For myself? Fanfic makes me really bored.

Well yes. You are, internet anonymity aside, probably a white American male, comfortably geeky. Fanfiction is not written for you. It is generally written for women. Whether or not you enjoy it is entirely irrelevant, which is some of the subtext that you probably missed in that first essay.

lightgetsin: And the part of my post that you missed is the fact that 99% of women readers don't read or write fanfic in the first place -- it's not a "female" issue, it's a "tiny subculture" issue.

I don't care what the logic is. Fanfic is both illegal and unethical.

When did these things stop mattering? I for one don't speed. I don't use illicit drugs. I open doors for the elderly. I say please and thank you. And I don't rip off writers. Heck, I don't even purchase used books because the author doesn't make any money from those purchases.

I suppose someone could make an argument for civil disobedience via women's lib via fanfic. But that's just rationalizing. I'm a big supporter of feminism, and I don't see a connection between the two. Sure, maybe twenty years ago. Not today.

There are a lot of books these days that don't get published because the audience for fiction is dominated by women. Topics that used to sell to a male dominated audience are gone, right or wrong, eaten by the void amidst the midlist. Trust me, I know this firsthand.

But does that make me want to steal from favorite authors? No.

Besides, it's not that hard to create material that is heavily derivative yet different enough. Witness the many Tolkien copycats out there.

Dave: Well, it's not that simple, either. "Fanfic" is not inherently either illegal or unethical. Anyone can write anything for their own purposes, with no legal problems -- and that's how fanfic started. (Distribution of a work derivative of someone else's intellectual property can be illegal, but still is not necessarily so.) Since the Internet is inherently a publishing medium, putting fanfic anywhere on it does immediately raise issues -- there I agree with you.

As to the concern about ethics, I'm afraid I can't agree that there's any blanket ethical objection to using characters and situations created by others. If there was, we'd have to declare a huge swath of literature -- from The Aeneid to Le Morte d'Arthur to last year's award-winner March (including every Shakespeare play except A Midsummer Night's Dream) as ethically problematic. If you mean that publishing fanfic set in the world of an author who has specifically asked writers not to do that (like Robin Hobb) is wrong, then I mostly agree with you.

But the next question is: how long do we honor that request? During the author's life? For all eternity? If someone found a letter from Arthur Conan Doyle tomorrow where he insisted that no one but him should ever write Sherlock Holmes stories, should we immediately destroy all copies of The Seven Percent Solution?

Personally, I think there's a point at which an author's work no longer belongs to that author, but becomes the common intellectual property of mankind. (At the moment, legally that's at the end of a work's copyright period -- and I'd say it's much too late, but that's a different argument.) Even before that point, some uses -- parody, for example -- are completely legal and ethical.

"Tiny subculture?"

Wow, I'd really like to hear you say that to the, at last public tally over a year ago, over 100,000 members of one of the biggest Harry Potter fanfiction archives out there. Gender demographics are impossible to get accurately, but it's clear the vast majority are women.

Yes, the treatment of fanfiction fandom by outsiders is a women's issue. It's a women's issue when women academics are dismissed and ignored at relevant conferences while male academic fans get lauded for doing the exact same projects. It's a women's issue when the emerging fan studies and new media fields elide nearly three decades of female fan activity. It's a women issue when male pro authors like Chabon or Mcguire write "pastiche" and are considered pioneers and geniuses for doing something women writers have been doing (in a few cases just as brilliantly) for years. It's a women's issue when the equally derivative but more commonly male activities of distributing video re-enactments and re-cuts are acknowledged and even lauded by copyright holders, while stories by women are mocked and threatened with legal action.

It's not a question of money (I certainly wouldn't want fanfiction to become a paid commodity, even if it could). Part of the point is that women instinctively found this liminal, unacknowledged space in which to create a community. But no, it is neither coincidence nor a legal/economic reaction which makes so many female fans so very angry.

