The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Azalais Malfoy:

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.

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.

Don't forget all the (bad) lesbian sex in Lynne Cheney's Sisters!

If you do have to kill someone, by all means don't bury them. Burn them. If you bury them, a tree will grow there, and it's quite likely that a bird or a Doleful Ghost or both will take up residence there and tell everyone what you did.

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