What if the creator is dead (but not in public domain yet) and the rights holders are either unknown or the authors heirs, being private people, don't have their contact data easily available?
What if the creator is dead, not in public domain yet in your country, but your website/blog happens to be hosted on a server situated in a country where the creator's work is already in public domain?
Quote:
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If they say "yes", everybody's happy; if they say "no", you don't do it.
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And that latter part is what is, by and large, happening anyway - the great majority of fans who are aware of the creator's request for no fanfic adhere to it (there are always a few who don't, but you can't blame "fanfic writers" here, just people being people).
The former is, of course, trickier - as I've said before, plenty of people do only write fic in universes where the author / rights holder has explicitly, in public, said it's okay (or encouraged it), while many others take the lack of a public "don't write fic" as tacit approval.
Frankly,
so much fanfic is written by 10-13-year-olds that I'd have a hard time seeing them all go to the effort (or be capable of) of determining the rights holders, finding contact data, sending them personal mail (especially if the authors/rights holders are not local to their country), waiting for two years to see if the rights holder gets back to them, and only then post their drabble on fanfiction.net.
If this makes those kids (or older fans, for that matter) leeches and bloodsuckers and parasites, then so be it.