuff after I am gone who understands what I want done with it. Sort of like a living will.

Insurance. If I drop dead today, there's a shorter time. If I drop dead in thirty years, bringing me close to 100, those who want to profit from running my farm or turning the land into highrise emporia or put Disney rides all over it, will either have to pay my heirs or wait another 50 years. It is still tillable, but for a price. After that, my work (my farm) goes into the public domain.

I have, myself, often written a kind of fan fiction (in the broadest definition), reworking folklore, Arthurian, even Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland for short stories. Some parodic (is that a word?) and some more serious. And some both at once.

The problems arise, methinks, when money and ownership bang heads. When big corporations and small-holders are put in the same shopping bag. When fans cross the creation line (a kind of moveable Maginot line.)

I don't have solutions. Mostly questions and a long-held passionate belief that I should have ownership in my own creations for a solid piece of time. Otherwise I really am writing for hire. And short hire at that.

Jane

Marion had begun to write a Darkover book about Regis Hastur. She liked the "take" a particular fan author had on the situations and asked to use that spin on things for her book in return for the usual acknowlegement in the front of the book. She had done this before with other fan authors (even though she didn't have to, after all, you can't "own" an idea).

However in this case, the next party heard from was the author's agent, who demanded cover credit and co-authorship, or there would be a lawsuit.

Now, having been a party in a lawsuit myself, I can tell you that when you sue or are sued, the only people who win are the lawyers. Even if you win the case, you lose; time, effort, your sanity...in my case, before the suit was over (we were sueing our insurance company to get them to pay over my husband's studio fire) I was on three Prozac a day and hadn't been able to write for six months. And that was just a civil suit over stuff.

This would have been over Marion's baby, her pride, her joy, her universe. She felt passionate about Darkover.

And she, too, had been involved in lawsuits by that time, so she knew what she would have faced even if she won.

She elected not to finish or publish the book. So that book will never see the light of day.

In her shoes, I'd have done the same thing.

Thats the facts, Jack.

That said, I am in favor of not-for-profit fanfic. I just have to protect myself by making it policy that I never, ever, ever read any fanfic based on my work. If it gets sent to me, it's returned unseen my me. But I got my start writing the stuff, and I managed to get a lot of lousy writing out of the way by doing so.

Though I am sure that there are some who would say that last statement is debatable. There are days when I would say so myself (grin).

As a Buffy fanfic writer I heartily agree with what Joss has done. There had been Buffy fic from the beginning. Joss has known there was fic out there and always acknowledged it. He even poked fun at it and used inside jokes from it in Buffy and Angel. He knows that the fans write fic out of love for his show. Without the fans there wouldn't have been a show, heck the fans petitoned for a 5th season of Angel! Joss knows that fans are what got him to where he is and acknowledges all the various possible ships with what he calls the Bring Your Own (sub)text philosophy.
As fanfic writers in the Buffyverse, we all acknowledge the characters are not ours, but we bless and thank their creator for allowing us to play in his sandbox.

(1) I can't recommend the article Professor Tushnet cites (and cited in a comment above that I'm too lazy to pinpoint—just look for "Tushnet" and read that entry) as either a well-considered analysis or an accurate assessment of the various doctrines underlying "character protection." That's a matter of disagreement, nothing more. My own take on it is at Fan Fiction, which distills a series of entries from my blawg.

(2) The basic copyright-based theory of how fanfic infringes an author's rights descends from Tarzan and Sam Spade. In those terms, fanfic (or anything else in which a setting or a character is "borrowed") is a derivative work, and therefore violates one of the exclusive rights authors have under the Copyright Act. The obvious problem is that almost all of these decisions fell under the 1909 Copyright Act, which did not have a specific fair use privilege in it as does the 1976 Act at § 107. This is rather like using everything one has learned in basic trig about tan rigidly to calculate tanh; there will be some points of congruence, the process is the same, but the actual values one obtains after the calculation vary pretty wildly over the range of input values.

To say the least, there is little consistency among the courts, or even from case to case, on what constitutes "fair use" of another author's characters/setting. Compare the 11th Circuit's decision in SunTrust (parody/satire of Gone With the Wind—fair use) with the 9th Circuit's decisions in Air Pirates (underground comic depicting various Disney characters as participants in drugrunning—not fair use) and Dr Seuss Enters (satire of the OJ Simpson trial done broadly in the style of Dr Seuss—not fair use). Then try to find an iota of consistency in the actual reasoning, even though these three cases all cite some of the same authority! Now throw in the 2Live Crew decision (Campbell v Acuff-Rose Music)…

(3) What makes this really complicated is that, all too often, we're also looking at a "transformative use". One transforms the Star Wars characters from film depictions to pure prose in writing Star Wars fanfic. Transformative uses are more likely to be fair uses than are "straighter" reuses; one interesting possible exam question asks whether there would be a difference if everything else was identical, but the fanfic form was the same as the original (the original is also prose, or the fanfic is done as a short film).

If this isn't sounding overly technical and highly unsettled, I haven't communicated very successfully. Suffice it to say that fanfic is almost always a bad idea because the consequences of winning a copyright suit are almost as severe as would be losing…

My point was to echo Robotech_Master (which, by the way, brings up an interesting point about Robotech -- it's certainly licensed, but how does it differ, functionally, from Macross/Mospeada/Southern Cross Fusion Fanfic? (Fusion fanfic being v. popular in anime fandom: Not "What if Ranma met Sailor Moon", but "What if Ranma Were Sailor Moon?" and exploring the funny/interesting implications thereof (transformation sequence involving spinning and a bucket; "Ukyou looks sort of like Makoto!"; a Tuxedo Kamen who can't ever find his way to the fight.))

Even MORE interesting, if you bring up Arsene Lupin, Monkey Punch was NOT licensed by the estate when he created Arsene Lupin III (The half-japanese grandson and successor to the original), and this would up causing quite a few problems when his creation was first licensed for US release, but it's a NATIONAL TREASURE in Japan (also notably, two other major characters in the series, Zenigata and Goemon, are quasi-RPF, being the descendants of fictionalized real people).

Even MORE interesting is the habit of say, DC and Marvel (and Wildstorm, both before and after its absorbtion by DC) to endlessly riff on each others major players in a way that I can't really call "Parodic". Guardians of the Galaxy? Parody, maybe. Kriegstein's (KRIEGSTEIN) Avengers and X-Men parody in Authority? Probably. Supreme? The Four? The three "chances" killed by The Four? The thing in the "0" issue of Planetary? Or even Doc Brass and his group, when compared to the pulp heroes? Can't really call those latter ones Parody, because they're played straight, and you certainly couldn't call them fanfic, and they're more than homage. So WHAT ARE THEY? (Leaving aside any legal arguments, which make my head throb on this particular issue)

In preview, I realized that the above post could use a lot of explanation of examples. I'll do it if requested, but I'm sure there are plenty here who can hit each if need be.

"I'll have a Ron/Hermione with moderate magic, easy on the passion. Hold the spoilers."

"Sure. You want violence with that?"

I dunno, as I said before. Something about it is giving me the creeps.

