Playing in George?s Sandbox: Copyright Issues and Fan Fiction

Just a brief comment--you can lose the right to exclusivity of your trademark if you don't defend it, but you don't have to do anything to protect your copyright. It's yours for the rest of your natural life plus seventy years (I believe that's the current amount of time), unless you sign the rights away for some reason.

Chillingeffects.org has an informational section on fanfic, but as you read it keep in mind that Chilling Effects is very anti-big-media in its outlook. The legal stance it takes here is about the most pro-fanfic one that a reasonable person could take. Most people in the legal profession take a far more pro-business position. (Not least because Big Media has control of, well . . . the media. They *are* their own PR blitz. Fanfic authors, by contrast, have this website. Wheeeeeee.)

There has never been a definitive case on the legal status of fanfic in the U.S., but my best guess is that if there were such a case, "derivative work" would be defined in such a way that 99.9% of fanfic would be declared illegal.

 

Nor did I suggest this. What I did suggest is that George already has a very large contingent of lawyers working for him. Your post implied he didn't and should have this in place. He already does. I am pretty sure those people at least keep tabs on fanfiction to a degree.
What I also suggest is that if headaches like this woman increase, which isn't likely given the backlash of other fanfiction enthusiasts, he could decide it isn't worth and then stop what goes on here. Easily, as it is within his rights.

All I was saying is that what you were saying he should do, he had in place by the showing of ESB, and if not then at least by the end of the trilogy. To assume otherwise, and to assume they aren't very aware of this nitch, would be short sighted and ignorant of how business in America works.

 

Short of cutting each and every one of our fingers off, I don't see what can be done to stop fanfiction.

 

:: Same thing they did to free music sharing--and nearly to P2P software altogether.

But so long as the major media conglomerates don't think we're cutting into their market share, we should be all right.

Totally random factoid: I found several sources on the net that claimed the first "fan fiction" was written by Sherlock Holmes fans "in the early part of the 20th century." No one would/could give an agreed-on date (or even decade), location, or an example of an early story, however, so I'm not bothering to include a link. Any of it may be true, or none of it. But I did find both a historical reference and a modern Usenet post that referred to the Holmes-inspired genre as "pastiche," or "a work building on the work of others."

I.e., fan fiction.

"Pastiche" sounds so much classier, though.

 

I do not accept the comparrison to music piracy at all. This is entirely different. Music piracy involved the sharing of an artist's actual work so individuals could delibrately avoid paying for it. The equivalent of that would be creating a PDF file of a Star Wars novel and distributing it on the internet. These are unique stories that never existed anyone else's head but our own, are done for entertainment instead of profit, and do not provide an alternative to Star Wars publications. Fanfiction does not make money, nor does it take money away from Star Wars merchandise. This is a nonissue and people keep running around like Chicken Little claiming "the sky is falling!"

 

There are really only two circumstance that I've seen when fanfiction becomes a legal issue. The first is when an author explicitly states that they don't want fanfiction up somewhere (such as Anne Rice vs. fanfiction.net years and years ago) or when something like this happens and money is made off of it. There's also some issues that I've seen involving fan art being sold at conventions and on websites, but that's still ambiguous as of the last time I checked.

I'm somewhat happy to note that every time something like this happens the fans tend to close ranks and censure their own. It's good, since I think it shows that the majority of us know that we're really only allowed to do this by the grace (or at the very least, inattention) of the owners of our respective fandoms.

That said, I was fairly surprised to see that there's another case of this going on right now in the Harry Potter fandom. Personally, I'm hoping that this is remembered long enough to keep something like this from happening for a good long while, or as long as it can be in Internet-time.

 

BigGuy219 wrote: This is a nonissue and people keep running around like Chicken Little claiming "the sky is falling!"

You didn't ask how much Napster resembled TFN (although many profic writers really wouldn't see the difference). You asked how big media special interests could stamp out fanfic.

We've seen the answer over and over in the past 10-15 years, and it looks like this. First they go to Congress, and lobby for restrictive laws aimed at ISPs that carry "copyright infringement" material--"copyright infringement" defined in such a way as to unquestionably include fanfic. Congress would then include this proviso as a little rider on a bipartisan-sponsored bill that people want to see passed more than they want to avoid annoying a bunch of entertainment-franchise nuts. That is, a bill on practically anything whatsoever.

With the bill passed into law, publishing houses and film/TV studios start suing ISPs, demanding the real names and contact information of people who post "copyright infringement material." The ISP's fight a little bit, but in the end most of the major ones knuckle under.

The same big media lawyers then pick and choose which individual fanfic authors they want to take down in order to "make and example" of them. The site owners will be target #1, especially ones that allow adult material. TV ads about the horrors of Harry Potter porn will be aired at times when parents are likely to be watching. The ads will end with a plea for mommies and daddies to keep their children away from the sexual predators who write fanfic.

