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- Tue, 12:24: well thats the same rush ida got from drawing a new one
- Tue, 12:37: Also I like this gag better than I did yesterday. When I was too short on sleep to like any gag.
- Tue, 12:52: course i cant upload it till im home from work
- Tue, 20:10: Hero of Three Faces update: an oldie, yet showing I always drew for panel-per-page. http://t.co/5cWM6KDdvS #doctorwho #superman
- Tue, 21:07: Reminder: an LJ entry tagged only "twitter" has yet to be edited for tags. Or for long retweets cut off. In case I start retweeting again.
- Tue, 21:41: Copyright holders cannot shirk their duty to consider—in good faith and prior to sending a takedown notificat… http://t.co/wF54xbpsVY
- Tue, 22:03: petratodd: deducecanoe: the-nerdy-aspie: deducecanoe: the-nerdy-aspie: deducecanoe: petratodd: like... http://t.co/1Rx8IKpCuq
- Tue, 22:24: MMFR Thoughts - fuckyeahisawthat: schwarmerei1: flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy: lizswyverns: So I read in an... http://t.co/SuDfgPuKtE
- Tue, 23:24: When I saw this film I was writing for the internet in the voice of Archy the Cockroach: … http://t.co/zwwKHdHHUe
- Fri, 23:38: jaclcfrost: imagine a sleepover with all of your favorite characters. like. all of them. each and every one... http://t.co/ZvbvplJPya
- Fri, 23:43: I, your Friendly Neighborhood Librarian absolve you from all literary sins and encourage you to go and read... http://t.co/cpEwb6Fl1t
- Sat, 00:20: even if your work is an unlicensed derivative work of someone else’s property, your work is still your property and… http://t.co/Pf11Ud44FU
- Sat, 01:06: Photoset: raijumykaiju: I want to talk about David Alleyne for a minute. I want to talk about bisexuality.... http://t.co/1RxPvY9kMQ
- Sat, 09:33: RT @LOLGOP: Republicans aren’t complaining about the economy — they’re bragging about how good they are at sabotage http://t.co/UOnzv3DCTK
- Sat, 10:53: "What is it like to be a child, facing the future? What happens when you cannot find any adult who..." http://t.co/01q2Kn42Fa
- Sat, 11:06: "Men’s rights activists don’t organize marches; they don’t build shelters or raise funds for abused..." http://t.co/6PbmKREx7o
- Wed, 12:45: RT @siracusa: "This is what a broken copyright enforcement system looks like." http://t.co/PAxkXUEo
- Wed, 19:49: #AKOTAS update: two of these things don't go together. http://t.co/zdgqfRMF #webcomics #kingarthur
- Wed, 21:20: Didn't draw AKOTAS yesterday or today. Buffer gone. Well, it's not like that isn't how it's operated most of its life.
- Thu, 08:25: Hero of Three Faces update: all along. http://t.co/AjwYFsQX #spn #btvs
- Thu, 08:56: Is it just me, or is it surprisingly difficult to find a transcript of the The Prisoner main title dialog on the internet?
- Thu, 09:26: DWM 456 ought've been an all Torchwood: Children Of Earth issue.
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fourzoas posted about this woman who put her Twilight fanfiction on eBay, got called on it and removed it; but reportedly keeps putting it back and put out a press release defending fanfiction and her actions. Unfortunately, instead of the defense being in legal terms, it's in such New Age, quasi-Jungian phrases as "Universal Mind" and "this matrix we call reality". Now I, as you must know, Gentle Reader, agree with her in principle, but - as I note in one of my fanfictions - law is about what can be measured. This is what I commented at fourzoas' post:
Well, I believe fanfiction is, and of a right ought to be, fair use. I don't take the issue to court because (a) I don't have the time or the money (b) I'd rather spend my time on writing/drawing the fanfiction. But it's true: fanfiction is the modern technological equivalent of the fireside oral folklore of all of human history up until now; the hiccup in normality is not that we make up and tell our own stories, the hiccup in normality is that the sources are owned by big corporations. However, if this woman wants to take it to court, I hope she (a) realizes the fight she's in for (b) finds someone to rewrite her brief.And:There was a case like this a coupla years ago, just after I got on LJ: someone putting their Star Wars novel on Amazon. I wrote this about copyright at the time.
I'd like to see the issue taken to court too, but by someone who had a chance of winning. I don't think this woman is that.
(no subject)
Jan. 12th, 2007 06:36 am
ursulav has been discovering fanfiction lately. She has a very interesting perspective on it, and one new to me, perhaps because I've been a consumer and producer since I was only a little older than the age she's flashing back to.
But the real reason I mention this is because I want to preserve in my journal things I've written in the comments on her post.
para_cynic, a professional editor who dislikes fanfiction on practical grounds, brought up the you don't own the characters thing.
That's a fallacy. It's not that the characters don't belong to me. They do, because they belong to everybody, the way Hercules belonged to everybody two thousand years ago, and King Arthur belonged to everybody five hundred years ago, and Paul Bunyan belonged to everyone a hundred years ago. The fact that these characters who belong to everyone are copyrighted intellectual properties is a modern aberration. The hiccup in normality isn't that the characters are treated by me as if I own them, the hiccup is that big corporations own them.