There was once a conjurer who boasted that he had become god-like. One god happened to overhear, and challenged him to a contest.
“Can you do this?” the god asked, scooping up a handful of dirt and making it into a bird. They watched the bird fly away.

“Sure,” said the conjure-man, and reached down for a handful of raw material.

“Hey,” said god. “Use your own dirt.”

And I want to thank WillA for this because it made me realize something this morning: The fundamental problem with the "family farm" metaphor applied to copyright is that it presumes that the writer created his own dirt.

If folk insist on the "working the farm" metaphor, the thing to remember is that they did not create the dirt that is the farm. The farm metaphor applied to writing would have writers working as sharecroppers, working a season, a year, or a few years, to grow a crop. They created the crop through their labor, and copyright is a system that rewards them for the labor they used in raising that crop.

Eternal copyrighters, and those who kid themselves that Life-Plus-70 isn't eternal, are basically arguing that having sharecropped a single season, having created one crop, they argue that they now get to own the land for all eternity. One finite amount of labor does not translate into ownership for all eternity. You write one book, and you want to make money off of it for all eternity.

The money you make on your "crop" is to pay you for your labor needed to make that crop. no more, no less. And copyright is meant to encourage folk to go in and work the land for a while and reward them for whatever they grow and people want to eat.

But to argue that working the land for a short time grants you and your heirs that land for all eternity is to invoke the Okloahoma Land Race, which results in the land being treated as permanent property. You must move off the land at some point, because you did not create the land.

And before you argue again that you aren't relating to your writings as permanent property, my question for you is this: In turning a written work into a legal piece of property for a finite period of time, what is copyright rewarding you for, if not for the labor you used to create it?

No creation of art, no matter how dear to you, took more than some finite amount of time to create. Why should you be paid so far and above that amount that you could spend a couple months writing a short story and get to control that writing for 150 years? (you write the story when your twenty, you live to a ripe age of 90, and you get Life-Plus-70 years copyright terms)

Jane: what you're proposing here is the death of the concept of public domain. Which is already occuring under current copyright law--the public domain has essentially been "frozen" by recent copyright extensions.

What I think will actually occur going forward, should this continue, is that this will result in the death of PRO fiction entering the public domain, and the concept of the public domain will change. It will become more of a quasi-legal entity than the legal entity it has been. It will be a mish-mash of work released by authors/estates who feel that they are filling the end of the bargin they entered into when they originally obtained copyright, and of work that cannot be attributed or traced to a owner. Ironically, fan fiction may play a large part in that. Authors of derivative works (here, fan fiction) DO have copyright in those derivative works (the original copyright holder may sue them for damages, but cannot claim or use those derivative works without permission). But many authors of fan fiction do not always have interest in that copyright, or in using the "protections" offered by copyright. They're content to let their fan fiction float around cyberspace, allowing others to find and find pleasure in it for free.

And you may think that the death of the public domain for pro fiction is a "good" thing. It's possibly a good thing for a very limited amount of pro fiction. If the heirs of Jane Austen still had her copyright, they'd be f*ckin' rich. Or maybe, high school students around the US and UK wouldn't be 'forced' to read her work on a yearly basis. We don't know what the result of the never-ending copyright would be, because it's not existed before.

I suspect that for a limited number of works, especially those with strong commercial backing (Disney!) never-ending copyright would mean that the works would remain forever available, and forever commercial. For your standard novel, take a look at the rare book world to see what's already happening with post-1926 works. There are novels with limited numbers of fans, novels that no publishing company has seen the demand to reprint, or that publishing companies have been prevented from reprinting (you know, by the heir that refuses to allow republication unless the company ALSO publishes their horribly written sequal--which PNH can speak on), that are dying. The fans aren't looking for a first edition or even an edition in "good condition"--they're looking for ANY edition, in ANY condition, as long as it's readable. And the community continues to decrease in size, as those who were only half-heartedly invested in that author or that novel decide it's not worth the effort. I believe this is going to be the more common outcome of never-ending copyright for non-highly-commercialized works: the work will die. And more quickly than I suspect people are willing to admit.

That first linked page is interesting, for a collection of hearsay. What it tells us is not that fanfic is inherently bad or harmful, or that any author who condones it risks losing control of some part of their creation. In my opinion, it doesn't teach us anything at all about fanfic, because that's not what was going on.

Here's something you don't usually hear in the circulating versions of the story: the disputed events took place twelve years after the publication of the first Darkover anthology, a collection of stories by other authors that was published by DAW and edited by MZB. In the intervening time, there'd been a new anthology published each year.

So we're not talking here about some clear-cut, well-defined situation where some uninvolved author discovers one day that her fans are writing fanfic on their own. Neither is it a lost-Eden scenario where kindly ol' MZB was letting her fans play with her toys, until one of them ruined it for everyone.

MZB was writing and publishing Darkover novels at the same time that she was editing anthologies of original Darkover stories written by other authors. She was reading all the submissions to those anthologies, and she was reading other Darkover fanfic as well. It shouldn't have taken a lawyer to tell her that that setup was courting trouble.

MZB solicited other authors' professional participation in the Darkover franchise. The disputed story had been published in its author's own fanzine, but that hardly matters; the first Darkover anthology was drawn from material that first appeared in fanzines. It was not unreasonable for other authors to feel their own stories had a certain amount of legal standing. Nothing could have been more predictable than the dispute which subsequently developed.

When this tale gets told, why do we refer to the Darkover stories by other writers as fanfic, and its authors as fanwriters? Because that's how MZB described them in her own version of the story. Fans of her writing will, I hope, forgive me if I point out that she had an interest in depicting the situation that way.

Do you see why I argue that fanfic is a legal not a literary category?

Two more observations:

First, something every author knows is that non-writers and some amateur writers have an exaggerated sense of the relative importance of idea to book. Who hasn't had someone tell them they've got a great idea for a book, so they'll contribute the idea and the author will do the writing, and they'll split the take?

I do not assert, but I suspect, that something of that nature was in play. Hey, that's an interesting idea, mind if I use it in the book I'm already writing? is not justification for demanding a shared copyright. It is, however, what fulsome acknowledgements, waivers of all further rights, and one-time flat fees were made for.

Second: the other thing this episode teaches us is that MZB couldn't or wouldn't write around the problem. A more satisfactory solution might have been for her to come up with other ideas that not only avoided the idea under contention, but knocked the other writer's work clean out of canon. It's what Blackburn would have done.

I've been following the discussion with fascination, because I come to it as a fanfiction reader, not writer, barely an original fic writer(as in, barely finish anything). To put forward my view, especially on the topics of the 'harm' it does to canonical works, I have gotten into more fandoms through fanfiction than out of them. I have stayed in them longer because of fanfiction than without. I also believe that it has helped me to deepen my understanding and enjoyment of the original by seeing these different takes on things that I did not (at first) see. I don't always agree with those takes, but it forces me to see why someone would and why I don't.

