Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Yes, some (most?) authors/IP owners tend to look the other way but they don't *all* do so. (Has the copyright holder expressed an opinion on fanfic based on their projects?) A point to consider is that the issue goes deeper than just the *legality* of it. Just because an autor doesn't sue doesn't mean they're not annoyed or offended by what is done with/to their creations. It would be a poor reward to (inadventently) return offense for delight, no?
|
Which is why I and many other fanfic writers check to see if the author has made an actual statement about fanfic, not just consider the lack of any statement as permission. Of course this gets difficult when the author has passed away but the work is not in public domain yet; fortunately for me, the authors whose work I've loved enough to consider writing fic about them are still alive.
So, yes. A lot of authors these days
do have a statement about their attitude to fanfiction somewhere either on their official site, FAQ, have talked about it in their blog, etc.
Some say "I'd rather not; I don't feel comfortable with it" - which is their right and people, by and large, respect those wishes.
(Of course there are always some who don't; fanfic exists for both Diana Gabaldon and GRRMartin's books, in spite of both of those authors considering fanfic authors on the same level with child rapists and murderers. But people are people and not everyone either knows about the author's wishes or cares about it.)
Others, though, say - directly - that they don't have a problem with it. Some authors have links to fanfic sites on their own official sites / on the official sites of their series. Some ask people to rec good fanfic to them and then actually read it. (Although most authors do say they'd rather not read any.) Some hold official competitions which ask people to write short stories set in their universe, with their characters.
And as said above,
many (traditionally) published authors, especially in the fantasy/science fiction genres, have started out with fanfic. They wrote it, they published it, they know what it means to fans to be able to interact with the source material in that way, too. Some still write fanfic in addition to writing original fiction, although since people have limited time and interests change over time, I think most stop writing fic once they get a contract for an ongoing original series. Those authors tend to be completely fine with fanfic and say so.
I admit that I don't feel comfortable with the idea of people taking their completed fanfic and just doing a find-and-replace on the names and publishing it as original fiction, e.g. Fifty Shades of Grey (and multiple other mainly Twilight fics, I've gathered).
However, that is generally legal - and there really isn't a lot of difference between "being very inspired" by something and writing your own novel based on it, using original names and changing the settings enough from the start, or writing the novel as fanfic first and then changing the names (either before or after having posted it on the Internet as fanfic) afterwards. We know about Fifty Shades of Grey because it was apparently a popular Twilight fic first - how many books
don't we know about, though, which may have started out as fanfic? Books that were either written in small fandoms, with very few readers, before undergoing the transformation, or books that were transformed into an original work already pre-publication? Are those morally and legally wrong, too?
I think what it comes down to is the question of "Is being inspired by an existing work wrong?" - clearly, some of it is legally wrong (like publishing work based on a still-under-copyright work with character names and settings intact for profit), while some of it is in a legal grey area and some of it is perfectly legal (being inspired by someone else's work but not letting anyone know about it, changing the names and modifying the settings before publication, or writing and publishing Sherlock Holmes or Jane Austen fanfic). And if it's fanfic in fandoms where the original creators (who have usually been inspired by a lot of other published work before creating their own) are fine with it or even encourage it... I struggle to see how that is morally wrong, to be honest.