On the legal front, Fanfiction.net probably goes first, since it's already had trouble with adult material in children's franchises, and it's gotten lots of cease-and-desist letters. Also, it's huge, multi-fandom, and visible. Almost every fanfic author on the planet has something on it. If they get mad, what are they going to do? Boycott every TV show, movie, and book in the world?

They can complain to the media, but the people who run the media are the ones suing them. By now there are also TV ads on the theme, "You wouldn't steal a book . . . why steal someone's book characters and ideas?" aired at times when teens are watching. The ads are meant to look like anti-drug ads, and they push the possibility of prosecution (remote though it is in real life). Fanfic becomes increasingly criminal in the public mind.

It would take a while for the lawyers to get around to TFN, since we're fandom-specific, squeaky-clean family friendly (hard to make us look like porn peddlers in court), and we've had a relatively cozy relationship with Lucasfilm in the past.

Instead of waiting to be sued, however, Phil and Josh decide that their real lives aren't worth the potential damage of a lawsuit, and they either cut off fanfic or shutter the doors on TFN altogether.

The end.

*Will* it happen? I hope not. The studios and publishing houses seem not to see us as a major threat, and we have the advantage of being old. Fanfic in one form or another has been around a long time, and nobody has died from it.

*Could* it happen? Absolutely. The same thing is already happening in other areas related to intellectual property--the music sharing industry especially, but also in more obscure areas like computer code and cryptography.

We've actually been extremely lucky thus far. Consider: Microsoft can claim, without blushing, that it is an intellectual property crime for you to modify the code of your operating system in order to repair it, improve it, or remove features you don't want. So far, American courts have mostly agreed with them. This is like calling it a crime to customize your van--or even to look under its hood. In a legal climate like that, how lucky is fanfic to have survived?

This is why it's important to be nice to Uncle George, and not to be an idiot trying to make money off his trademarked product because he "won't mind."

 

Ophelia ... that is all well and good. But, what nobody is talking about is enforcement. It is impossible to enforce. Sure big websites stand out like a sore thumb, but they only represent a small portion of all of the fanfiction that exists in the world. What are they going to do, break down our doors and tell us to "stop thinking up stories!"

 

If it ever does happen, back to print zines, will we go.

Careful, we must be, Obi-Wan.

 

They don't have to enforce it. The cease-and-desist letter does it all. What 30-something librarian who wishes she was on the crew of the Enterprise is going to take on Paramount Pictures in a legal battle?

Has *anybody* sued by the music industry actually taken them on in a legal battle? Usually people are thrilled to have the opportunity to cough up some dough and settle out of court--and those are the "hard core" cases. The insignificant people just get a scary letter, and almost always agree to all terms without conditions.

These are not fights that are won by men stomping up to the door and flashing badges. All it takes is a form letter and a stamp.

That's why one of the watchdog groups that keeps an eye on these things calls itself "chillingeffects.org."

Personally, I'd rather just play nicey-nice with Lucasfilm and be officially ignored.

 

If I ever got a cease and desist and letter I would tear it up and take my chances.

 

It's depressing to see how much our laws are against creative thinking than isn't meant for profit.

What's next? Are they going to try and copyright ideas themselves? Is any mention of an energy sword in a story going to constitute violation of copyright for alluding to a lightsaber?

It sounds silly on the surface, but I wouldn't put it past some of today's businessmen and politicians. Just because George wouldn't do that doesn't mean the same can be said of everybody else.

 

Look at what's going on with the Da Vinci code right now. There happens to be a few other novels with the same plot, so someone's gone to court over it.

Which isn't to say there's not a lot of stuff with the same plot. If I read one more teen girl novel where someone gets knocked up and has to give it away, I will scream.

Basically, an idea is not something you can own.

 

Lets be honest, this was 'trash-fic', not even good fan fic.
The only thing that 'book' could be used for is a manual on how NOT to get published or taken seriously as a writer.

Rule 1: Attempting to profit from Fan Fic is a big NO NO.

Rule 2: If you're going to utalize other written works (In this case the opening was ripped off directly from the novelisation), do so sparingly and with credit.

Rule 3: Watch out for "Carusoes" ie: Naked, he swam out to the boat then filled his pockets with buiscuttes.

Rule 4: A beta reader/editor is your other pair of eyes. Even the greatest authors utalize them.

Rule 5: See rule #1

 

Um, what exactely would "Carusoes" be?
Is it the sentence structure or the bad spelling? Or is it againa missing comma (I'm big with those, so I wouldn't notice... )

 

MsLanna: what exactely would "Carusoes" be?

Continuity blunders. Read the line DarthBreezy provided, and make sure you visualize the character very carefully.