Fanfiction also, like in the case of Harry Potter, provides a sort of stop-gap of frustration while waiting for the next installment. Whose theories will be closest, whose most out there, etc.? I think this is a good thing. It keeps interest high, while without it interest might wane in the long breaks between installments, or between seasons, or even after a series is done. In addition, there are always unanswered questions, even in the most well done books, television series, and movies. Fans want to see those questions answered, those holes filled.

I just know that should my stories ever get (a)finished and (b)published, I would be ever so thrilled to know people were writing stories about my creations...that means they've read them and that they were engaged enough to do something about it. Rarely do you see fanfiction without a worthy canon. People just wouldn't care, and I think that's the goal of most authors: make the audience care.

Authors have all the rights to make a decent living and be spared the sight of their work being altered or distorted, but I don't see how this privilege should survive them for such a long time, especially if it's linked to companies or corporations and becomes just another tool to stop other people from making a decent living out of writing/playing/composing.

I'm not, right now, a published fiction writer. I am a published essayist. And I am also "published," to the degree a blogger and fan fiction writer can be published. And I am someone that does believe that by creating and "publishing," I have entered an agreement with the public good that's embodied in copyright. But I am distressed by the lengths that agreement has been taken to in recent years (I'd prefer a 40-year copyright term).

My current method of dealing with that distress is that my casual writing is explicitly released to the public domain upon publication. (I'm sure that someone out there is now considering the legal ramifications of placing "this work is released to the public domain" on a piece of fan fiction--legally, from what I've researched and the advice I've been given by IP lawyers and professors, that the statement applies specifically to the situations I have placed down on paper, and the exact words I have used to describe those situations. So while I am releasing my exact representation to the public domain, it does not affect anything else within that work.) For my more commercial work, I was considering a blanket release to the public domain to be placed in my will. But in a conversation on MK a couple of weeks or months ago, Jo Walton mentioned that, at least in the UK (I think?) that cannot be done, because it ends up in the estate losing value on your death. Has anyone else considered this issue in the US?

(Yeah, I know, I need to go talk to a probate attorney and an IP attorney. I'm just not sure I have enough commerical work that I own the copyright on--too much work for hire--to make it worthwhile right now.)

Prudence might dictate that authors never read fanfic based on their own work, but if you knew people were doing that, could you resist having a look? I know I couldn't; it would be just too good a source of information on how I was being read. Perhaps the real solution is for authors to never, ever admit that they've read it.

The point I was trying to get at is that the MZB story is obviously a lot more complicated than the simple fable it's been turned into in the fannish folk process. As Teresa observed, it's obvious that

[...]we're not talking here about some clear-cut, well-defined situation where some uninvolved author discovers one day that her fans are writing fanfic on their own. Neither is it a lost-Eden scenario where kindly ol' MZB was letting her fans play with her toys, until one of them ruined it for everyone.

Some fanfic is people thinking "Hmmm, I wonder if..." on things they reasonably know that the original writer isn't going to answer--for example, I've read some fanfic based on McKillip's Riddlemaster Trilogy, filling in odd bits of what the High One's past might have been like.

Personally, if I like a writer/their work and they say they don't want fanfic, I won't read it. That's what feels right to me. I have no settled opinion on whether that should have legal force, or even whether other people shouldn't write it, or shouldn't make it available, because of that request. I do think it would be nice if they didn't mix it in with fanfic from authors who haven't objected, or with non-fanfic, on a single Web page (i.e., not even "click here for fanfic of X") because that makes it harder for me not to start reading it.

Saying "that should be decided by a jury" is basically pushing the question off, rather than providing useful guidelines: if something actually gets to a jury, the judge is supposed to provide guidelines on what the law says, and the jurors then decide about the particular case, based on that and the facts as presented during the trial. A jury can no more decide a case without there being some relevant law than it could do so without any facts.

I suspect that "order up a story" Website is closer to walking into a library and saying "I'm looking for a book on modern Chinese history" and the librarian asking what you mean by "modern" and whether you'd rather have an adult or a sixth-grade-level book, and then giving you the appropriate work from the existing collection.

Except that the broader view tends to obscure what to some pro writers are the primary issues, namely the possible detrimental impact that fanfic might have on their livelihood and the sense of intrusion/invasion that may be felt when one sees one's income-producing creation spun off in ways one never intended and may not be thrilled with.

And the use of terms like "less provincial", tend to imply, whether meant to or not, that those on the other side of the argument are at best ignorant and at worst smallminded and unwilling to see the light.
I personally have never seen the term used in a benign manner except when describing certain types of decorating styles.

You mean "fictional universe as a work of art," right? The translation for "work" you're looking for is "Werk."
Do’h x2! Yeah, I used to know that word too. Somebody take away my license to use my vocabulary!

[stuff omitted]
But "Geschichtenwelt" isn't quite right, because "Geschichte" doesn't sound so ... respectable, in German. It has a certain association with "children's story", at least to me. "Geschichtenwelt" sounds a little like a world where bedtime stories take place.
Yes, that might be a bit too specific, but I like it.

How about "Fiktivwelt"? The German Wikipedia uses the term "fiktive Welt", which fits the bill except that it's not a single word. "Fiktivwelt" sounds like -- hmm -- an imaginary world that someone pretends to be real, perhaps. But it seems ok. And since "fictional" is the translation of "fiktiv" that pretty much all English speakers will default to, I expect, it seems pretty good to me for our purpose. ("Virtual" is a translation conveying a different meaning of "fiktiv," but I expect that English speakers will conveniently not notice that subtlety.)
I think it adds a nice connotation: fictive is pretty close in meaning, often used in the sense of “we will treat it as if, but it’s not really. In anthropology, you can talk about “fictive kinships”, i.e. my Aunt June, who is not actually blood-kin.

Ah, and I know what to do about "world-work." "Gesamtwerk," literally "entire work," is actual academic German and means one author's entire corpus; e.g., "Goethes Gesamtwerk." I hereby declare that from now on, it also refer to the entire corpus of works set in a particular fiktivwelt.
[Note that I'm not forgetting to inflect "refer." I'm inflecting it to be in the subjunctive mood.]
You have my permission to use "Fiktivwelt-Gesamtwerk" if you want to make clear which meaning of gesamtwerk you are referring to.
- Benja
Yay! That’s excellent! I shall definitely use those!
Now for Anglo-Saxon.
-r.

Theresa and Patrick; yes indeed, you have good points. Marion operated on some assumptions that might have held back in 1950 in the Golden Age of Fandom but certainly were not in operation at the time of The Affair, and believe me, I am the first to agree to that.

I like fanfic. I like it in the way it lets people ask "what if" and "what then" questions. I like it that it gives people who may become pros a place to concentrate on *one* thing--plot--or maybe two--plot and character--without having to invent a universe of their own. The latter reason, by the way, is why I like to write urban/urban-historical fantasy, since everyone knows what "our world" looks like. I like that it gives people who want desperately to tell a story a built-in audience. OK so it follows Sturgeon's Law of "90% of everything is dreck" but what doesn't? And OK, the idea of some people taking rather...extreme...*ahem* liberties with my stuff does make me go a bit ewwwwwwwww (sometimes more than a bit ewwwwww) but as long as they lock it down into a place where theoretically only 18-and-over can go...

