You don't own your fics: Against the idea of ownership in fandom

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Title:	You don’t own your fics: Against the idea of ownership in fandom
Creator:	probablyintraffic
Date(s):	April 30, 2017
Medium:	Tumblr post
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External Links:	You don't own your fics: Against the idea of ownership in fandom
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You don't own your fics: Against the idea of ownership in fandom is a 2017 tumblr post by probablyintraffic. As of July 2017, the post has 11 notes.

Some Topics Discussed

• Fifty Shades of Grey and E.L. James
• Filing Off The Serial Numbers
• plagiarism
• fanworks as community property

The Post

There are two parts to “You don’t own your fics,” one more controversial than the other. The utterly uncontroversial part is the material fact of ownership, in the capitalist sense, which is that your control over your stories is not enforced by the system, i.e., the police. If someone plagiarizes you online, you cannot call the police to arrest them and regain control over your property. You can cry foul and sic on the plagiarist the fandom police, but at this point any real word/fandom comparison becomes laughable.

You don’t even “technically” own your fic, I’m sorry to say, because fundamentally, ownership is tied to the enforcement of ownership, which necessitates punishment when ownership is infringed. Without the punishment a sheet of paper means nothing, and it only means something because punishment (and potentially violence) is threatened. Ownership rights are so important because in this capitalist society all laws are based on the sanctity of trade, on which capitalist society operates. It cares nothing for fics, which cannot and will not generate profit. So fandom plagiarists are rarely if ever punished, and then even not materially punished with fines. What we may not understand when we talk about ownership is that there is nothing technical or theoretical about it.

What fic ownership in fandom exists is purely based on norms, and we operate so much on norms that we forget how ludicrous norms are, these unspoken or loudly asserted rules that differs from person to person and from sub-group to sub-group. The extent to which ownership-based-on-norms has any material impact at all is very limited.

The controversial part, and the main reason I wanted to write this post, is that I believe fan fics are communally created and communally owned. Fan fics owe to the original creators in the first place, and on the second order fan fics also owe to the fandom community. Never mind the fics that are written by multiple people whose original idea had been contributed by someone else, off of the kink memes or in an ask box, never mind those fics: Fundamentally, tropes and fanon are created by many people through hundreds and thousands of stories and are recycled over and over again, so that when we write we are both taking and creating. Fandom came up with the ABO verse, we did, so if you are writing an ABO story it doesn’t just belong to you.

(The problem is that this applies to all art, yes, but when you get to the level of Damien Hirst or Thomas Kinkade, there is a police state behind them. That’s the difference.)

Yet in many fans there’s this individualist streak that defies the communal nature of fandom. I inadvertently poked this beast when I wrote that authors shouldn’t delete their fics (unless they had to), but that’s for another day. Regardless, I think some fans have taken the doctrine of individual ownership for granted, when they overzealously assert creators’ right in cases of plagiarism, for example (see: debacle, hikago). Let me please just say that plagiarism in fandom is extremely difficult to divine, unless stories were copied verbatim, because in fandom ideas percolate, and tropes and observations and phrasings and feelings percolate. It’s damn near impossible to find a fic that has not obviously borrowed from another fic in that fandom or adjacent fandoms. If we understand that fics are communally owned, then a plagiarist is some one who only takes and doesn’t give, and that person perhaps should not belong in the community.

It’s partly why there’s resentment against some authors, like E.L. James, who filed the serial numbers off of the fics and brought them to the publishing industry, even though as fans we intellectually understand that a lot of labor went into the fics and authors should be compensated. There’s quite a bit of fear in that resentment, fear of bringing wider attention to our little world, and perhaps there’s jealousy, I don’t know. But a big part of it must be a sense of betrayal, I think, because authors like her profit off of works that are not entirely their own, and by doing so they claim individual ownership over communal property. It’s how most publishing works, but in fandom the case of communal ownership is the strongest, I think.

Understand, I do not and have never begrudged authors who go pro. They are all doing their best to work creatively in late capitalist society, and going pro was and remains the only way to do that. Ideally, compensation for creative or intellectual work should not be tied to ownership at all, but to the actual labor. I said ideally, because we don’t live in such an ideal world. We live in this place where we don’t understand how everything we love and everything we touch is communally created, so we attribute credit and obscene wealth to the few who were at the right place and the right time by strokes of fate. I really can’t believe how much push back I get sometimes for saying that Steve Jobs or Peter Thiel or Mark Zuckerberg have never done anything to deserve the money they have, because to explain the accumulation of wealth, we continue to believe that ideas can be owned.

Credits, like compensation, should be separate from ownership and should be given properly. This is not a comprehensive post, however, so I don’t want to dwell too much into that here, and don’t want to spend a lot of time on qualifiers, which as we all know is a sign of weakness. I’d really rather have read more academic works before writing, but what I have been able to find (specifically on this subject) has not been significant enough to cite, most of them hewing very closely to fandom orthodoxies or focusing too much on a single community. A better than average example is this article, which suggests “limited common property” as a descriptive concept for fannish creative works. If anyone knows any interesting articles or posts on this subject, let me know.