Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It's not writing fan fiction that's the issue; it's publishing it that is. Of course anyone can write whatever they wish for their own personal pleasure, but when you publish it, that's when copyright law gets involved, and copyright law doesn't care whether or not you're publishing for profit; the infringement is the same either way.
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Copyright law *does* care about whether you're publishing for profit in the US. The purpose/use of the new work, and its impact on the market for the original, are part of the factors weighed in considering whether infringement exists. The fact that even the most *viciously* anti-fanfic authors and corporations have never filed a lawsuit against fanfic--although there have been many C&D orders--implies that a number of lawyers don't think there's actually a case that would hold up in court.
A lot of fanfic qualifies as parody, which isn't a legal defense in many places, but is in the US. "The Star Trek story where Kirk and Spock get married" is an obvious parody, whether or not it's funny... and re-imagining pairings and romance in the source material is a common theme of fanfic. (So common that many people think it's all of fanfic.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I think your time would be better spent writing original fiction rather than using someone else's intellectual property, permission or no.
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Depends on a person's reasons for writing. If your goal is to make money, your time would usually be better spent doing something else entirely. If your goal is to make a career as an author, your time would usually be better spent writing material whose inspirations can't be easily identified. If your goal is to show the virtues and flaws of a book or TV show you enjoy, and share that consideration with other fans, writing original material isn't going to help.
Also, until this point, those of us on the pro-fanfic side of things weren't limiting fanfic to "other people's intellectual property." It doesn't stop being fanfic because it's written about Sherlock Holmes or Shakespeare's works. It's no more or less creative to write about those, than to write about Harry Potter or Star Trek.
Derivative works are common in nonfiction, especially in academia. Taking someone else's book or research report, quoting a few passages from it, and using those as a basis for an essay with a different theme, happens all the time. It's also how many legal briefs are written: here's a quote from something else, and here's how I interpret that in light of this other detail.
A number of fanfics begin with "here's a line or paragraph from the source, and here's my story about [what could happen next/how that could be interpreted/what this really means to the characters]." I don't see how fiction is so different that a practice revered in academia and the legal realm is immoral, illegal, or "a waste of time" when it's fiction.