[Yapyap]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Harry does not need to apologize for that because he hasn't insulted any particular person but simply stated his opinion about an entire class of people engaging in activity that is often illegal.

And it's not like the MR echo chamber hasn't already come down on him with the usual dose of hostility for anyone who suggests that authors and other people who create content have actual enforceable rights.

And he insulted a LOT of people who haven't done anything illegal. Or are you suggesting that writing Jane Austen fanfic is illegal? (I keep bringing up Austen because there is a lot of non-commercial Austen fanfic around, and several of my fanfic writing friends write or have written Austen fanfic. They don't do it with the aim to publish it, although they easily could if they wanted to, just like many others have done; it's written and read as fanfic.)

Authors have rights. Authors have moral rights and authors have legal rights. And as has been said again and again, if an author doesn't like the idea or existence of fanfic, the author has the right to ask people to stop writing and sharing it - and more often than not, people do that. There is extremely little Outlander or A Song of Ice and Fire fanfic around, considering how extremely popular these series are - some, yes, but among the millions of fans around the world, there are bound to be a few who either haven't heard about the respective authors' anti-fanfic attitudes or plain don't care.

Authors also have a right to not have their work pirated or plagiarised, or having other people commercially gain from using their characters and worlds. And the overwhelming majority of fanfic (i.e. fanfic based on works currently still under copyright) does none of that. Fanfic readers and writers are usually among the most ardent financial supporters of the author, often buying up every copy of every book (including various editions of the same books), every piece of official merchandise there is; there is often an overlap between collector fans and fic-writing (and fic-reading) fans.

Fanfic also isn't plagiarism; it rarely copies directly from the source (and when it does, e.g. to quote specific lines of dialogue from the source for the purposes of re-interpretation of a scene, it's nearly always clearly marked and attributed). It almost always comes with a disclaimer (which may be legally useless but has the intention of making certain no one mistakes it for the original, generally naming the original author and saying the characters or settings don't belong to the fanfic author).

And it's maybe one in a million fanfic writers who would seriously even try to sell their fanfic commercially as-is. Yes, EL James published her Twilight fic with very minor changes (but those minor changes made it legal), and as far as I've gathered, so have other Twific writers (it seems to be more popular in that corner of fandom than anywhere else, possibly because there is a large amount of completely AU all-human stories there to begin with). But while the idea doesn't sit well with me, morally, the fanfic was a complete AU story to start with, borrowing very little apart from the characters' names that was unique to Twilight, I'd say it was basically an original story to start with - so a find-and-replace of the names was really all it took to turn it into a completely original story that simply had its inspiration, its origin, somewhere else. Just like a gazillion other published novels out there - just that with those, the origin usually doesn't get as much public attention.

I really don't know how all of the above translates into suggesting "that authors and other people who create content [shouldn't] have actual enforceable rights". As a rule, people who write fanfic are very much for authors' rights - we love authors, we want authors to create more. And since fanfic doesn't, in and of itself, harm the author or the author's income, and is a legal grey area even for copyrighted works, not a clear-cut illegal activity, people keep doing it - and, yes, defending it, because it's a fun hobby and a good way to interact with other fans.