Ficlets

This is interesting, with the notation at “interesting” is not necessarily the same thing as “good” or even “advisible”: FanLib.com, a site which apparently is a place for people to post “fan fiction” (i.e., stories they write about characters from movies, TV and books) without all that nasty “you might get sued by the copyright holders” aftertaste – the site has partners in HarperCollins, Penguin Books, Showtime Networks, Simon & Schuster, and Starz Entertainment, all of whom seem to have agreed to keep their lawyers in check while fans make up breathless adventures for their favorite media characters (here’s the press release, so you can see for yourself what they’re up to).

Here are some of my questions about this venture:

1. How long will it be before some unauthorized fanfic shows up, and some copyright holder sues? FanLib notes it has a DMCA compliance employee whose job is to purge unauthorized fanfic, and plasters its site with warnings noting that it is not responsible for content posted there, but I’d guess at least a few folks won’t be pleased with that and will be willing to go to court to challenge that.

As corollary to this, how long until the people who are writing fanfic realize that posting their fanfic in such a public place is a fine way to draw the attention of exactly the wrong sort of people (i.e., corporate lawyers), and retreat back into the recesses of the Internet, where they will not be molested by cease and desist orders?

2. Likewise, how long until some fan writers upset one of the FanLib partners by doing something, er, unseemly to one of the characters? (or, as noted elsewhere on the net: “Synergy is all well and good until someone stumbles upon that Shrek/Gandalf/Harry Potter threesome BDSM fic and has an aneurysm.”)

3. Fan writers may enjoy skating right up to the edge of copyright violation (and then gleefully leaping into the chasm), but they’re not stupid. One of the great unwritten laws of fanfic is that you don’t profit from the fanfic (financially, at least). How long before the fanfic folk come to the conclusion that the whole point of FanLib is for someone to make money off their work – and that person isn’t them?

(Yes, yes – funny for Ficlets to be noting this when it’s a community content site owned by a major corporation, right? Fair enough. However, two things here: One, we’re not encouraging you to violate copyrights so we can make money. Two, there’s a reason everything here is covered by Creative Commons license.)

This is relevant because fanfic communities already exist and thrive online, in places where folks put out their stories in relative peace, and without anyone monetizing their labor without recompense. I would think someplace like FanLib would need to make a good argument that what they offer is better than the home-grown fanfic communities.

I think it’s also relevant to writers. Writers are all over the board about fan fiction: Some hate it with a passion and will do anything to stomp on it, while others see its presence as a good thing; it means your fans are so invested in the universe you’ve created they’ll keep playing in it while they wait for you to come up with more. I myself tend toward the latter camp – I’d be happy to know that there was fanfic in my universe.

However, I don’t think I would be pleased to see it on a site like FanLib. I’m willing to look the other way for fans, who are just enjoying themselves and not bothering to try to do anything other than have fun. I’m less inclined to look the other way when someone is trying to build a business a) off my fans without compensating them; b) off of my universe and characters without compensating me.

Now, if FanLib wants to license the universe from me for fanfic purposes and thus we create a hassle-free zone for them to play, that would be one thing. But I don’t really see them going out of their way; at the very least, I would be surprised if they’ve licensed the universes for all the fanfic the site points to and houses. I’d be curious to know what other creators and fans think about this.

For other perspectives on FanLib, check out Making Light’s entry on it, which features lots of interesting links and discussion in the comment thread.