But I really, cross my heart, am not that curious about what they're writing. It's a bit like the reason why I don't read Amazon reader reviews of my books. I don't want to know. Sometimes it gives you a swelled head and sometimes it makes you want to reach through the screen and strangle someone and neither reaction is good for you.

I cannot, for the life of me, see how it can really hurt anyone. But then, I have a kind of complicated relationship with my books. They are my babies right up until the point where they leave my hands.

Then they become something else, and that something else is different to everyone who reads them. I can't control that. It's stupid to try. All I can really do is tell the best story I can, and what happens after that is out of my hands. The babies have grown up and become independant, and like a wise parent I do my best to let go.

And that includes all the "what ifs" and "what thens" other folks imagine.

I like writers; I work with them every day. I'm not unaware that many of them have these concerns about the matter at hand. I even agree that these are, in some instances, real things to be concerned about.

What I don't buy is the notion that because these are "the primary issues" for writers, they ought therefore to be the primary issues for everybody else. It takes all kinds of people to make a worthwhile civilization. As far as I'm concerned, a pink-collar service worker's moral claim on a healthy cultural "public domain" is every bit as important as a professional writer's claim to just compensation.

I have a kind of complicated relationship with my books. They are my babies right up until the point where they leave my hands.

Then they become something else, and that something else is different to everyone who reads them. I can't control that. It's stupid to try. All I can really do is tell the best story I can, and what happens after that is out of my hands. The babies have grown up and become independent, and like a wise parent I do my best to let go.

Drawing analogies between literary rights and other real-property rights always gets wonky. That said, Jane surely has a right to her own work.

A better example might be this:

There was once a conjurer who boasted that he had become god-like. One god happened to overhear, and challenged him to a contest. “Can you do this?” the god asked, chopping down a tree and carving a branch into a bird that promptly stood up and flew away.

“Sure,” said the conjure-man, and reached down for another branch from the same tree.

“Hey,” said god. “Harvest your own tree.”

(2) One of the most-common arguments against extended copyright terms is that "in this Internet age, everything moves faster, and therefore the term should be shorter, not longer." Although the premise is true, the conclusion leaves a lot to be desired, because it neglects something else that happens in "this Internet age": Authors and other creators are living longer and longer, and with much less predictability. Perhaps the ultimate balance will tip toward shorter terms; however, the failure to acknowledge the opposing force robs the "short-term Internet" argument of much of its force.

(3) One of the real conceptual problems that most of the "copyleft" camp has refused to acknowledge: It is now vastly easier, cheaper, and more accurate to make copies in the first place than it was at the time the Statute of Anne was introduced in 1610. Keep in mind that presses, at that time, were run by muscle-power; that there was no photography; that there was no audio recording; that all color work was hand-painted (the multicolor press process wasn't perfected until 1628). In the end, this means that the increased ability to copy has led to an urge to use that ability.

However, technology continues to change even the perception of a copy; there is a world of difference between seeing a photograph of, say, the Brandenburger Tor that someone else has put into an art-history book and looking at one's own photographs, even if one's own photographs are (with no false modesty, marginally) less technically adept. One's own photographs are also memory-keys in a way that a third party's can never be. Similarly, when reading even a brand-spanking-new copy of Through the Looking Glass I cannot help recalling the experience of reading a second printing at the British Museum. My not-quite-overtly-Proustian point is that copying is not a perfect and complete replication, and so this argument is as much about what is "close enough" as it is about copying at all.

I like this! It reminds me very much of the dichotomy Tolkien develops in The Silmarillion between Aule, a creator god who had a similar attitude, and the elf Feanor, whose possessive love of the Silmarils he created caused great evil lasting through generations of his descendents.

You even see the same kinds of fannish behaviors in medieval Arthurian lit, the character who's favored in one alternate fannish universe, say Gawain, is totally trashed in the work of another fan. I've often thought Lancelot began as Chretien's "Marty Stu" character.

Something I thought of after the fact: also look at the economics of the rare book world, and the fact that while prices on these copies may be extraordinarily high (one of my friends gave up looking for copies of books by a favorite childhood author when poor condition paperback-type editions starting fetching $800+; unfortunately I cannot remember the author's name because I'd never read her/heard of her) the author or the author's heirs are not benefiting from this market. So, the works are in the process of dying (losing what little audience they have left), yet the market's in the process of a price explosion, and the people who are profitting are those that are packrats or have extremely good luck at yard sales.

Geschichte has multiple connotations depending upon its context. In a colloquial context, it does indeed shade toward the "children's story" end of things; in a "serious" context, though, it means more like "received history" (as distinct from "academic history"). In fact, one frequently finds legal philosophy texts distinguishing between Geschichte des Arbeitsrechts (history of labor law) and Entwicklung des Arbeitsrechts (development of labor law). I think there's little chance of this being construed as "children's bedtime stories"!

Perhaps my own fondness for compound nouns is showing through, but I think the most-effective term would be das Fiktivweltanschauung, because the whole point of fan fiction is one of shifting perspectives. Fiktivweltgesamtwerke connotes "authorized" to me in a way that makes this argument even sillier than it already is. But that's just me.

The ones I've heard describe the process talk about it much the same way any other fanfic writer does: a story popped into their head, so they had to write it out.

Which is certainly a valid concern, and one that fanficcers will generally honor with authors who have expressed it. But I think the possible detrimental impact is minor, and should be weighed against the possible benefits of increased fan community and interest in the original work.

[I]f you bring up Arsene Lupin, Monkey Punch was NOT licensed by the estate when he created Arsene Lupin III (The half-japanese grandson and successor to the original), and this would up causing quite a few problems when his creation was first licensed for US release, but it's a NATIONAL TREASURE in Japan (also notably, two other major characters in the series, Zenigata and Goemon, are quasi-RPF, being the descendants of fictionalized real people).

As I go into in my downloadable MP3 commentary track for Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro, there are even more fanfic connections than that. Cagliostro is filled with references back to the original Arsène Lupin novels—and not just the ones in which he faced off against the evil Countess Cagliostro either. There had been Arsène Lupin novels involving massive government-backed counterfeiting schemes (involving the discovery of a huge stash of fake Franc notes created by the Germans during World War I to destabilize the French economy) and a hidden treasure at the bottom of a lake as well—both elements that played important roles in Castle of Cagliostro. As it had been the popularity of Leblanc's works in Japan in the 1960s that led to Lupin III being created in the first place, I doubt those similarities are coincidental.

In turn, Arsène Lupin was filled with examples of RPF—both Real Person Fic and Real Place Fic: the Cagliostro stories involved a descendant of a real-life alchemist, Freemason, and all-around con man, Count Cagliostro, who was involved in events leading up to the French Revolution; another Arsène Lupin tale involved past Kings of France and subsequently Lupin himself hiding stolen treasures within a natural rock-spire formation that would have been well-known to Leblanc's native French readership of the time.

