Paul Gadzikowski

Paul Cornell, British tv writer, currently the writer for Action Comics, and Hugo award nominee for the Doctor Who two-parter Human Nature/Family of Blood (based on one of his Doctor Who novels) is soliciting links to fanfiction featuring characters he created for the Christmas Day entry of his blog. Rules and submission procedure at the link. (I submitted three pieces from this journal's masterlist that qualify, before he added the "one link per author" rule. I wonder which one he'll use.)

Cornell often tweets against comics piracy (and, no doubt, speaks out against it in other forums). In the comments on the solicitation blogpost, I asked him to define the difference between that and fanfiction when they're both seen as copyright violation. The difference is obvious enough to him (me too, I assured him from the start) that he had some difficulty discerning what I was asking; his response was, basically: fanfiction is its author's own work while piracy steals livelihood from the paid creator.