- lazy

 

LOL, I didn't see it the first time either.

Naked, he swam out to the boat then filled his pockets with buiscuttes.

 

Thanks lazykbys

I bet he is a hampster. Probably a shaved one, hence naked.

I have few problems with such, I'm a very visual writer. if I write it, I saw it like a movie. Sometimes I even do poses/moves for swordfights to see if it's possible.

 

Book Sites Pull Star Wars Fanfic

The self-published Star Wars fan novel Another Hope was finally pulled from sale on Amazon.com on April 25, though copyright holder Lucasfilm had asked it to be removed at least a day earlier. The listing, however, remains.

The book, an unlicensed and unauthorized book by Lori Jareo, has also been removed from sale at Barnes&Noble.com, but remains on sale at Amazon.co.uk as of 10 a.m. PT April 26. A listing also remains on Powells.com, though the book is listed as being "out of stock."

Lucasfilm spokeswoman Lynne Hale had told SCI FI Wire that the company asked Jareo to remove the book from sale, and that she had complied happily. SCI FI Wire e-mails to Jareo have gone unanswered.

News of the book first broke on the blogs of writers John Scalzi, Nick Mamatas and Lee Goldberg.

The Making Light Web site, meanwhile, offers more discussion of Jareo's efforts. ?Patrick Lee, News Editor
____________________________________________________
I just got this email. Don't know whose site the person who sent it to me pulled it from.

 

and that she had complied happily.

Yeah, I'll bet she did. LFL lawyers have that strange effect on people. It's interesting that listings are still up. Wonder why they did that, rather than delete its existence altogether.

 

my guess is poor software design. they didn't want the ability to delete products, just be able to set them to 'out-of-stock' which since that book was print-on-demand, is quite impossible to be out of stock of...

 

I wrote the majority of this post in the literature forum as part of a commentary on the "Another Hope" novel. There's been a lot of fear that the situation will result in a backlash and possibly large scale damage to the fanfiction subculture as a whole. I felt the need to throw my own opinion from my own experiences and just give everyone a cheery pep talk (I hope its taken like that).

Fanfiction is a cottage industry right now as its really where a lot of tomorrows future authors get their experience trying to write down their initial ideas. Some publishers are trying to take advantage of it with varying degrees of success. Dungeons and Dragons is probably the first group to ever make a profit off fanfiction to a large extent with their equivalent in Open Source material. Hundreds upon hundreds of "dot com" equivalent RPG companies rise up and attempt to make their own works of varying qualities with the rules and WOTC makes their profit by continuing to publish the rules for them. When I worked for Seraphim Guard, the publishers of Hearthquest, the figures for published WOTC products were about ten times the size for original work and it may have saved the RPG industry. On the other hand, it also means Wizards will always have a powerful grip as they still have the power to shut down products they disapprove of (there was a big to do over the Book of Erotic Fantasy. I'm surprised no one tried to publish the AD&D guide to Sex either---which has existed on the internet for decades).

Other companies are trying similiar experiments. My own publishers, the medium sized 15 year old publishers in Windstorm are experimenting with their own version of Open Source called the Shared Universe Project which I'm frankly interested in seeing how it goes off primarily because of its potential to navigate current copywrite difficulties, less so because my own universe is the first to actually be involved in it. Windstorm's owner basically hopes that she can get fans to harness their fanfiction skills to contribute their own books to it. I get a small percentage from Windstorm's profits for every book of the votaries sold and thus of course am all for it, especially since I get to see it expand. Actually, my biggest hope is that it might inspire some would be professional writers who happen to be more comfortable with established universes to read it ;-). Eventually, I imagine it'll have to be more disciminating but I was surprised to find out that this is NOT the first time that such a thing was actually pursued actively. The property used as a model for this....something called Doctor Who.

The British Broadcasting Network undertook the idea that with the cancelation of the storyline that it might be a good idea to continue the adventures. Hardly a problem eh? However, strangely, they decided to open up submissions to the fans themselves. BBC writing submissions. This has helped contribute to their truly VAST collection of fiction that is currently out for Doctor Who....and frankly of varying quality (The Cthulhu Mythos combined with Doctor Who! Ugh!). However, its created one of the most truly devoted and fascinating fanbases out there.

I'll perfectly admit that I probably wouldn't be in writing now if not for fanfic to be frank. The circumstances of writing actually helped me get out a lot of kinks from my writing. Fanfiction is as old as Sherlock Holmes' mysteries and you still see dozens of pastiches written in that style even today....heck you might argue many Arthurian legends are fanfic of a much more older story. It's the assumption that characters in a story do not belong to the author anymore but to the world and there's nothing wrong with that. In my case, I started with Highlander, Buffy, and Evangelion as I got my writing critqued (occasionally painfully) until it was better time for me grasping the emotions of my works. I even wrote a couple of Oz books that got printed (rather in my young and stupider days) before writing the books I really became proud of.