So, Lupin III, and especially Castle of Cagliostro, was a fanfic of a fanfic (or at least a work that did a lot of the same sorts of "borrowing" that fanfic does today). Interestingly enough, Lupin III is not the only work to have borrowed from Arsène Lupin. One of the Arsène Lupin novels involved an unsolved murder that turned out to have been an act of God instead—a micrometeorite striking someone in the head in such a way as to resemble a gunshot wound. This device was later borrowed (or, admittedly, it could have been independently conceived, but it seems unlikely) by Fritz Lieber for one of his Change War short stories.

Well, I am defintely pro-fanfic, and I definitely don't think that it is third-rate writing.

I did read a really excellent bit of fanfic called Ishmael, which is authorized pro-fic Trek, but is also an "intentionally silly" crossover with a 1960s TV show called "Here Come the Brides. which not coincidentally featured Mark Leonard (Sarek) playing one of the main characters.

And part of the argument I see being argued here is that people believe that FORD should have the right to stop you from painting it bright purple with "Girlchaser," etc, because other people might think "Hey, I wonder what I could do with my truck . . . "

(But then we get into the mess of rights over "real" hard property versus rights over ephemeral and intellectual property, and everything falls apart once again.)

I wonder whether any of the advocates of "fanfic is third-rate writing by people who can't muster the creativity to work in their own universes" feel up to tackling the question of successful professional authors who take to writing fanfic.

The ones I've heard describe the process talk about it much the same way any other fanfic writer does: a story popped into their head, so they had to write it out.

EEP! I've been outed.

I....shuffle mumble shuffle....still write fanfic. Of all darn things, fanfic set in a superhero MMORPG, City of Heroes

It is my brain candy. I admit it, it's mostly rough-draft prose, but it's the sort of thing I don't get to do for a paycheck.

It is extremely collaberative (to the point where I often use a piece of software called MoonEdit that allows several people to be writing the same piece of prose at the same time). The joy of it is that people take the things I put down and by their reactions send the story in a direction I would never have considered. It's turning out to be very useful, in that it's exercising my writing muscles in different directions.

And yeah...I had to do this. I started out just being a role-playing gamer, but these characters came alive just like all my book-characters do and they started demanding real stories out of me.

and

Copyright ... should be the life of the author plus some years after that. Maybe 50? Maybe 75.

I'm not sure I follow these two statements. Would your answer to your own question be "I would feel as if I got what I wanted."? Or are you arguing against the shortening proposed by others here?

I'm not sure what the expected future value of a work of fiction is 71 years after the death of the author. I don't have any of the Inside Baseball publishing knowledge that it would take, but I wonder if you'd be better off selling the rights to someone and buying them lottery tickets. Guessing popularity beyond the author's life has historically been a crapshoot.

Jane:The problems arise, methinks, when money and ownership bang heads. When big corporations and small-holders are put in the same shopping bag...

I think you're dead on here.

And performs the occasional play in Atlas Park.

Perhaps my own fondness for compound nouns is showing through, but I think the most-effective term would be das Fiktivweltanschauung, because the whole point of fan fiction is one of shifting perspectives. Fiktivweltgesamtwerke connotes "authorized" to me in a way that makes this argument even sillier than it already is. But that's just me.

"Die Fiktivweltanschauung" (note female grammatical gender) includes "Weltanschauung", which is roughly "ideology", and probably not what you're aiming for.

Also, "Gesamtwerk" is singular unless you mean the complete works on several worlds.

On the other hand, I had gotten into a pretty intense debate with a few published writers in this mailing list regarding fanfiction back in February, which, might interest you guys as well since we're still in this subject.

I know there's an internet law that there will always be a typo in a post correcting spelling, but having it happen in someone's name...

(lurks back into lurkerdom)

Teresa, it's wonderful when it's screaming to be let out, even if it's bad. Sitting in the back of the classroom, writing it down because If I didn't, it wouldn't shut up....

Rhandir: 'Ishmael' is one of my 'keepers'! (Half the fun was trying to identify the various other people wandering through.)

On the first issue, it's certainly been proposed that this is possible. There may be anecdotal evidence that it's happened. There's been discussion of the related trademark law principle of dilution, but I'm not convinced you could show actual damages from fan fiction as practiced by the responsible creators of it (Lori Jaroe excluded, naturally). It's probably easier to quantify the financial damage an author could do to himself by being surly to fans in a convention hospitality suite.

On the second issue, you may have a sense of intrusion/invasion (as Ms. Brite did, at a remove). However, it is not the job of copyright law to protect you from bad feelings. Even if I sympathize with you, I don't know what you want us to do with regards to how you feel. I don't want to stifle someone else's creative urges to protect you from an unpleasant sensation, and I certainly don't want that precedent set in law.

In the webcomics industry* it is common to see a really close relationship between author and fans, with fanfiction and fanart being posted in the forums on the same site. The whole question of derivative works endangering ownership is generally not engaged.

There are some hard boundaries. Fred Gallagher (Megatokyo) has a real problem with hentai (pornographic) fan art, and has directly said that he'll stop the comic and move on to other projects if he comes across it.

I will quote bits of his more lengthy explanation here:

A fan community represents an extension of the lives of the characters in a story. For instance, Fanfiction, doujinshi and other fan-based works extend the lives of characters beyond the set bounds of a show or manga and not only exists as 'continuations' or 'paralell worlds' but is a rather remarkable recording of how these characters and the story has affected the readership.

For instance, it disturbs me to no end that Hoshino Ruri, a rather wonderful and droll character from Nadesico, who's deadpan cuteness knows no bounds, should be subject to the seemingly endless horror of brutal rapes, incest, sodomy and other horrific happenings (cripes, i dont think i've ever even seen a loving description of 'sex with ruri' - almost all are variations on some kind of pedophilistic rape) *I* refuse to accept it as something that i have no control over.

I don't have control over what fans do. If you must know, i encourage things like fanart, fan fiction, and even use of MT characters in people's own comic works. The only think that i ask is that you treat the characters with the same respect that you would treat real people. Why won't you see Kimiko naked? Because it would comprimise the character's integrity for the sake of a small moment of perverse release.

Trust me, nothing would make me feel more ill than to see my characters being abused. Also keep in mind that many of the characters are loosly represented by real people. If something happend that made me or my characters feel threatened, you would see things change here real quick.

Fanfiction as a record of how the characters and story has affected the readers. I like that.

-r.
*poor phrase, but it will have to do.

I like the way that publication of an album is referred to as "releasing" it. It seems to make this lack of control explicit.

This phenomenon exists in pretty much every fandom I've been even tangentially been a part of. It's usually called Alternate Universe (AU) or sometimes Alternate Reality (AR) fanfic. I think it started* with the Xena fandom around 97-98. The tv show did an episode The Xena Scrolls which featured the descendants of Xena and Gabrielle. The descendants, Melinda and Janice respectively, had the primary characteristics of the main characters reveresed. Mel was like Gabrielle and Janice was like Xena. This** inspired a whole bunch*** of AU fic where people wondered "What if Gabrielle was like this? And if Xena was like that?" And from there it spread to fandom far and wide.

*I seriously doubt if Xena was the first fandom to have AU stories, but I think it was the first where AU fic was such a huge part of fandom.

