ARCHIVE Publishing Fanfiction

Hypocrites. Or is it only alright to use someone else's work without permission if they are the original creator and have bills to pay?

 

There's some great fan fiction kicking around. If someone's good enough to file off the edges and publish and people want to buy it, you'll get no arguments from me.

 

I don't see a problem as long as the quality is there and either the writer can get permission from the rights holder or they can take the numbers off enough e.g. I don't dislike Fifty Shades because it started out as fanfic.

 

It's fiction - if they have the right or have been given the right to publish by the author, let them.

Although making money from someone else's ideas because they can't come up with their own, seems odd. Amazon should give a portion to the author each time one sells for the IP.

 

You mean like Kindle worlds does, if you're American?

 

A lot of authors put tip jars on their fanfic sites now, and lots let you download stories as epub. The line on publishing fanfiction blurs even more.

Is there really a difference between someone binding fanfic as a book and selling it, and someone putting it on a site with a download and tip jar?

 

Isn't it the degree of separation? An author with a tip jar can claim they are being paid for blogs or other works, and not directly for a work that might breach rights. Binding and selling (or formatting and uploading) a book creates a product and direct profit from the work that might breach rights.

 

A tip jar is a good way of donating for the time and energy going into writing the fanfic as well.

Linking it to the downloading of an epub is just asking for trouble.

 

Something like that. If an author is going to profit from something someone else creates, then they should at least pay something nominal back in return.

 

If this is the site I was on as well, it was a huge personal vendetta against one author by the mods. Fiction based on his work is still on the site, but anything he did based on someone else's were pulled. He's gone to AO3.

 

Moving on, there's also the issue of publication (or performance) without the author's consent. One example happened in 2013 on the BBC when Caitlin Moran handed Benedict Cummerbatch Sherlock fanfic to read without the author's knowledge or consent (cite here). It seems the BBC weren't to happy either as they asked for all tapes to be deleted (Sherlock - BFI Screening Q&A).

In the UK this may actually have been a breach of copyright under fair dealing and moral rights, and a possible breach of performance rights according to one blogger: ‘Fair dealing for the purposes of humiliation, embarrassment & mockery’ is a bit of a contradiction in terms.

 

Would that count as publishing fanfiction without the author's consent?

 

It gets more interesting if you consider the difference between UK and US copyright law. There's no such thing as Fair Use in the UK, only Fair Dealing, but in the UK an author has moral rights, separate from copyright, to be identified as the author of a work even if that work is created in the course of employment.

Which means that the show may have breached both Fair Dealing, unless they claim parody which a straight reading isn't, and moral rights unless they named the author or her pseudonym. (And then you get to the issue of whether the BBC's Sherlock series is any more legit than the fanfic).

 

Where does parody come into this?

I though that parody was fairly exempt from copyright to a degree in terms of making fun of the source material, although I guess it still has to be changed to a degree.

Does that mean something like Pride & Prejudice & Zombies would count as published fan fiction?

 

Pride and Prejudice is in the public domain, but that doesn't mean it's not fanfiction. Thinking about it, it does fit the definition of an AU fanfiction, but most sites might take it down for containing too much of the original text, I think. I haven't read it. Sorry.