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Money, Rights and Fic, Part Two
Oct. 29th, 2006 07:17 pmIntellectual property is a bastard concept to begin with, in US legal and artistic practice. In fact, it runs directly counter to one of the major tenets of current copyright law, which is that ideas cannot be copyrighted, only specific executions or expressions of an idea. Intellectual property, on the other hand, has been taken to mean that ideas , and everything following from them, are the property of their originator, the same way a bowl is the property of the person who throws it.
If your mind is now teeming with objections about how those two things are just not equivalent, good for you.
Unsurprisingly, it is intellectual property, rather than copyright law as it is currently written, that authors appeal to when trying to assert that fanfic is illegal. Some authors, in fact, go further and say that an author has a moral right to determine all future dispositions of any world/characters/story they write and publicize, especially any refractions in a negative light--whatever "negative" means to them.
This is, frankly, a load of ripe bushwah. Neither history, precedent nor written law is on the side of such an assertion. Not even the Berne Convention or the DMCA say the author has control of everything, including audience reactions, for ever and ever amen, though the former comes perilously close. The strange bedfellow that such authors do have is big business, who want to protect their profits and keep control of all ideas, expressions and, most importantly, money that the author and the public might have.
Once more, to make sure everyone caught that: rights of control over production, in the US, are about money. Not morals, money. If a case gets to court, which, incidentally, has never happened for fanfic in its current incarnation, morals don't win. Money wins. Money always wins. The complete and utter lack of that mythical beast "artistic control" evident whenever big business makes a derivative work should hammer home that fact to the authors who are whining over what a terrible defamation uncontrolled fanfic is.
If, in face of this, authors still want to put forward arguments about ethics, about how things should work, then they should be prepared for the fan-creators to start doing the same. Vigorously.
In our next segment, how things should work, by all rights.
.
If your mind is now teeming with objections about how those two things are just not equivalent, good for you.
Unsurprisingly, it is intellectual property, rather than copyright law as it is currently written, that authors appeal to when trying to assert that fanfic is illegal. Some authors, in fact, go further and say that an author has a moral right to determine all future dispositions of any world/characters/story they write and publicize, especially any refractions in a negative light--whatever "negative" means to them.
This is, frankly, a load of ripe bushwah. Neither history, precedent nor written law is on the side of such an assertion. Not even the Berne Convention or the DMCA say the author has control of everything, including audience reactions, for ever and ever amen, though the former comes perilously close. The strange bedfellow that such authors do have is big business, who want to protect their profits and keep control of all ideas, expressions and, most importantly, money that the author and the public might have.
Once more, to make sure everyone caught that: rights of control over production, in the US, are about money. Not morals, money. If a case gets to court, which, incidentally, has never happened for fanfic in its current incarnation, morals don't win. Money wins. Money always wins. The complete and utter lack of that mythical beast "artistic control" evident whenever big business makes a derivative work should hammer home that fact to the authors who are whining over what a terrible defamation uncontrolled fanfic is.
If, in face of this, authors still want to put forward arguments about ethics, about how things should work, then they should be prepared for the fan-creators to start doing the same. Vigorously.
In our next segment, how things should work, by all rights.
.