You know, it always astonishes me to watch the SFF community turn around and deliver the exact same condescending treatment to various parts of fandom that it itself is so frustrated to receive from the wider literary world.

lightgetsin: "Tiny" may be a bit much, but it's still small, in a world with tens of millions of "Harry Potter" readers (and probably hundreds of millions of viewers). A small piece of an immense pie may look large, but it's still a very small piece of that pie.

Otherwise, you seem to be very very angry at someone, but that someone is not me. I'm not an academic, a video re-enactor, or whatever. I'm also not at all clear on what you want. People who flout the law in public are always at risk of being caught and prosecuted, and any change in copyright law that would allow free, uncontrolled fanfic writing would also essentially gut copyright (which was Nick Evans's point in the second link above).

I don't want to gut copyright (though it could certainly use one or two swift kicks to get it caught up to the past two decades). I do want to be able to read reviews of Naomi Novik's books without reflexively cringing at the inevitable reference to her fanfic roots and accompanying patpat about how she's come so far out of the gutter -- you will be able to knock me over with a feather when a professional reviewer finally figures out that part of her immediate appeal and success is due to her fanfiction history. I would like to wander comfortably around SF and news blogs without having one of the most unusual, creative communities of people I've ever run across being casually dismissed and insulted by people who are outside the community, and so do not have the requisite context and esthetics to grasp the complexity of what goes on and why. It is exactly the same desire as those pro authors in my circle of friends who still wince and snarl when science fiction is derided in the wider media. I don't particularly want community outsiders to be anthropologists and try to get it. Being treated with a little respect is not too much to ask, and that is what I'm irritated about.

Basically, calling fanfic as a body uncreative is insulting, because it is so wildly uninformed. It is the impression one could unfortunately come to if all one does is Google or follow the occasional link to a particularly terrifying example. As a friend of mine once said, "you don't get that shit on the street, okay?" Some fanfiction writers have invented new styles and forms. Some have outdone the source text in complexity, in beauty. Many have not. But the thing a lot of outsiders don't realize is that insulting fanfic's value effectively insults the entirety of a community which involves a great deal more than writing -- friendships, unconventional sexuality, and the creation of safe female spaces. Yes, it really does, I'm not being over-sensitive here.

And to me and many others who have begun to analyze these things, that will never not be a gendered response, and it will never not feel like an attack. And for context on why so many people feel that way, try http://www.trickster.org/symposium/symp181.htm -- the fandom relevant portion begins with "so, what does this have to do with fandom?" but the first half is quite illuminating as well.

Andrew, imagine all the people who say to you, "Science fiction bores me. And it's such a tiny portion of the overall fiction market that really, it's not relevant to an overall discussion of literacy and literature." ...I think that's part of what is bugging lightgetsin.

That being said, I agree with Andrew that fanfic should not be thought of as a route towards making money, because, well, it's not. And I agree with lightgetsin that fanfic is not just about the value of a particular piece of writing itself, but should be thought of more generally as a tie that holds fandom communities together, which is something that is hard for people who don't have fandom experience to understand (I certainly didn't understand it before lurking on LJ).

...I'm not sure the two of you are actually disagreeing!

Charlene: I don't think I'm vastly disagreeing with lightgetsin, but I do think she has an unearned sense of entitlement. (Mostly based on the idea that fan-fiction is special and wonderful, so other considerations -- like its legality -- should be ignored.)

Honestly, I'm not sure what lightgetsin wants: is it a world in which all of the things she thinks are special and meaningful and important are beloved, and no one ever is mean or rude to anyone else? (I exaggerate for effect, but she seemed to be heading in that direction.) In a world where major-newspaper stories about comics are still more often than not headlined "Biff ! Bam! Pow!" and Dave Itzkoff reviews SF for the New York Times, expecting a random person to be both knowledgeable about and sensitive to every single group in the world that can boast 100,000 members is simply unreasonable. People are prejudiced, obnoxious, rude, and cruel -- that's what makes them people.

