Legal Issues With Fan Fiction - Fan Fiction Outside The United States

Fan Fiction Outside The United States

In Great Britain, Discworld author Terry Pratchett, while emphasizing that he is careful not to read fanfics, has voiced the opinion that "everything works if people are sensible" and doesn't mind "so long as people don't put it where I can trip over it". However, Pratchett emphasizes that the Discworld and all its characters are ultimately his intellectual property, and stresses that "it is not a franchise".

Neil Gaiman, another English author who has written such works as Stardust, Coraline, and American Gods, says he does not mind fan fiction as long as the author notes that the characters are the intellectual property of another and so long as the fiction is not for profit.

In countries such as Russia, where copyright laws are more lenient or less well enforced, it is not uncommon to see fan fiction based on the work of popular authors published in book form. Sergey Lukyanenko, a popular science fiction author, went as far as to incorporate some fan fiction based on his stories into official canon (with permission of the writers of the said fan fiction). Perhaps the most famous case, however, is Dmitri Yemets' Tanya Grotter book series, a "cultural response" to Harry Potter, which provoked a lawsuit from J. K. Rowling.

In Japan, the dōjinshi subculture is similar to a combination of the United States subcultures surrounding underground comics, science fiction fanzines, and fan fiction. Many dōjinshi works are manga-format fan fiction, which in Japan is, while not strictly legal, generally tolerated and usually encouraged, being looked upon as a form of free advertising or a breeding ground for new talent, most famously the group CLAMP and Love Hina author Ken Akamatsu.

Read more about this topic:  Legal Issues With Fan Fiction

Famous quotes containing the words united states, fan, fiction, united and/or states:

    The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
    Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

    Hard times accounted in large part for the fact that the exposition was a financial disappointment in its first year, but Sally Rand and her fan dancers accomplished what applied science had failed to do, and the exposition closed in 1934 with a net profit, which was donated to participating cultural institutions, excluding Sally Rand.
    —For the State of Illinois, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
    William Gass (b. 1924)

    Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity—an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.
    Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)

    How many people in the United States do you think will be willing to go to war to free Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania?
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)