For more academic arguments saying this same thing, google MIT professor Henry Jenkins.
nornagest responded to my comment, in part, "I think there's a significant qualitative difference between King Arthur or Hercules and, say, Buffy or Captain Picard. Retellings of myths recycle plot. You can write a version of the Christian War in Heaven where Lucifer is a basically sympathetic, if deeply flawed, character and everyone will recognize it as the War in Heaven as long as the proper events occur in approximately the proper order ... Mythic characters start out as blank slates ... They only become well-defined after many iterations, if at all; Odin is fairly well characterized, as is Robin Hood ... Fanfiction relies much more heavily on character structure. You can put Buffy, or Picard, in a plot ... unrelated to the original works, and people will still recognize them as the same characters ... I think this is a consequence of a change in the way stories are told; the concept of a canonical set of stories is relatively recent ... and the idea of intellectual property pretty much came in with it."
That's a great point but I'd argue that, while it reflects a new dynamic in the community folk hero's adjustment to the electronic communication age, the phenomenon of "canon" doesn't hold the omnipotence you seem to be arguing it does.
Characters like Buffy and Captain Picard are too new and young to be good examples. James Bond, on the other hand, has just featured in a very popular reenvisioning of his character (even if that "reenvision" was an exercise in bringing the characterization closer to what it had been in Fleming's novels than the films had ever achieved before). Gregory Maguire's novel Wicked which casts the Witch of the West as a sympathetic character is a bestseller, has been made into a stage musical, and has a new sequel out. The last two decades have presented movie theatres with comic remakes of mid-twentieth century cop tv dramas like Dragnet and Starsky and Hutch. And while Captain Picard is too new a character for such treatment, Captain Kirk is rumored to be getting a continuity reboot in the film J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias, What About Brian?) has in pre-production. And actually, Buffy was a movie before she was a tv show.
The concept of "canon" plays a large role in the creation and appreciation of fanfiction, but today's lasting community characters are truly no more restricted by it than the lasting community characters of all of human history before them. Me, I stopped applying the word "canon" to bodies of fiction, because I feel it implies things that aren't true.
I may add to this post if the discussion over there continues.
We do it all for you.
May. 3rd, 2006 10:32 amAs mad as I was the other day about people who say, "Why don't you write something original instead of fanfiction?", once I calmed down I never actually expressed my own position on that aspect of the topic.
One way it was put to me was "working with someone else's energy". Here's what that made me realize about it: It's not just someone else's energy. It's my energy too. In fact, it's everyone's energy. Just like Hercules was everyone's energy two thousand years ago, and King Arthur was everyone's energy five hundred years ago, and Paul Bunyan was everyone's energy a hundred years ago.
Patrick Stewart in something I read once told a story, back when he was still appearing as Captain Picard on our screens every week. The press was always nagging him, "How does it feel to have had this illustrious career with the Royal Shakespeare Company and in I, Claudius and all, and then doing this silly science fiction thing?", and finally he blew up at them: "All that Shakespeare was just preparation for Star Trek! It's the same exotic language, the same fantastic adventure, the same high philosophy and moral discourse! Get a life!" [He didn't actually say, "Get a life!" in what I read; I'm paraphrasing.]
And here's another quote from academia to go with the one earlier this week from the guy at MIT. The Arthurian scholar Eugene Vinaver, in his introduction to King Arthur and His Knights (an abridgement of Vinaver's edition of Malory), wrote of the evolution of the medieval romances: "In most cases, when a 'branch' or an incident was added, the purpose of the addition was to elucidate or to anticipate stories which were already in existence. ... This 'backward' growth of the narrative implies a method still clearly distinguishable in the works of Rabelais, who began with the adventures of Pantagruel and then went on to the life story of Pantagruel's father, Gargantua; a modern novelist would probably have written his Gargantua first. ... On the wide and constantly expanding canvas of a cycle of romances there is always room for a further lengthening of any one of the carefully interwoven threads." That's what fanfiction does - it expands upon our culture's present body of folklore.
The fact that this energy that is everyone's is owned by big corporations is an aberration, a hiccup in normality, as I discussed in that earlier entry this week. In our own way, by ignoring the stigma of writing fanfiction, we are battling for Truth and Justice just as much as the heroes we write about do.
More on derivative works
Apr. 26th, 2006 08:38 pmAccording to Sci-Fi Wire yesterday the Amazon page selling the unauthorized Star Wars novel is still there (despite my reporting that it was gone) though Lucasfilm Ltd. Legal has spoken to the author/publisher about it.
theferrett admits to being one of the people whose gut reflex to fanfiction is, "Why don't you write something original?", but nevertheless says the things I'd've said the other day if I hadn't been so mad (but his way of course).
billroper writes of the steadily vanishing status of parody as fair use (Everyone remember the The Wind Done Gone case?), and the steadily growing time limits on copyrights, to the benefit of corporate intellectual property owners and the detriment of the public domain. This puts me in mind of a discussion I had on Usenet once. ( I know, I know, I once told you I'd never cut for length. Be afraid. )
So to summarize the argument I put forward: Since death-plus-a-time-limit is the system theoretically in place, but is being abused by corporate intellectual property owners to suspend copyright expiration indefinitely, I put forward the resolution that intellectual property ought to be ownable only by actual persons and not by corporations, and ought to expire at the death(s) of the creator(s). ( footnotes )
Edit More here.