Fanfic is a creative enterprise, obviously -- I don't see any basis for denying that it is. (Even something like LOLcats is creative; putting words, pictures, ideas and thoughts in a new cohesive form is the essence of creativity.) And I know that fandom has some wonderful communities (until you get on the wrong side of a feud, of course -- that's always a risk within a fandom). But the people who write fanfiction really do have to realize that what they're doing is at best borderline illegal, so they should try to keep it quiet and private as much as possible. That's not oppression; it's just the good sense of not calling attention to yourself at the wrong time.

I do hope fanfiction continues, and that the community thrives. I also wish that the people in that community would pay more attention to the stated wishes of certain authors (like Robin Hobb), but I wish for a lot of things that I don't expect to happen.

I think what bothers me most about Andrew's riff on copyright infringement is the notion that it is black and white. Fanfiction, in general, yes is borderline illegal as copyright law is currently written and interpreted. It is also grossly outdated and does not take into account the interaction between cultural ownership of common texts and intellectual property rights. Something that is talked about more in regards to art is appropriation- that is taking symbols, images, etc. that are not ones own intellectual property and using ones own ideas and creativity to refashion a whole which borrows but does not infringe on the appropriated artist. Fanfiction in its most slavish devotion would depending on the context in which it is presented, the creativity displayed, be considered either an apropriate riff on a style, genre, artist if it were visual art or bad taste copying. No one would sue unless A) they really did take the work wholesale or B) they claimed to be an original of the appropriated artist. Ethically as an artist I find fanfiction, and the fanfic community in general to be more upfront and respectful of intellectual property than the culture as a whole.
Something which I think is also misunderstood about "fanfiction" at its broadest centext is the place in human culture to which it is inherent and has always existed. From children making up plays and stories about stories, movies, and myths, young writers starting out with characters taken wholesale from books and tv, friends talking out potential storylines to soap operas. Distribution of these things has always happened but was tipically limited to those present at creation. The internet has exploded distribution of these stories- among the fan communities and creators of fanfiction but the community is still insular. Fanfiction is not passed of as anything but fanfiction, giving full recognition to original content's intellectual property owners and is designed to be an interaction with that content. If fanfiction resided on bookshelves next to the original content and passed it self of as original content- it would in my mind be a much more serious violation of copyright law. This is whether or not an monetary gain comes from such production. It does not however and is much more about the writing and interacting with such content which holds me to argue that it is not a violation of the spirit of such law.

colorsrprtty: If you see my reply to Dave, above, I think I wasn't as dogmatic as you seem to think I was. I've never said that fanfic is wrong, full stop -- and I don't believe it is. (Some particular cases are, though.) It is illegal, as far as I understand it -- I'm not a lawyer -- but that's a separate issue; many things are illegal (such as driving without seatbelts or drinking when 16 or jaywalking) but the laws are regularly broken.

On the other hand, many fanfic writers try to use "ownership of common texts" to essentially mean "I love this story, and so I should be allowed to do anything I want with it." There could be an argument to make that modern mass culture inherently makes cultural artifacts the "property" of larger groups much more quickly than in past eras, but I don't like that argument, and I don't agree with it. I believe creative people should own their creations, at least during their own lifetimes, though I'll admit I think the current copyright term is far too long. But I don't think that the general populace has any ownership interest in something barely ten years old just because they like it a lot -- that's just mob rule.

Fanfiction, I think, is a lot like squatting (in the real estate sense) -- it's technically illegal, but often winked at, especially if it's not causing any harm to the rightful owners. But the owners are always well within their rights to "evict" the squatters, since it is their property.

Also, it's pretty easy to alter a story so that it's not infringing someone else's IP. Fanfic writers wouldn't put it that way, but one of the things they want is to infringe the IP; they want to change things around in the "real" fictional world and create stories that are thus more "important" than ones which don't have pre-existing characters.

(And, again, I wish good writers all of the luck in the world, and, personally, I'd prefer that they spend their energy on things that could be both more widely available and are not actually illegal. But writers very rarely do what I want in any case...)