I find it typical that the racist bigot who professes a desire to 'protect our women!' from the racial Other is the same person as the sexist bigot who, if 'his woman' is raped, is the first to tell her it was her own fault.

The implicit contradiction highlights the fact that neither the racial-other nor the gender-other is the real point of the bigot's complaints. The bigot himself is; he is the center of his universe and the only real points that he can imagine being made are ones about him.

This is why he is often the same person who, in any discussion centering on the perceptions, problems and possible solutions of women, will stand up and proclaim that the discussion is "exclusionary" or "reverse sexism" because it is not about him. Or he may be the one who insists on telling everyone, and calling on everyone to witness and agree, that he is distressed and injured by the hostility of the discussion, because he is most certainly not one of the bad men the women in question are angry at. This is a slightly more subtle attention-grab, but it results in the discussion being hijacked and recentered on him just as surely as the first example.

The one thing that this kind of person fears most is finding out that he is not the center and turning point of the world.

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A certain percentage of published authors, not infrequently those who do not actually have active fandoms, make a point of derogating fanfic at every turn. According to this set, fanfic is of universally poor quality and fanfic authors are just thieves/lazy/unsophisticated/inconsiderate/rapists/insert-pejorative-adjective-here.

(Example adjectives taken from real life. To read them in context, see any fanfic-related entry on Making Light.)

These people would do well to recall the Golden Rule.

This because the widespread (though inaccurate) fan conviction that fanfic is flatly illegal does not stop anyone from writing fic. The only thing that stops a fandom from ficcing is the respect they may have for the author's wishes. The authors in the above-mentioned set seem quite happy to ignore this fact and shred any good will or credit as reasonable beings they may have.

While they are busy insulting and disdaining the fanfic they are proud of not having read and its authors, who they seem not to believe they share a world and internet with, they should remember that many human beings do unto others as they have been done to.

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You know your whole damn culture needs therapy when large numbers of people can be convinced that there is something evil and wrong about writing yourself being and getting absolutely everything you want in your wildest dreams. This is even more true when the evilness and wrongness is explicitly identified as the act of sharing, posting, making public, speaking aloud your wish-fulfillment, and being applauded for doing so.

The urge to police other people's pleasure should be recognized as the greatest moral perversion of all.

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If, after a story is written, published and sold for money, a derivative story based on it is then written, published and sold for money, does this cause any monetary loss to the author of the source-work?

I would suggest that it does not.

The two products are not commensurate; one cannot replace the other, in either direction. Any argument that they are competing for the same market share must acknowledge that, as the second work is derivative, they also mutually support the growth of each other's customer base.

Thus, the commercial basis of copyright law does not apply to fanfic.


In our next segment, reflections on the "intellectual property" aspect of the issue.

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Question inspired by a brows through fanficrants: Do fen use terms that trivialize extremely serious matters?

Yes.

Question under the question: Do fen casually use weighty words without bothering their fluffy little heads for one second to think about where those words come from and what it does to their own patterns of thought, to use them casually?

Yes.

Prime examples: gay [as a pejorative] ("That's so gay!"), rape ("Fox is raping my favorite show!"), crack ("This fic is total crack/on crack.")

This is not, of course, specific to fen. It isn't even limited to a young demographic, though teen and young adult slang is where it shows up most often.


What I find most disturbing about this is the number of people who, when pressed or questioned about their use of such terms, will instantly say that their interlocutor is "taking it way too seriously, get a grip!"

Because I would certainly hope that queer-bashing, rape and drug addiction are taken seriously at all times. They should be taken seriously, as anyone who has ever had the misfortune to experience them knows beyond a shadow of a doubt. Insisting on using the terms in a light and unreal/istic way is singularly stupid.

Maybe it's a guilty conscience that drives this double trivialization. Or maybe the people protesting the taking-seriously really are that brainless, shallow, naive, callous and lacking in empathy.

I kind of hope it's a guilty conscience.

In either case, the question I keep wanting to ask next is: Why do you want, so badly, to keep using those particular words? What do you find appealing about them and the concepts they refer to or embed?

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Apropos of watching some birds getting frisky...

I'm sure people besides me have heard various men appeal to the specious argument that they can't control their sex-drives because humans are animals and male animals turn into furry/feathery sex machines during mating season.

(Not that this is not a perfectly accurate portrait of the male animals in question, it just isn't nearly that simple with primates.)

At any rate, I can't help thinking that men would appeal to this argument far less often if women adopted the female response of the species in question--which is generally to pound the living shit out of any male they don't approve of until he goes off to bug someone else.

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Copyright. The right to copy.

It's really fairly simple, or at least it was until the web came along. Now those of us who deal with text and images are all stuck with laws that were developed to address paper and ink, trying to stretch them to fit pixels and server-client function. What a mess.

But, however the medium changes, the motives hold pretty steady.

The motive of copyright is to protect the income of the creator of some product.

That's it, really. I mean, we can argue all we like about intellectual property and the ethics of idea-theft and the integrity of artistic work, particularly. But the practical issue it's all based on is the money. (See the last entry about practicalities and ethics.) That's the part that makes me laugh when some artist sets up a howl about how their story or characters have been tainted by fanfic, and what makes me wince when I see another contract saying that some company owns all the ideas their R&D people have for five years after leaving the company.

Ideas are true public domain. It's only the development that can be proprietary. It's the development that time and money and the resources of thought and research are invested in.

And that is the understanding that the concept of "fair use" is based on. The more development that's invested in a derivative product, the more it becomes the property of the 'secondary' creator. The specific threshold between "enough development invested, this is yours" and "nope, not enough, you stole that" tends to be extremely circumstantial, but the principle driving the decision is consistent.

Copyright says that the creator has the right to determine whether and how her/his work will be reproduced and distributed, and the right to be compensated by the recipients. The definition of "creator" that copyright laws give us, though, is "someone who did the work". There's no Holy Mantle of Creator-ship involved, and I think that's a good way to look at it.

Of course, the fact that it's all down to money also means that copyright law dabbles in areas such as "trademark dilution", which I consider an abomination. Questions of trademark recognition, and the importance of it, have entirely to do with advertising, which I believe is a truly evil thing that no self-respecting human being should have truck with. It's rank propaganda, at heart, brainwashing by another name.

So I think the real question, the useful question, to ask yourself, the next time the issues of copyright and intellectual property come up is: who did the work?

Who, all, did the work?

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