Fanfiction: Threat or Menace?
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 at 2:09PM
Secret confession time: I used to write fanfiction. Tons of it. And worse than that, I totally wrote Mary Sue fanfic.
You'll have to forgive me. I was fourteen years old, and just doing what came naturally. I didn't even know what it was at the time. In fact, I only recently -- some twenty years later -- realized that's what it was. But me and a friend of mine had torn our way through ElfQuest, and we wanted to be a part of that world. So we wrote and illustrated new stories for the characters we loved in the universe we wanted to escape to.
This wasn't the beginning of my play with other people's IP, either. When I was a mere lass of eight years old, I remember vividly chasing my friends around the monkey bars, pretending I was Princess Leia, and they were Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and Darth Vader.
Heck, when I was in high school, one of my creative writing teacher's favorite assignments was to have us write what was essentially fanfiction with literary characters -- Jay Gatsby meeting Dracula, perhaps. I recall rewriting the ending of A Tale of Two Cities as one of the high points of my high school literary career. At its heart, it's basically the same thing. Except that under the law, they are very different things indeed.
What brings on this deep, dark secret from the 8th grade? Well, wildly successful author Diana Gabaldon has posted her opinions on fanfiction. She sums up nicely at the beginning:
OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.
She seems to be reconsidering this stance, based on a later post. But she's by far not the only one in the world with that opinion; you might even call it the default starting point, especially for the kinds of major franchises most likely to go full-on transmedia. So I'd like to talk for a bit about intellectual property, copyright law, and fandom.
Copyright Law Sucks (and Also it Is Way Confusing)
I used to be able to doodle a mean Garfield, back in the day. But while this briefly made me shine in the eyes of my classmates, it also made me a criminal in the eyes of the law. I'd created an unlicensed copy of a copyrighted work! Oh noes!
Worse, Garfield is trademarked, which brings in a whole different-but-related set of legal knotwork to untangle. And, indeed, this confusion between trademark and copyright is one of the key problems creators, fans, and IP holders deal with today.
Trademark holders can't let you get away with infringement -- like me and my doodled Garfield -- even if they want to. Because if they don't work their tails off to limit infringement, then the one time it legitimately costs them umpteen bajillion dollars, the court is going to laugh at them and say if they cared so much about their intellectual property, they would've nipped this thing in the bud with less-significant cases.
As a result, it's equally illegal for me to draw Garfield on my math notes, draw Mickey Mouse on a birthday cake, or make a new header for my blog starring the entire cast of Yo Gabba Gabba.
But is it illegal for me to write a story with Garfield in it?
Maybe, and maybe not. This is where it starts to gets murky, and it's only worse the further you get. If I'm using the character of Garfield to tell just another story starring Jon and Odie, it's probably not kosher. If I'm trying to sell it as a book on Lulu, it definitely isn't. But if I use the character of Garfield and transform the work into something entirely different -- like in Garfield Minus Garfield, for example -- it might be OK. There are cases where all's fair in creation and culture repurposing.
Creators have used the fair use doctrine to write alternate novels about such famous works as Twilight and Gone With the Wind. If that's not commercialized fanfic, I don't know what is. But it's a gray area if there ever was one; fair use, satire, parody, they're all well and good if that's what you're making, but sometimes fair use is in the eye of the beholder. And if you were the owner of the Margaret Mitchell estate, you, too, might want to suppress the commercial release of such works.
That's not even getting into the arcane world of movies, music, sampling and clearances. The medium you use to express yourself very much affects what aspects of copyright law you need to know about. I'm not saying you need a law degree to keep it all straight, but it sure would help; and as a creator who, on a good day, is working with several kinds of media at once... man, I sure would like it all to be simpler.
So that's the state of the world. Confusing, growing more confusing by the day. At least it keeps the IP lawyers employed in a down economy.
Transmedia and Fanfic
As I understand it, the entire point of making a transmedia property is depth of engagement. And the primary reason that people write (and read!) fanfiction is because they are so very engaged with a story that they can't bear for it to end, or they want to explore something that happened offscreen, or shine a new light on existing canon, or just plain old put their own faces into a story.