The fanfiction community shouldn't be ashamed o

 

I'm not *quite* sure where to post this, since we now have two threads on the subject and a mod directing us here, but the other thread hasn't been locked . . .

I guess I'll post here to be on the safe side. Charlemagne19 made some very interesting points about how publishing houses could make money off of fanfic, and should therefore logically encourage it. I belive this system is actually common in Japan, where some anime/manga houses love it when fans create and sell fanfic/fanart--because the copyright-owning company gets royalties from the sale. (I don't think they ask for a whole lot--but even the equivalent of a couple of pennies per copy would generate a lot of money if a fan manga was really successful.)

This would be a smart practice for other countries to adopt as well, for several reasons--not least of which is that it allows you to "hire" your "competitors" and make them work for you.

However, the fan anthology plan Charlemagne19's publisher apparently engages in has not taken off in the U.S., most probably because of the Darkover fan anthology disaster that ended with Marion Zimmer Bradley being forbidden to publish her own book. This was the result of *one* loopy fan, and it happened back in the 70's or early 80's or so, but it still "casts a shadow over everything we've built here."

Once upon a time, before I joined the dark side, I was an aspiring profic wannabe, and I spent 6 weeks at the Clarion writer's workshop (aka writers' bootcamp) and had the honor of studying with authors like Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Tim Powers, Joe Haldeman, and others. The advice regarding fanfic and fanzines was strangely schizophrenic--on the one hand, it was openly acknowledged that lots of fantasy and SF writers started out as fanfic writers, and the fanzines (no real Internet presence in those ancient days) were a place for a novice to get his or her feet wet. Star Trek used to accept freelance scripts from fans, and at least one well-known SF author got his start that way--although for the life of me I can't remember who.

So on the one hand, writing fanfic was fine. I even confessed I wrote it to one of our teachers, and he didn't bat an eye. But on the *other* hand, we were told that if we were ever successful enough to have people want to write spin-offs of our universes, we ought to hold those people out away from us with four-foot forceps and lead-lined gloves. The refrain was always legal issues, and Marion Zimmer Bradley, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Marion Zimmer Bradley.

A single nitwit 20 years ago managed to strike such fear in the hearts of profic authors that we still don't have many legitimate sources harnessing fan creativity in this country. That was why the "Another Hope" book concerned me--the lesson of the Darkover anthology is that "it only takes one."

Some American entertainment-houses are nudging closer to trying to make money off of fanfic (and if we were profitable, we'd be safe forever). Lucasfilm has a kind of funny bass-ackward way of almost-sanctioning fanfic: it allows fans who pay for Hyperspace to have a blog spot, on which they can post (nearly) anything they want. The official TOS says that no copyright-infringing material will be tolerated (which frequently means "no fanfic"), but the blogspot rules *also* state that anything posted on that page becomes the property of Lucasfilm. This is very close to the "signed release" plan that some profic authors have used in the past--i.e., fanfic is allowed, but only if you sign a paper saying that what you write belongs to the original creator. Not such a good deal for those who write a lot of original worlds and OC's, but for everyone else, it's nice, cheap insurance. By offering a space that practically begs for fanfic-posting; *not* going after people for actual fanfic posting; having people agree--however fine-printedly--that all things posted on that blogsite belong to LFL; and charging $40 a year for the privilage of using the service, LFL is *almost* selling legitimate writing lic

 

The woman is either as dim as a three watt light bulb or has an angle on taking things through the courts. Seeing as it has been taken down, I would assume the dim version.

Now, if it had been a stonkingly good read, what would have happened then? I noticed on another forum on TFN that people were actually ordering it! Maybe we need a bit of self publicity here, because I've read some really good stuff here.

If a lot of the authors here had the real life time to settle down and concentrate full time on their writing to turn it up a notch they would possibly become exceptional authors in this field.

Maybe GL should look at a few of the writers here to contribute the odd story to a small collection of works. He would add to his already bulging wallet and encourage many to contribute (healthily) to the SW legacy.

Just my two pence (cents for you pedantic Americans)

 

Yeah, they closed the other thread after I recognized it was probably better to post here. One person saying something is notable, two says you should really pay attention.

I agree with everything Ophelia has said and her words are pretty much completely accurate on how the industries are forced to deal with the matter in the current United States climate. Barring some kind of legal disclaimer that says "If the writer takes any ideas from this or reads it, I won't sue them" there's no way for authors to read fanfic.

To go back to Windstorm, their current idea is that 'submitted' fanfic can be reviewed for publication by the author of the universe but even then I don't know how that's going to affect future writings. I like to think that we've moved beyond the infamous Marion Zimmer Bradley event.