Discussion Did anyone see this article?

Article

 

What is this, hipster fandom?

 

I don't see anything at all!

 

Nope, sorry -don't see it.

 

You guys don't see it? Ha! Next you'll be telling me the emperor is naked.

 

It was MIA because she didn't put a phrase in between the link stuff. I've fixed it.

 

I agree with the writer. Fan fiction can be a free advertising campaign for other works, movies, etc.

Its a shame how some authors are so snotty about fan fiction.

 

Interesting.
I wonder why nobody came up with what's obvious for me: should I ever get around to finishing one (or more) of my original novels, they will be written with fanfic in mind. I know what's out there and how it works. I know how little hints can lead to huge stories and wouldn't my novels be full of those? You bet. I'd have enough ambiguous stuff in there to let people run wild and laugh up my sleeve happily.
Because that'd be just more fun.
Even if I cannot read it.

 

I agree with the article. While I can understand the protectiveness of ones characters, settings, ideas, etc., comparing them to children is a little bit much, IMHO.

Does that make Card wrong in saying, ??if I do NOT act vigorously to protect my copyright, I will lose that copyright?? Maybe not in a technical/legal sense, but I think he?s missing the forest for the trees.
I completely agree with this statement. Legally it makes sense but if some of these authors would take a good look at what fanfiction (and other forms of fan art) have done for certain fandoms they might look at it differently. I know if I had a published novel I would be more than ecstatic that there was fanfic written about it, no matter where fans took the story. But everyone is entitled to their opinion and their intellectual property and if they want to protect it then they have that right.

 

Lemme' get this straight... I have to put a disclaimer on all the fanfic I write declaring I'm making no money off it, only to provide George Lucas with more money AND free advertising???

 

Some would say all George Lucus have done recently was to make low quality fan films off of his own works. If that's true, then I think he misses the point of fan fiction, fan art, and fan films all together.

 

It's also worth noting that copyright eventually lapses and that fanfiction, by its very nature, becomes legal and even available for profit, once a work has slipped into the public domain as it will inevitably do (and while at present this doesn't happen until long after an author is dead that's not some kind of inherent value but the result of outcomes of a series of legal decisions). Are the various later works of Conan, by people like Robert Jordan fanfiction? I certainly think so, the just happen to be published and for profit. This is even more skewed in a shared universe like Star Wars, where the difference between fanfiction and canon fiction is a seal of approval from Lucasfilm (Lucasfilm could elevate hundreds of fanfiction stories to legitimate status tomorrow if it wanted to).

Now I do think the article vastly underestimates the amount of fanfiction that qualifies as 'stomach-churning' from the author's perspective, because, if we're all being honest, the vast majority of fanfiction is garbage. Poorly written, poorly premised, wildly out of character, and just generally awful. Of course this is true of just about any form of art that one can put on the internet for free, but there are a number of trends and common practices in fanfiction that lead to bad stories. Of course, the funny thing is, the more 'out-there' fanfiction generally is, the less authors have a legitimate gripe, horrifying though it may be to them personally, because once you cross the line into parody (and many more comedic fanfics certainly do this, whether intentionally or not), you're protected as fair use and fully in the realm of legality.

 

Even the most oblivious of people with no common sense know the difference between fan fiction and the canon novelizations. (I mean, they do read for fun after all)

I guess that's my simplistic stand-point on the subject.

I think in a way fan fics should be treated like satire is in the court room. If a reasonable person knows that it is a joke, and not real, then someone can't be sued over the joke. Same thing with fan fiction. If what I am reading, I know couldn't have been reasonably written by the author of the novels, then I shouldn't take it as being as a real part of the story. If the authors are worried about anything else they are just being petty, imo.

Thank you, Larry Flynt for teaching me at least one thing.

 

Well, the difference is not always quite so obvious. One example that I know well: there's a novel floating around the internet called Fire and Dust. It was written by James Allan Gardner, a professional science fiction writer, unsolicited, for the D&D Planescape campaign setting. It was rejected by the then TSR, and Gardner put it up on the web for free, where it can still be found. This is a fully professional novel (though it has a number of copy-editing errors) that could be easily confused with, and is in fact widely considered better than certain existing Planescape works, but it is still technically fanfiction. So things can get complicated.

After all, a well established novelist who had enough money that they didn't need to write on contract anymore (like Steven King or something), could hypothetically produce unsolicited fanfiction using any setting they wanted and make it publicly available, and I suspect that is the situation authors fear.