I'll even go so far as to say that the entire point of transmedia is to build exactly the sort of fan culture in which fanfic and fanart thrive. Speaking as a creator, if somebody is making fanfiction around my work, that means I am doing it right. I'd like to see a lot more of it!
That said, I also have a vested interest in keeping myself gainfully employed, and profiting from the juicy money-squeezings of my body of work, assuming there ever is such a thing. But where's the line between "paying me homage" and "ripping off my work"?
It's not exactly the letter of the law, but a lot of IP owners have historically put that line at the cash register. You write as much Kirk-on-Spock action as you need to, and they'll look away. And probably shudder a little, while they're at it. Just don't start shopping it around or slap it up on a print-on-demand service.
That seems fair to me... but even that isn't clear-cut. In a world where a video of a kid hopped up on anesthetic can net six figures, even the line between commercial and noncommercial use starts getting murky. If I put my Kirk-on-Spock in a blog post and I happen to run ads, am I monetizing somebody else's IP? What if it's syndicated or aggregated to a third-party site that runs ads?
Free Culture
The legal solutions I've seen bandied about for these and similar questions usually involve draconian measures to protect copyrighted works from any unapproved use. It's part and parcel of the copyright piracy hysteria we see, and while that's a different ball of wax, it's the same body of law, so it all gets jumbled together.
Look, I don't want to live in a world where nobody can mashup The Beatles and Metallica, a documentary on music sampling simply can't exist because there is no way to get all of the proper clearances, and the age-old practice of playing in another creator's playground is criminalized. I want more creativity, not less.
So how do we fix it? Well, we need to loosen our death-grip on the reins of our IP. A lot.
Creators need to understand that derivative works make them money. When your work is being referenced in a song, a clip, a story, it's assuming cultural knowledge of the original work. Kirk-on-Spock doesn't make sense... unless you've seen Star Trek. And if somebody doesn't have that cultural knowledge, then the allegedly infringing work is actually acting as an advertisement for the original. You can bet paperback sales of Pride and Prejudice went through the roof when Pride and Prejudice and Zombies came out -- and that's a work that isn't even protected by copyright anymore!
Better, understand that volume of fan-generated works are a fantastic barometer for the success and longevity of your IP. Fan-created works tell you the temperature of your fan culture: How engaged they are, what they're interested in, what they hate. A good transmedia creator will even find ways to focus a thriving fan culture's creative energy. I've talked about how this made the Why So Serious campaign such a rousing success, and I stand by that.
So look, fanfiction isn't the enemy. It's definitely not immoral. It might or might not be illegal, but it definitely shouldn't be. And seeing it should make any creator cheer wildly that they've got a hit on their hands.
You can't stop the creative impulse, and I don't know why you'd want to. Find a way to work with it, and everybody wins. Stamp it out, and everybody loses.
Reader Comments (18)
It's tricky business, but the thing to me is that fanfic is one way that the audience is trying to claim investment in the property. And that's a good thing. Fans could use some breathing room there, I think. The Internet complicates things, but as you say, it's the same kind of thing we used to do in notebooks. I used to to insert popular characters in my handwritten stories in junior high school.
Transmedia is great because it finds an alternate path toward lending fans a little bit of that property -- some investment, some ownership.
(Just saw a Charlie Stross post, too:)
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/faq-fanfic.html
-- c.
I hadn't seen the Stross link yet, but there is one dude with a lot of smart things to say. Reading now.
However, in some cases, reimagined works do get a nod from the original author's estate first. This is the case in the forthcoming John Scalzi novel Fuzzy Nation.
But there are issues such as the ads on the blog - another one being in the recent light of charity people auctioning off writing fanfic for charity (saw this happen for Haiti and other events) and of course goodness forbid a creator uses ideas from a fanfic and gets sued and....
But, there is hope too, sanctioned fanfic does happen (The L Word contest and there other others that could be quoted). And as you mentioned, changes in the way we think about stories may alter the way we think about fanfiction..... thanks again for writing this article, I and other fanfic people say thanks
I have been seeing a lot of fanfic created as gifts for friends and so on, and the charity-auction thing is wild. Copyright law as written never dreamed of this stuff. All we can do is try to be kind IP owners until the law sorts itself out a little better.
