Copyright – Who Owns Your Story?
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Copyright – Who Owns Your Story? |
| Creator: | J.S. (Jerry) Levine |
| Date(s): | 2003 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | multifandom |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Copyright – Who Owns Your Story? |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Copyright – Who Owns Your Story? is a 2003 essay by J.S. (Jerry) Levine.
Some Topics Discussed
- fanfiction and copyright
- what is trademark
- what is derivative, what is original
- Anne Rice and George Lucas are creators to stay away from
- like many people, the author repeats and perpetrates the simplistic common scare of the Marion Zimmer Bradley Fanfiction Controversy
Some Excerpts
You have just written a fan fiction, and you are all ready to post it. Then a thought comes into your head. Who owns the characters you have used in your fan fiction? Who controls the rights? I shall attempt to explain that in a lucid and educational way, so that everyone understands what he or she just did.
Now then, there are some standards for copyright protection. You must take the ideas in your head (the original work) and make it into a tangible object (fixation). Such works include plays, novels, poems, and many other creative objects. However, copyright does not protect intangible things. I can protect the novel I am writing, but Albert Einstein could not protect his theory of relativity, no matter how original it was. Copyright protects works, not ideas, regardless of how it might be written, explained, or drawn (However, patent law protects this). Even better news is that something recorded on your hard drive or a floppy disc is copyrightable, even if the story in your head during math class is not.
However, what exactly is “original work”? Well, original work in this case means independent creation, not originality, and includes anything that is not copied. For example, let us say that I just created a story identical in everyway to that of Star Wars, but I did it in a small cabin in the middle of nowhere, with no way of every knowing that Star Wars actually existed. My work is just as original as Lucas’ (which is based off hundreds of folklores and myths in the first place), and it had an independent creation. I can copyright this work. Novelty is not required, and the legal standard is objective, so that judges cannot just decide whether a work is original or not.
“Hold up now,” you say. “Doesn’t that mean that I’m breaking copyright law by writing a fanfiction?” Unfortunately, yes, you are breaking the law. Even though many copyright holders ignore fan works, they do not have to. It is completely up to the owner of the copyright to decide whether to enforce rights and prosecute. Moreover, the fair use clause does not totally cover this kind of usage, and neither does the First Amendment. So be sure that you are not writing for profit and explicitly say so. One of the few exceptions to this is parody, which is extremely well protected by the First Amendment, even to the point where it could destroy the original work. Another exception is work in the public domain; however, most fan fiction is based off works that are not in the public domain. Nevertheless, even if something is in the public domain, you still must attribute any parts you copy. Therefore, we have established that fan fictions are derivative works. In addition, in the first section, we established that while novelty is not required, a minimal level of creativity is. However, that would mean that fan fiction writers do not have very many rights at all!
Don’t write anything derivative of an author who has asked that there be no fan fiction written on their copyrighted work. Anne Rice is like this, and George Lucas has asked that slash/sexual fan fiction not be written about Star Wars. Moreover, there is always the case of the fan fiction author sued the original creator of a work for stealing the fan fiction writer’s ideas, even though the author owned the copyrights to the actual characters. That one sue-happy writer ended all fan fiction of that original author’s work.
Now this of course leads me closer to the end of this discussion and to a similar point I made in my work on plagiarism. Since fan fiction has little monetary value, it does not get much protection. There is not much of a way to protect your work other than asking another author not to use it, and if the other author asks you not to use it, please do not use it. Keep everything nice out there. As can be seen, the road to writing a fan fiction is littered with trials and tribulations. Copyright law is difficult to discern, and they do not often make much sense to the people we ask to obey them. Do use copyright disclaimers, as they represent true understanding of democracy in action, as most authors realize that the worst thing that could happen is that they are asked to remove their fiction from the web. Copyright owners are totally in the right to protect their own original works, and fan fiction represents a valuable sense of creativity, one that we should treasure and protect just as much.