I read fanfiction. I’m pretty sure I’ve publicly proclaimed that here. I’d say it’s a guilty pleasure, but it’s not. I enjoy it, period. I’ve read many stories that have been written better than the original, and tons that, while lacking in the fine-tuning, have given me a much-needed escape from reality. Honestly, it’s probably a solid few steps above from reading supermarket novels. At least these stories are still full of originality.
Anyway, without giving too many details– there’s a fundraising event of sorts going on right now and some of the authors who are more involved in the organization have been put in the spotlight. Their stories aren’t quit PG13 so some chose to remove their stories, possibly just for the time being, to avoid focus being shifted to what they write instead of what they’re currently trying to accomplish. Well, at least one author chose a less-than-desirable way to go about it. No information was really given about why the story was pulled, so people made assumptions.
Some fans had their own copies of the story to read offline and offered to email those copies.
We awoke today to a cease and desist order.
I’ll pause here and grab an AED to revive you when you’re done dying from the shock of something so fucking preposterous.
We’re informed that this work of fanfiction is copyrighted.
You get enough of the picture there for me to express my feelings.
These are some of my comments in our discussions:
I honestly don’t understand why you’d want to copyright a fanfiction work that you’re posting publicly anyway? Can someone please explain how anyone would benefit from that? I can only think of two things people would do with fic–
Save their own copies and share them with friends: Okay, there’s nothing wrong with this. You’ve posted it publicly on the internet which means it’s there, archived forever anyway. You can’t stop that.
Or they try to pass it off as their own: if someone’s going to do this, they’re going to do it whether or not you claim to have it copyrighted. All you can do is contact the site where it’s posted, show them the proof that you posted the material first, and they’ll take it down. Most websites aren’t going to bother to go any further than seeing the dates you originally posted. They don’t have time to look into that sort of bullshit. They don’t care. There’s no copyright needed for that.
So yeah, unless I’m missing something, there’s no benefit whatsoever for copyrighting your fanfiction and a never ending list of reasons why you shouldn’t/may not even be legally able to.
——————————————————————————————————————
I just…before this, despite any questionable things said/done in the past, I had nothing but respect for her and her fiction, but wow. If I’m understanding all of this correctly, the bottom line of what went down in the first place was to keep the focus on the charity, and not what some people may see as a negative aspect of the fandom. How could anyone think that threatening legal action toward your fans and publicly claiming to have a legit copyright on material that at its base, isn’t yours anyway, would be a good way to avoid negative attention? I think if she had contacted those few people herself and just nicely asked, “Please don’t email my story to anyone else,” things would have been received a little better. But to automatically throw out legal action in the world of fanfiction makes everyone automatically go on the defense, and makes her look like she’s taking herself way too seriously.
I’m going to have to agree with *another user*, maybe she doesn’t even have to apologize, but at least admitting that she made some bad choices there and took this a little more seriously than need be would be a good idea.
Seriously. It’s fanfiction. Get the hell over yourself! If you want to write works to have copyrighted and get some legit attention over, go write some original fiction that has nothing to do with anyone else’s characters, plots, settings, premises, etc.
Really, I can’t wrap my mind around this fuckery. I got a cease and desist order this morning based on a FANFICTION. REALLY???!
Tags:
