Fan binding has exploded Popular in recent years.many fans Do Adhering to a strictly gift-economic stance, in agreement with the authors of the works they bound, usually limited the money they collected (if any) to cover the cost of materials. But those who sell bound editions of popular novels for profit are of a different kind. When they make money off work that the authors themselves cannot sell, they put those authors—and arguably the fan fiction itself—in an untenable position.
“Technically, the right to reproduce belongs to the author of the novel because that’s what ‘copyright’ is: they are the only ones who have the right to reproduce the novel,” said Stacey Lantagne, a copyright attorney who specializes in fan matters. novel and teaches at Western New England University School of Law.Although she noted that this “might be formally considered an unresolved legal issue,” the novel’s author Do owns the copyright to the original parts of their story, although certainly not the underlying source material.
Is it legal to bind someone else’s novel? “That’s a typical lawyer answer: It depends,” Lantagne joked. “It may be legal to print someone else’s fan fiction for personal, non-commercial use,” she said, adding that this might extend to paying someone else for the materials to bind it. “Non-commercial” here is the key. Like the legal status of fan fiction itself, the legality of fan fiction depends on fair use, an exception in U.S. copyright law that is determined by how transformative the work is or whether someone profited from it and took it away from the rights holder Decisions are ongoing regarding money and other factors.
fan fiction community When doing other things with someone’s novel, there has historically been a reliance on good-faith communication. There’s nothing stopping you from translating, remixing or creating an audio version (called a podcast) or, yes, a printed and bound version, but it would be nice if you asked first. Some writers issue blanket licenses that allow for any non-commercial participation in their works, while some, especially in these ultra-popular corners of the fandom, have specific guidelines for fanbinding. Last year, a charity auction raised huge sums of money to bundle other people’s works, prompting some writers to –Including Linyu——Modify their policy to only allow personal, non-commercial fan binding.
While many fans respect their wishes, there is clearly demand for these books, so the supply continues. Lantagne said that because litigation is extremely expensive, a fan fiction author’s only recourse in this situation may be to file a DMCA takedown notice, a very tedious process when there are multiple sellers on multiple sites. “This is something that copyright owners have been complaining about since the DMCA was passed in the late 1990s—it’s painful to have to file a DMCA notice wherever copyright infringement occurs,” she said. “However, the alternative is to use YouTube’s Content ID to automatically block uploads, which we know is notoriously poor when it comes to fair use considerations.”
While illegal sellers clearly deserve a large share of the blame, this continued demand, regardless of the wishes of the novel’s author, illustrates how scale and money have changed the world of fan fiction in recent years.To be clear, there has never been a single “fanfiction community” or set of universal norms, but the widely accepted framework of the gift economy has always been underpinned by the fact that many fanfiction readers are also writers, and that stories are shared in fanfiction fandom, and all the structural connections they bring. Pulling a release is often considered a betrayal – we were all in this demonetization boat, and now you’ve jumped ship and cashed out.