Ever since I began reading the Harry Potter series, I have heard of the phenomenon of Fan Fiction. And ever since I have been an admirer of the many interesting twists that fans have laid on popular books that I have liked. Especially the way they develop the minor characters in the series.
Fan Fiction is stories written by the fans of a particular series and is usually posted on sites which are dedicated to certain series. (This is of course before the advent of the popular site www.Fanfiction.net which hosts multiple collections.)
It has been suggested that many of the budding authors in this phenomenon are actually committing copyright infringement. It is said that they decrease the marketability of the copyrighted material by way of removing from the author the chance to maximize the economic use of his work. Furthermore, their exclusive and exhaustive use of copyrighted material is said to be the very heart of infringement.
However, I believe that what they do falls under the fair use doctrine because the purpose and character of their use is not of a commercial nature. They don't publish the material with the aim of remuneration. They publish it for the sheer satisfaction of sharing their own ideas on a particular storyline.
Furthermore, the argument that it decreases the potential economic use of the author of the copyrighted material is flawed because what it actually does is increase the interest of the people in the original. Such that whenever the author enjoys increased sales from the copyrighted original and if the author comes out with a sequel of the original work, the response in the form of sales is enormous.
Unfortunately, the argument on the exhaustive use of the copyrighted material is a valid argument for infringement only because the kind of work that fanfiction writers do necessitate the exhaustive and exclusive use of the original material. They build upon the world that the author created and use the characters that necessarily inhabits that world thereby enriching the genre.
But instead of infringement, I think this is one of the limitations of using traditional Intellectual Property Modes such as copyrights on the phenomenon of internet publishing. Originally copyright, by its very name, is reserved for printed material. However, it could not anticipate a world which allows for the type of freedom of expression that is the internet today. Publishing is as easy as a mouseclick (as we see and read on our class blog).
So I end this post with a question...Could we actually allow the interest of a few individuals to stifle the growth of our future authors???
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2 comments:
hi doc,
from what I know, J.K.Rowling allows fan fiction of her work. She allows non-commercial use of the characters in the Harry Potter series. Her restrictions are simple: that the characters are not used in an obscene way, the use is non-commercial and that these works are not attributed to her.
the link is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3753001.stm
So besides your argument that HP Fanfic falls under fair-use, it is also possible to say that JK Rowling allows derivative works of her books and that fanfiction fallls under this.
However, there are some authors who are not as generous with their work. Anne Rice, Nora Roberts and some others have explicitly forbidden fanfiction.net from uploading fanfiction based on their work. According to my friend, if a fanfic writer uploads a fic based on one of these author's works, they are not accepted by fanfiction.net.
Perhaps in these cases, the fair use doctrine could be invoked.
p.s. One of my best friends is a fanfic writer and we've often discussed the legal implications of fan fiction.
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