Legal Issues With Fan Fiction - Copyright Holders' Attitude Towards Fan Fiction

Copyright Holders' Attitude Towards Fan Fiction

While many authors, (e.g. Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling, D.J. MacHale, Stephenie Meyer, Terry Pratchett) do not take issue with authors of derivative works, a number of authors do. They may request that fan fiction archival sites remove any pieces of fan fiction based on their original works. Many also request that bans be put in place to prevent fan works being posted without their direct permission and ability to control the works.

To date, no fan fiction archive has failed to comply with an author’s request to remove works, and many archives feature a full list of authors whose work cannot be the source of a fan fiction on their site. Generally, authors who do not want fan works being written without their direct permission and/or the ability to control it, request that major fan fiction archives remove and ban such works.

To aid fan fiction authors so that they know which fandoms are prohibited on the site the fan fiction site MediaMiner has compiled a list of authors whose works are banned from the site. As they state, “This is a right they have as an author or owner of the work. No copyright owner has to allow fan fiction or even tolerate it.”

Most major studios and production companies tolerate fan fiction, and some even encourage it to a certain extent. Paramount Pictures, for example, allowed the production of Star Trek: The New Voyages and Star Trek: The New Voyages 2 from Bantam Books, fan fiction anthologies which followed Bantam's Star Trek Lives! by reprinting stories from various fanzines; as well as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a series of ten anthologies from Pocket Books in which the short stories were selected through an open submissions process geared toward novice writers.

Due to the ongoing nature of television production, some television producers have implemented similar constraints, one example being Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. His demand that Babylon 5 fan fiction be clearly labeled or kept off the Internet confined most of the Babylon 5 fan fiction community to mailing lists during the show's initial run. J. K. Rowling has also complained about sexually explicit Harry Potter fan fiction. However, lawyers on behalf of Ms. Rowling specifically noted that she has "no complaint about innocent fan fiction written by genuine Harry Potter fans."

Many writers and producers state that they do not read fan fiction, citing a fear of being accused of stealing a fan's ideas, but encourage its creation nonetheless. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the air, for instance, creator Joss Whedon encouraged fans to read fan fiction during the show's timeslot.

Noteworthy in regard to the acceptance of fan fiction is Eric Flint, who has set up a formal site for the submission of fan fiction into his canon in the 1632 series at Baen's Bar and has to date published 24 issues of The Grantville Gazette in electronic form and five in book form. These feature fan fiction and fan non-fiction alongside his original work (paying first semi-pro, and now SFWA rates). Flint (a former labor organizer and socialist) contends that this collective work allows the expansion of his alternate history universe into something approaching the complexity of reality. It can be argued, however, that since work published in the Gazette is paid (at professional rates) and cleared by Flint for canonicity, that this is not actually "fan fiction" in the commonly-understood sense of the term.

Also noteworthy is the series of Darkover anthologies published by Marion Zimmer Bradley, beginning in 1980, consisting largely of fan fiction extended into her canon. These books led to a much talked about (and exaggerated) controversy. Bradley read something in a fan story that meshed well with a Darkover book she was currently writing, so she wrote the fan author, Jean Lamb, offering her "a sum and a dedication for all rights to the text." In a 1991 Usenet post, Jean continued, "I attempted at that point to _very politely_ negotiate a better deal. I was told that I had better take what I was offered, that much better authors than I had not been paid as much (we're talking a few hundred dollars here) and had gotten the same sort of 'credit' (this was in the summer of 1992)...a few months later I received a letter from Ms. Bradley's lawyer threatening me with a suit." The rumor, however, was that Bradley had a skirmish with a fan who claimed authorship of a book identical to one Bradley had published and accused Bradley of "stealing" the idea, and the resultant lawsuit cost Bradley a book. Either way, her attorney advised her against reading fan fiction of her work. Versions of this incident are credited by many to have led to a "zero tolerance" policy on the part of a number of other professional authors, including Andre Norton, and David Weber. Mercedes Lackey used to strictly disallow any posting of fan fiction set within in her universes on the Internet, though she did allow stories to be published in approved fanzines with signed releases for each story. Recently, she has changed her stance to allow nonprofit fan fiction of her works so long as the fan fiction is licensed as a derivative work and uses a Creative Commons license.

