Quote:
Originally Posted by hildea
Heh, yes, it's annoying to try to have a discussion with people who don't seem to engage with any arguments, they just repeat their own stance over and over again.
Going back to the first post in this thread:
I've read some truly excellent fanfic. One of the driving forces is that it allows people who seldom get to seee people like them as heroes to reimagine popular stories with heroes outside the standard white-straight-cis-male norm.
Or just, like several posters have mentioned here, to play around with the source material, experiment with what if's, go into detail where the canon stories go fast-forward, put the spotlight on a minor character, move the characters into an alterntive universe, or give a happy ending to characters who have tragic endings in canon.
I'm not sure what the legal status of fanfic is, and less sure what it should be. It seems to me that allowing not-for-profit derivative/transformative works would be a good thing, although there might be potential pitfalls I don't see.
I don't see the Mickey Mouse porn hypothetical as a problem. As long as it's clearly marked, so people don't stumble across it by accident, what's the harm?
Added:
I went looking for information on the legality of fanfic, and found this one interesting: https://transformativeworks.org/faq/ See especially the two first items under Legal: |
Fair Use was originally a judge created exception to copyright that was later written into the law. As far as I know, the idea that fanfic would fall under fair use has never gone to court, and I suspect is on fairly shaky legal ground.
I think that where fanfic runs into philosophical problems is the idea of indirect profits, i.e. you have a website devoted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic. You don't charge people to read the stories, but you do have advertisement on your website.