**It wasn't just that episode but nobody wants to hear all the details of the genesis of Xena AU fic.

***I could fill a book with just essays written about AU Xena fanfic.

Maybe I missed it, or maybe everyone's taking it as obvious, but I haven't seen anyone make the obvious point here: that intellectual property is not like a business or farm because using it doesn't take it away from anyone else. If one person copy's another's idea, the first person still has it -- no squatters in sight. (If I had it on tap, this would be where I put that nifty Jefferson quote about borrowing ideas.)

Copyright is really less 'property' in any sense than it is a government-issued monopoly -- on speech and ideas no less. Now, I think there is a good rationale for it -- "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" as some document or other put it. But it's a rationale that needs to balanced against other interests -- including the interest of the public in a public domain.

In any event, Weltanschauung means "perspective" as much as it means "ideology," and in the academic and legal German I've been reading usually leans toward the former. That's what I was striving for—something in between.

yeah, up here.

Then, too, "rivalrousness" is not absolute in any event. For example, there's an easement for the power company to come and trim the power cables in my back yard, and the power poles are in my back yard. I'm allowed to anchor a clothesline to that power pole; I can't damage it. Similarly, the power company can't modify the power pole without explicit permission. Nonetheless, the power pole occupies the same space for both of us. That is nonrivalrous property. (Or, at least, semirivalrous property.)

This is actually a raging argument in intellectual property theory; nobody should rely upon it, and I could cite about a dozen law review articles on each of the several sides of the debate.

There are two ways in which fanfic is alleged to be illegal - under copyright law, and under trademark law.

Trademark law generally only applies where there's a series (Harry Potter, How Do Dinosaurs..., Spiderman, Spiderwick, Anne Rice's Vampires, etc.) or if there is merchandising related to the book. And a blend of common-law, state law and the Lanham Act (federal law) can create a trademark infringement situation if the unlicensed/unauthorized use is likely to be confused with the trademark owner's products. This is the sort of thing that bars bints from selling their Star Wars fanfic on Amazon. It is also possible to trademark a character - Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Captain Jack Sparrow - they're all trademarks of the corporations that own them (not the authors, in these particular cases, but sometimes the authors do own them) - but, say, Justin Finch-Fletchley or Millicent Bulstrode are probably not WB trademarks, or copyrighted characters, which leads to the second type of alleged illegality marker...

And that is copyright law. Sometimes, a fanfic writer will use a phrase from the source material (aka canon) but that is never copyright infringement, as you can't copyright a phrase.
However, you can copyright a character, although it's not easy, and really, copyrighting a literary character (ie not a filmed character) has only been clearly viable since 2004. The Gaiman/McFarlane cases make it clear that copyrighting a character is a complex trick of description and distinctiveness. So it's not that one is taking the words from another author's creation - it's that one is taking the copyrighted characters that created the allegation that it is an illegal act.

The thing is, it isn't necessarily illegal to write and distribute fanfiction. Of course, a parody fic is always acceptable - look a the published Barry Trotter book, or the Movies in 15 Minutes book by Cleolinda Jones. But even if it's not a parody, if a fanfic is primarily commentary on or criticism of the source material, then it would also fall under the definition of a noninfringing work. And, finally, fanfiction is not illegal if there is an implied contract between the copyright and trademark holder(s), and the fan-creators, which is what has happened in many, many fandoms at this point. Look at The L-Word - they had a fanfic-writing contest! And Cartoon Network is featuring fanart of characters from their shows that's been created by kids and teens. But even if the original author does not want any fanfic created of his or her work, there is no way to bar all of it, because of the parody and criticm exceptions - and there's a lot of fan creativity that can fit under those two banners!

If they do, they can read about it (and subgenres) here:
http://www.whoosh.org/uber/whatuber.html

-r.
p.s. *sniff sniff* Nobody wants to talk about Fred Gallagher's take on fanfiction? Me sad. :(

C. E. Petit: fair enough. Point taken.

rhandir, I didn't know the word "fictive." Cool. Multiple people learning pretty new words in multiple languages. :-)

If you like the children's stories connotation, Geschichtenwelt works, IMHO.

C.E., you have a good point about gesamtwerk. Werk sounds like something created by someone in particular -- for Gesamtwerk to include fanfic, you would have to imagine the author and fan community as a whole as the creators of this "work." In a way, it's simpler to mentally plug in the author / copyright holder as the creator, and have Fiktivwelt-Gesamtwerk mean the canon.

You're certainly right that Geschichte can mean different things depending on context. I suppose that in the right context, it would mean literary short story, for example -- or the fully general meaning, as in Teresa's "story is a force of nature," "Geschichten sind eine Naturgewalt". The example you give uses the "history" meaning of Geschichte, though, not the "story" meaning. (As you know, Bob, the two are homonyms in German. As usual with homonyms, there is indeed very little chance that one is mistaken for the other, given enough context.)

Naturgewalt. That's another very pretty word.

If anybody needs some genders for following this discussion, here are some: Die Geschichte, die Welt, das Werk, die Anschauung, die Arbeit, das Recht, die Entwicklung, die Natur, die Gewalt, die Perspektive, der Kommentar, das Blog, male, female, other, genderless, bigendered, trigendered, transgendered, intersexed and genderqueer. Hope this helps.

I agree with inge's points. To me, ideology is the default meaning of Weltanschauung. Using it to simply mean "perspective" works in a metaphorical context, I guess: depending on your world view, you might argue that fanfiction is not in violation of copyright (metaphorially using "world view" to mean "legal theory"). Want to dig up some quotations to pick apart?

The German Wikipedia article on Weltanschauung explains the non-metaphorical meaning in detail, if anybody's interested.

Be all this as it may: Fiktivweltanschauung is without a doubt another very pretty word!

But -- what it conveys to me is fictional world view / ideology. Or, if we've established the neologism "Fiktivwelt," it conveys a fictional world view or ideology in a fictional universe. At least that would be the default meaning to me...

---

So. Umh. What were we looking for, again?

A word for the entire body of works set in one geschichtenwelt / fiktivwelt, right?

Or was it, the geschichtenwelt/fiktivwelt considered as a work of art?

Aw, I don't have any good ideas now. I give up. This is fun, but I've been slinging enough words for now. :-)

- Benja

I have a kind of complicated relationship with my books. They are my babies right up until the point where they leave my hands. Then they become something else, and that something else is different to everyone who reads them. I can't control that. It's stupid to try.

Beckett once freaked out over a production of Endgame that futzed with his stage directions. The director, Robert Brustein, responded to this attempt at absolute control of artistic interpretation (even the sanctioned, and necessary, interpretation required by the medium of stagecraft):

''a purist rendering of this or any other play...not only robs collaborating artists of their interpretive freedom but threatens to turn the theater into a waxworks.''

Is every theatrical performance a species of fanfic? Dunno, but I'm not much of a fan of rigid taxonomy (and Darwin's whole thing is that differences between species, and differences within species, is just a matter of degree). What I do know is that every act of reading (& performing) is an interpretation. Are reading and writing different in kind, or in degree? Does writing = extremely active reading? Fanfic seems to be. Tolkien & Lewis complained that the kind of books they would like to read didn't exist, so they were obliged to make them.

