Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
One significant difference is that it's legal, whereas most fan-fiction is not.
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Yep.
The legality of fanfic varies -- some rights owners explicitly permit it, some seek to destroy it, and the majority choose to overlook it. I would guess that the latter realize that the writers of fanfic are their greatest fans, evangelists, and buyers, and any loss that may be attributed to their writing is a drop in the bucket compared to the corresponding gains from their evangelizing. But with the exception of those cases where the rights owners specify that they permit fanfic (and in those cases, in the circumstances they permit), fan fiction is technically illegal.
It's illegal, but allowed. That's a very interesting situation. There have been cases in which rights owners attempted to destroy fanfic communities and prohibit any reference to their works. That happened to Rat Patrol fandom a few years ago, for instance. Some writers went underground, others just changed their characters' names, and eventually the owners had a sudden rush of brains to the head and said "hey, why are we trying to keep people from popularizing an old TV show that nobody would even remember without them?" With a very few exceptions (does it surprise anyone that Anne Rice is one of them?), most rights owners now have something of a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude toward fan fiction, possibly because they are aware of its benefits, or possibly just because they won't want a court fight that could easily be spun into a bully versus a teenage girl, so even if they won (which would probably only force fanfic underground anyway) they would lose.
But we're really not talking about the legality of fan versus pro continuations of existing series here, but rather the quality. I don't see unmoderated collections of fan fiction as being any lower in quality than any other unmoderated fiction -- as I said, see Smashwords for examples -- and while much of it is in that 90% Sturgeon's Law speaks of, some of that remaining 10% is outstandingly good.