![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"Bravo! I'd dearly love to see an end to the two-tier world we've been maintaining, where a book that's clearly fanfic about the March girls' father from Little Women can win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (March, by Geraldine Brooks), but transformative reworkings of movies, television shows, video games, commercials, and uncountable other sources are afforded neither respect, nor access to commerce, nor the protection of the law.
It's the exact equivalent of the system whereby high-end "literary" publishers can publish books in which underage characters have sex, but cheap paperback publishers who do so risk prosecution.
The functional status of fanfic right now is that it can be written, and posted to the internet, as long as the author is willing to give up all rights to her (or occasionally his) own work, and accepts that this irregular legal tolerance may be withdrawn in the future. This just isn't fair.
Fanfic is a natural human impulse. As long as people care about literature, they'll write fanfic about it."
- Teresa Nielsen Hayden (posted here)
It's the exact equivalent of the system whereby high-end "literary" publishers can publish books in which underage characters have sex, but cheap paperback publishers who do so risk prosecution.
The functional status of fanfic right now is that it can be written, and posted to the internet, as long as the author is willing to give up all rights to her (or occasionally his) own work, and accepts that this irregular legal tolerance may be withdrawn in the future. This just isn't fair.
Fanfic is a natural human impulse. As long as people care about literature, they'll write fanfic about it."
- Teresa Nielsen Hayden (posted here)