PNH: thanks for setting the record straight on the joke, though I find it fun and fitting that it got crooked. Dirt everywhere.

Specifically, it has a lot in common with a fanfic genre called a "remix" - where one author will rewrite another fanauthor's story (usually with permission, since the fanfic community is small enough that it's fairly easy to obtain), either from a different character's perspective, or in a different narrative voice, or with some plot details changed, or whatever. It's an interesting comparison.

It's worth noting that as far as I can tell, most fanauthors don't feel that remixes of their stories are violating their vision or providing an alternative that might take precedence over their own story; they see it as a way to shed new light on the story, and take it as a compliment. (And the elements that are changed in a remix are usually details that originated with the first fanauthor, not those that come from canon - so I do think it's a somewhat valid comparison.)

Actually, ownership of the work allows Disney to manipulate its availability.
Think of the infamous Disney Vault...

[ This links to a a Cartoon Brew posting
   about Robert Smigel's Journey to the Disney Vault.

   The post says: Disney got Oswald from NBC-Universal -
   now NBC gets revenge in this brilliant parody telecast last night on NBC's Saturday Night Live.
   Watch it now before Disney sues SNL, and NBC yanks it fron Youtube.

   Don't know if anyone got sued,
   but it is no longer available on Youtube.

   There is a more recent posting
   featuring a link to a 1998 piece by Smigel for SNL
   titled Conspiracy Theory Rock ( in the style of Schoolhouse Rock ).
   This only ran once on TV, but is available now. ]

There is a deliberate intent to manipulate availability
to create a collectibles market.

In a bit of a tangent to literature,
but still in the domain of characters,
I had been talking with the owner of a local comic book store
about how some action figure are sold.

For some of these, he cannot order specifically what he would want:
he has to order a quantity, and hope (given the odds)
that he will get specific characters.

In that case, he has assume the uncertainty,
but he can at least give his customers what they are looking for.

In other cases, such as with HeroCliks figures, what he has to sell are sealed boxes,
and the customer cannot know for certain what is in any one box.

I thought this was a strange economic transaction:
when I go to the supermarket to buy some product,
I have an expectation that packaging describes the product;
I don't have to buy a box which promises a 10% chance it will be cheese.

He offered collectible card packs as the classic example of this sort of marketing.
Again, you buy packs of cards, and hope (given the odds)
that you will find specific cards you're looking for.

It struck me that originally collectible cards were premiums sold with gum.
That is, you were buying gum, and the card was a bonus.
Now, you don't know what you're buying...

So if free market economics is our dominant religious belief,
why are these unsymmetric manipulations of markets allowed?

    . . .

Bringing it back (I think) to the fanfic thread, I've picked up a copy of a classic.
I'm trying to get started on: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

And Misty? (May I still call you that after all this time? Austin Loomis here, veteran of several Coastcons.) Is your fic on the CoH forums? And what server are you mainly on? (Due to an underpowered graphics card that can't handle large numbers of mobs, I've lately been concentrating on Baron Cimetie, my necro/dark MM on Victory.)

So, apparently I share a hobby with an author whose books I own by the bucketful. Life is interesting that way.]

More topically: As far as fan-fic being written by third-rate authors go... sure, a lot of fanfic is poorly written. It's why I don't go randomly surfing for it and generally only read what I'm specifically pointed to by someone whose taste is similar to mine.

But there's a lot of poorly written blogs, too. Does that mean all bloggers are third-rate writers? Or does it just mean that a lot of people just aren't good (or polished) writers?

And, well, there's a lot of official tie-in novels written by people who aren't the creators of shows (for instance, see my personal library, which contains nearly every Buffy tie-in novel in existence). That's just fanfic that's been officially sanctioned and published.

A minor correction: most remixes are done as part of a yearly Remix challenge, and authors sign up to be remixed and to remix others' stories. Those that are done outside the scope of the Remix challenge are generally done with the agreement of the author of the original story.

Yes, I'm aware that the fan-to-fan relationship is different than the fan-to-creator relationship. There are reasons behind that, although not all of them stand up to close examination.

Actually, ownership of the work allows Disney to manipulate its availability. Think of the infamous Disney Vault...

Yeah, Disney is well-known for doing that. I didn't get off on that tangent because I don't think that Disney's ever let it get to the extreme I was thinking about: when a work is truly unavailable and at risk of remaining forever unavailable.

Disney could chose to do that with one of its works, but I don't think we're (culturally) at much risk of losing much Disney ;)

http://www.transbuddha.com/mediaHolder.php?id=1706

It's wonderfully wicked.

You should look at some of the collections of censored cartoons that are out there. Lots of things are removed from distribution by copyright holders, including Disney. Disney may never create a DVD of Song of the South, for example.

Instead, I'm just going to mention my hypothesis that the Copyright Term Extension will be harmful to Disney revenue in the short-to-medium term (I have no proof as yet, and need to do some math to even refine they hypothesis), as they find that their historically favorite (and most profitable, I believe) well of stories for animation is being limited.

Is the cost of buying the rights to a book really that significant for Disney? I would have guessed that for most books it would represent a small fraction of the film's budget (wildly successful books would be the exception, but then the film has a better chance of being wildly successful as well).

In the US, that is. They did release it a few years back in Japan, although I'm not sure it's still available.

I remember seeing it at one of those summer Saturday matinees when I was a kid, in the 70s. What a difference 25 years makes!

On the other hand, I wrote a piece of poetry about (but not mentioning by name) Londo Mollari, and I do not consider it fanfic. Mainly because it doesn't tell a story, so I don't consider it fiction. So, uh. *shrug*

(I think most people are talking about prose when they say 'fanfic', though. Even if you include poetry in the definition, broadly, I would expect most people aren't thinking about it.)

Or maybe not. It was more like the beginning of a cheesy romance novel, with Bush in a little frock, blushing prettily at the suggestion that he might like to dance with the Iraqi dictator.

Certainly it contained no Saddamy. Dinosaur or otherwise.

The Xopher is implacable and pitiless.

What we're actually talking about are chartered monopolies, but to use that kind of language tends to remind people that this stuff is contingent, that it's part of a transaction between creators and the rest of society which is supposed to go both ways. So naturally Disney and Microsoft prefer calling it "intellectual property."

As an unpublished writer, I'm constantly swinging back and forth between thinking, "hey, this is good, right?" And "Oh, crap, anyone could take this and make it better."
And there may be where some of the anxiety with fanfic comes in. My world, though incomplete, has boundaries and an arc in my head within which I intend to write a series of books, and the thought of someone "misinterpreting" it is discomforting. It's sort of like how you get pissed off when the guy on the cover looks nothing like he does in your mind, and even though you read the book, internally whine, "but that's WRONG!"

That said, my inherent duality as a writer and a Libra lead to also thinking Fanfic is a massive complement, whether I agree with their interpetation or not. In my opinion, really wonderful writing allows enough leeway for a reader to partially envision the story and setting in their own way, placing their own stamp on it so it's more personal, and that's beautiful. Does it hurt the original work--I don't thinks so. Can it lead to a plaintive "but that's MINE!"--sure.

