Fyeahcopyright

Website
Name:	fyeahcopyright, FYeahCopyright, ef yeah copyright law
Owner/Maintainer:	Heidi Tandy and hllangel
Dates:	2014-
Type:	copyright education tumblr blog
Fandom:
URL:	fyeahcopyright and ef yeah copyright law
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fyeahcopyright is a tumblr account hosted on its own domain (isfanficlegal.com) that is run by Heidi Tandy and hllangel.

Heidi Tandy explains:

So about two and a half years ago, Universal Studios decided to sue a porn company that was doing a “parody” of 50 Shades of Grey. It was well before Universal was going to be able to roll that movie out the door. And they sued, and their pleading papers were absolutely fantastic because it said things like “oh, just because a story has been posted as fanfiction on the internet doesn’t mean it’s protected by copyright,” and the porn company was walking around saying “oh, it was posted on the internet, therefore it is public domain,” which is not true! So I thought that it was just lovely sentences and I wanted to preserve them in a way that people would be able to access forever, so I started a Tumblr to preserve this stuff and we started getting questions from people who were like, “But I thought that everything I posted online was public domain!” And then we started dealing with people who misguidedly believed that it was important for them to write a disclaimer on their fanfic that said “I don’t own anything, you can use it for anything.” And the problem with that is, yeah, possibly then you are coming very close to releasing it into the public domain but at the very least you’re giving nefarious and evil people the right–you are licensing them the right!–to take your fanfiction and upload it onto Amazon and sell it. And I don’t think that that’s what people really have in mind when they say “I don’t own anything.” But, unfortunately, that’s how courts would interpret it, that’s how evil nefarious people would interpret it, and while they’d be unfair, they’d have unfortunately almost an entire leg to stand on. So we started doing this Tumblr, and we were getting questions, and we were trying to explain things to people, and then rumors started flying about Terms of Use agreements, and these people did some kind of insane psychological experiment on Tumblr where they lied about Tumblr’s Terms of Use, and all of a sudden we had 5,000 people following us. And it’s nice to have a way to talk about the legal issues in connection with fandom, not just how to be creative but how to protect other people’s creativity.