Anne Rice has consistently, and aggressively, objected to fan fiction based on any of her characters (mostly those from her famous Interview with the Vampire and its sequels in The Vampire Chronicles) or other elements in her books, and she formally requested that FanFiction.Net remove stories featuring her characters. Similar efforts have also been taken by Annette Curtis Klause, Robin Hobb, George R.R. Martin, and Robin McKinley among others. Many authors do this, they state, in order to protect their copyright and especially to prevent any dilution, saturation, or distortion of the universes and people portrayed in their works.

One curious case is that of Larry Niven's Known Space universe. In an author's note in The Ringworld Engineers, Niven stated that he was finished writing stories in this universe, and that "f you want more Known Space stories, you'll have to write them yourself." Internet writer Elf Sternberg took him up on that offer, penning a parody in which members of Niven's hyper-masculine Kzin species engage in gay sex and BDSM. Niven responded by denouncing Sternberg's story in the introduction to Man-Kzin Wars IV (Baen Books, 1991) and issuing a cease-and-desist for copyright violation. To date, Sternberg holds that the story is constitutionally protected parody, while Niven maintains that it is a copyright violation that lies outside of protected speech, though he has not legally pursued the matter further.

Copyright holders may have been changing their policies towards fan fiction. Some companies like CBS and Lucasfilm Ltd., which had been historically hostile to fan fiction, changed parts of their model in order to be more fan friendly. This included trying to encourage fan works and integrating them into official sites.

When not hosting the fan fiction or being openly tolerant of existing fan sites, companies created partnerships with other companies like FanLib to aid them in the task. The reaction from fans to such alliances and interference in their activities has been mixed, with some people thinking that it violates the basic rules of fan fiction communities. Those fans seem to be increasingly in the minority, as acceptance of such interference is tolerated because of the positives that can result.

Many tie-in novels and novelizations have the ambiguous status of being officially sanctioned, for-profit fan fiction - though once again, this largely depends on one's definition of fan fiction. Series from Star Trek to Charmed have numerous books that exist outside the officially canonical world of the series, much like fan fiction, but which have the official sanction of the show's creators or owners. The refusal by Paramount Pictures (owners of the Trek franchise) to allow printed adventures to be considered part of the canon has led many fans to consider the books to be a form of fan fiction despite their legal and licensed status, and a similar attitude prevails amongst fans of Buffy, where the series' creator has explicitly declared that the novels and novelizations based on the series are not canon material.

The attitude of copyright holders toward incorporating fan fiction into the canon varies. It is generally the case that the writers hired for a television series or movie are under strict orders not to read fan fiction out of fear that doing so will cause the copyright holder to be sued later for infringement. However, some copyright holders, such as the BBC in the case of Doctor Who, have mechanisms to allow for unsolicited submissions of stories into the official canon, and it is also the case that the writers of canon stories have sometimes been recruited from the ranks of fan fiction writers. In the case of the Doctor Who novels published by Virgin Books, once the BBC reclaimed the license to publish novels regarding the Doctor, many readers immediately categorized all the Virgin New Adventures as non-canonical fan fiction.

Finally, there exists a sect of science fiction authors who have admitted to writing fan fiction before they became published, or in other ways have outed themselves as pro-fan fiction. A small sample includes: Naomi Novik has mentioned writing fanfic for television series and movies, and says she'd be thrilled to know that fans were writing fanfic for her series (though she also said she'd be careful not to read any of it); Anne McCaffrey allowed fan fiction, but had a page of rules she expected her fans to follow; Anne Harris has said, "I live for the day my characters get slashed"; J. K. Rowling has mentioned fan fiction approvingly, and her lawyers have confirmed she's okay with fanfics. In 2008, Steven Brust published a Firefly novel with a CC copyright notice. A larger list, with citations, can be found on the Fanlore page Professional Author Fanfic Policies. Fanlore is a fandom-focused wiki and is a project of the Organization for Transformative Works.