"..the line between "paying me homage" and "ripping off my work"?" is being soundly trashed in this case.
..while simultaneously testing your Comment fears using Google login.
I hadn't known that about Comic-Con. I knew you could get sketches, but I thought it was all artists sketching *their own* work. So... huh. Another datapoint to the weird and inconsistent state of things.
The point I really like here is the one about Depth of Engagement. Ficcers are the most loyal and most brutal fans you will ever have.
Your characters live inside their heads, and don't always say the same thing they say in yours. You want depth? That's it, right there, as much as you're ever going to get.
This is all a very long way of saying "damn skippy, and thanks for writing it so I can send the link around."
I guess my thinking is that as a creator, you're selling a setting and a bunch of characters, and it's not up to you to dictate what your audience does with them after that (provided they're not trading on your name and losing you money).
Mattel isn't allowed to tell me that I can't cut Barbie's hair and draw on some serious ink with a Sharpie. And then pose her for some hot action with Kung Fu Hulk and Strawberry Shortcake. Mattel isn't even allowed to tell me I can't take pictures of her and put them on the internet when I'm done.
Why shouldn't you be allowed to play around with something you've purchased, even if the thing you've purchased is ideas?
"I guess my thinking is that as a creator, you're selling a setting and a bunch of characters, and it's not up to you to dictate what your audience does with them after that (provided they're not trading on your name and losing you money)."
And I agree completely.
I come from game design: first the tabletop kind, now the MMO kind. And what you're doing there is creating elements for other people to tell their own stories with.
But that's not just my medium that does that. The thing that folks like Gabaldon don't realize or don't care about is that fan fiction -- taking the elements of someone's story and making them your own -- goes back far further than the current fan movement. It goes back earlier than even the earliest fic I'm aware of, fanzine stuff for Man from UNCLE.
Look, for example, at the sprawling body of Arthurian work. Malory had a story very different to tell from those of his sources. Chretien as well. The reuse of established fictional elements is a long-standing, honorable tradition. (And so is adding more sex. Again, see Arthur.)
And, absolutely, action figures. My childhood Masters of the Universe movie, enacted with an extensive cast of the toys, would have been a masterpiece if filmed. (Mostly because I do a good Skeletor.) My Doctor/Rose epic... actually, you know, that one's a little personal.
So hell yeah with giving Barbie tattoos and getting her down with Hulk and Short. In fact... yes, I think that's me putting you on my blogroll.
People don't read Dresden fanfic as a substitute for Butcher's novels, and being permissive towards fan fiction helps build communities around your work. Which is so incredibly valuable.
http://blog.fantasyheartbreaker.com/2010/04/21/whatever-happened-to-elfstar/
And: Wow, that's impressive. I went into your fic expecting something light and hyperbolic in a different direction, and instead, you transformed a 2D story into something richer and deeper. That's a neat trick, it is.
And finally: Your blogroll, really?! And we just met! I think I shall have vapors now.
Thank you. :) What I did was the same thing you do with a tarot deck or a d20 roll. You take a random set of results and you try to relate it to human behavior. It's kinda what you have to do every time you wrap an arbitrary mechanical process ("fight 10 enemies") into a narrative one ("get rid of them varmints on my farm").
There's actually a lot of fanfic that seems to get its start this way. Fan consumes media, says "that makes no earthly sense," then writes fic to explain it.
Fanfic is often a response to a perceived gap in the source material, which I think is rather wonderful. I mean, you were going to imagine what happened between scenes and sheets anyway... why not share?
Anyway. Flattered, and very happy to make your acquaintance. ^_^
It was mostly adolescent males whose appreciation for the creepy atmosphere of the series outweighed their writing ability (and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible).
...And there was ONE guy who wrote ASTOUNDING novella-length stories. I hope he's gotten published by now.
(And there was me, who was...somewhere in between?)
On another note, one of my favorite authors is known for corresponding gladly with fans, inviting them to create derivative works and organizing a circle of collaborative colleagues...in the 1930s. Yes, I'm talking about H. P. Lovecraft.
And: That is SO GREAT about HP Lovecraft. I think that's my new fun fact for the day!