On to Teresa's trunk of unpublished erotica, I have to admit I do a sort of Fanfic of my own characters when my creativity is in the toilet, or the story stalls and spirals out. I've stopped deleting it after I'm finished out of embarrassment (like I'm sneaking a piece of cake after I've already had a human-sized piece) because I lost a lot of really good ideas that way, and they never come back to me in quite the same form. A lot of of my writing starts out extremely explicit, then I go back in and start hacking, trying to decide what's gratuitous porn that does nothing for the story, and what a potential reader would appreciate me leaving in.

About the dumbass who put her fanfic on Amazon so it was easier for her friends and family to find, or whatever--for the love'a Gawd, just don't.

Absolutely. There have, for example, been innumerable takeoffs on "Casey at the Bat," some about later games Casey was in, and at least one from the pitcher's perspective.

a plotbunny just ran through the room:

once upon a midnight dreary
while I pondered weak and weary
over the headless body that lay on the floor,
while I pondered, nearly napping,
suddenly there came a clapping
as lightning round my body wrapping
as it had done each time before.
"There can be only one," I muttered,
"As it says in the book of lore.
"Only one, and not a single more."

I believe one would call that "filk". And yes, I've seen plenty of it, and it seems to have less derogatory connotations than fanfiction does.

Actually, if Wiki is at all correct, the term "intellectual property" predates industrialization, and the idea has been kicking around since the Talmud.

Alice

I know this is the historicist in me, but so many of these fanfiction stories are a conversation between different writers -- one person portrays Character A as a big meanie, the next responds with a more nuanced version -- that I'd love to see a chronology. When a book is published you have a clear date of publication, but with fanfic this gets a little blurry as stories are moved from site to vanishing site.

Also, the internet is so ephemeral that I'd like to see some of these stories collected by those active in each fandom, especially the earliest and more influential ones (and wow, deciding what's influential, wouldn't that cause a squabble?). Fanfiction's already fascinating and pings a lot of questions about the definition of literature, copyright, and who is a writer. We're going to regret it if we don't record and anthologize these now.

Icarus

However, if you did rewrite a poem and set it to music it *might* be a filk. That's rather dependent on the subject matter of said rewrite...

Lori Coulson
ConChair, Ohio Valley Filk Fest 22

AliceB, that Wikipedia entry says the phrase "intellectual property" was coined in 1845. How does that predate industrialization?

Let's not forget that at least two of Lewis Carroll's most famous poems, "How Doth the Little Crocodile" and "You Are Old, Father Williams," were actually parodies of treacly poems that rather annoyed Carroll...

The first codification of intellectual property can be traced to the Jewish laws codified in the Talmud, which declared a prohibition against "Gnevat ha daat", literally the theft of ideas. The type of ideas subject to theft and further explanation may be found in the Shulkhan Arukh. Both texts precede the Statute of Anne by a few hundred years.

I clicked through to the link, and the article I read states that "The earliest use of the term appears to be from an October, 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown" and that "The use of the term to describe these statutorily granted rights has increased markedly in recent times, though it was rarely used without scare quotes until about the time of the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980". Nothing about the term "predating industralization"; quite the contrary, this article backs up my sense that only in the last couple of decades has the term been in common use.

Prudence might dictate that authors never read fanfic based on their own work, but if you knew people were doing that, could you resist having a look?

Heh. Exactly.

I've heard actors/directors claim that they never read reviews of their stuff, and I've always assumed they were lying through their teeth, most of them. How can you go through all you have to go through to put a creative work in front of people, and then not care (or at least be curious) about what anyone thinks of it? The mind, it boggles.

Slightly tangentially, one of the most amusing fan-pro interactions ever, in my opinon, was how Cassie Claire's Very Secret Diaries managed to find their way into the hands of most (if not all) of the LOTR actors in the Fellowship. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when/if Orlando Bloom and Ian McKellan read those...

I happen to think that people should have something like "ownership" in ideas that they originate. I'm also critical of the phrase "intellectual property," because I think it conceals as many issues of justice as it reveals.

The Moody Old Drug Addict
by A. Raven

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I fluttered, weak and weary,
Over many a grub and larva I had thought to store,
While I flitted, barely flapping, suddenly I saw a shimmer,
Like the moonlight, only dimmer, gleaming near my insect store.
" 'Tis some shiny thing," I muttered, "gleaming near my insect store;
To make my nest less of a bore."

Just for example, you still infringe a patent even if you invented the idea entirely by yourself having never seen the original invention. But if you take a cool idea from a book and right about it differently, you (probably) haven't infringed the copyright.

Patrick: I don't like the phrase "intellectual property" because I'm torn between the concept that you can't own an idea at all (though you can own an expression of it) and the concept that an idea, once had, can't be stolen (though it can be replicated), barring, you know, brain damage. 'Property' seems to be a rather odd term for it given those things.

Also, the term has always struck me as snooty, but I expect that's just my personal feelings about the way the word 'intellectual' is often used.

Unfortunately, I don't really have a better term for it handy, other than "my idea", which suits me but not everyone.

No man is an original, intire of itself. Every man is a piece of the Prior, a part of the public domain. If a blog be washed away by the (C), the internet is the less, as well as if a proprietary were, as well as of a work of thy friends or thine own were: Every man's derivative contributes to me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know on whom the eternal copyright tolls, it tolls for thee.

with sincere prostrate apologies to John Donne....

[As an aside, the concept of what "property" is has varied a great deal both over time and between cultures. Once upon a time, in some parts of of the world, all property was owned by the crown. People were assigned rights to use areas of property, but under certain conditions. To put it in Patrick' words, they were given chartered monopolies which were contingent.]

T.W.: Robotech_Master has explained the typographical etymology of the word 'filk'. But a word's etymology is not its meaning (see rants about 'gafiate' and 'gourmet' elsewhere); these days the word appears to refer to songs about fannish or stfnal topics, set to well-known tunes. The lyrics are generally original, and the term especially applies when the lyrics parallel or even parody the original lyrics.

Of course, like all such terms it's squishy around the edges, and a 'filksing' could contain the Tolkien words to "Elbereth Gilthoniel" sung to the tune of "Lovely Joan" (not original words or terribly well-known tune), the song "The Amazon" (which while amusing to fans is quite old, with both original words and original music), someone singing "Mack the Knife" to the tune of "Clementine," and even a wholly original song or two about some novel or movie that had no songs.

Purists will grumble, and try to exclude some or all of those from the sacred category of filk. But I'd rather enjoy the whole squishy mess than cut myself up on the edge cases. Therefore I beat my inner purist into submission with the Delany-Nielsen Hayden Anti-Definition Stick.

I realize it's a tangent, but I'd be interested in reading those rants, if you've got readily available links.

And too bad that the online OED's free week expired a few days ago, so we can't look up the earliest citations for "intellectual property"...

But corporations and their influence have vastly changed the term of "ownership." From a term of 14 years for copyright, to a term of 28/renewable+28 (mid-century), to a term of life+50 (1970s) to a term of life+90 (1998).

Oops, that should be life+70, right?