fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #639 ]

⌈ Secret Post #639 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

CITY STUFF → here! (RANK 16)

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Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 3 4 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 1 2 - repeat ], [ 1 - personal attack ].
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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

you have no right to use them to begin with

matter of POV and of copyright laws in your particular country, but agree on the rest.

You don't have the righ to them, sorry. You didn't create them, just because you like them, doesn't give you special co-ownership.

You don't need "co-ownership" to think about them or make up a story about them or tell that story to somebody else as a "what if this happened?" story. You just don't have the legal right to publish a book and sell it.

You just don't have the legal right to publish a book and sell it.

If that is the case, the characters do NOT BELONG to you.
No yours.
You can not has.

So...what does that mean? Are you just complaining about people saying "i own this character" or "this character belongs to me?" are wrong/crazy? Or are you suggesting that if you don't legally own a character's copyright you can't say or write pretty much whatever you want about them? The idea of the character is in your head as soon as you read the thing.

As anon says, that depends on the copyright laws in your country. In the UK characters cannot in themselves be copyrighted, so yes, I do have the legal right to write my own stories about any of them I want.

Soooo, Harry Potter is game? I can just publish it and make some extra cash on JKRs expense. Nice to know.

There are trademark considerations to be aware of, but on the whole, a character is an idea - it is only the idea as fixed in JKR's actual words which are copyrighted. Ideas are not copyrighted, only their material fixed expression.

It would hardly be at her "expense", unless she were somehow paying for it. It's unlikely that you would find a publisher who wanted to take it on, of course, but if you could find people willing to pay for fanfiction, you'd be safe enough.

(Sources are Robin Fry, copyright expert for Beachcroft Wansbroughs; and Nicholas Bohm, general legal counsel for Foundation for Information Policy Research.)

...if you could find people willing to pay for fanfiction, you'd be safe enough.

Oh really? So, in the UK, you have the right to sell Fan-Fiction biased on other peoples characters? Over here, in the USA, that's a nasty lawsuit.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

Yes, I know. It's one of the areas where US and UK copyright law is different.

A lot of popular authors trademark aspects of their books, which complicates the issue if you're actually selling your stories. But in the pre-internet days it was quite common for fans to put together amateur compilations of fanfiction and sell them (mostly just to cover costs), and that was legal in the UK.

As far as published stories go, people safely published Sherlock Holmes stories in the UK long before the Conan Doyle estate's copyright expired, without requiring a license.

See, I think it's rude to sell Fan-Fiction. It's not yours to sell. It's like making money on someone else's hard work; they're not your characters or world building to use. (I hate Fan-Ficcers, who think that authors should have no rights. What is the point of creating something if everyone can steal it?) *it's a peeve of mine*

Sherlock Holmes was through permission of the estate, it was in a gray area of being public domain and not public domain. Star Trek had issues with even using namesake in the early 90s.

You can't own an idea.

With Fan-Ficcers, creators have NO RIGHTS whatsoever. It should just be a huge free for all. Nice to know.

What's your position on published authors who write fanfiction in other 'verses for fun?

*is one, knows others*

Published what? Shiatty erotica sold at truck stops? Second rate romance novels? Fantasy novels that no one has heard of?

I think authors should pretty much have the rights they already have, but as my notion of their rights have always been the rights granted by UK law, those are the ones I've come to consider reasonable (and as someone else just said, I agree with UK law that you can't own an idea, only the material expression of it). Though there is more to my opinion on it than just that - it's also to do with notions of property rights in general, and how they compare with the way literature and story has evolved over human history. Our storytelling has always taken elements of other people's tales and embellished upon them. Copyright law has extended and extended the amount of time that a work is protected chiefly in response to rising commercialism.

I don't actually even read fanfic, I'm just interested in the whole area of intellectual property law and how its developed, and in storytelling and mythology and how humanity has used stories over the centuries.

Oh my gosh, someone better tell John Updike to pull Grendel off the market.

And all those Jane Austen continuation novels that are so popular these days - who knew they were illegal?

Not to mention books about King Arthur or Robin Hood!

Golly, thank you, Anon!

That stuff is all under Public Domian, and no longer under copyright.

/lolz at Rabid Fan-Ficcers

can we pull grendel off the market anyway? srsly, it was such crap.

moar lolz at people who can't spell "domain"

...which has nothing to do with the silly claim made above that if you didn't invent something, you shouldn't write about it.

[ SECRET POST #639 ]

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