Rant about fanfiction and copyright

My one wish this Christmas? That the U.S. copyright laws on fiction and fanfiction would get replaced with the Japanese copyright laws re: same.

There's a discussion on lkh_lashouts re: LKH and fanfiction. Now, while I understand why some authors would have "no fanfic plz" clauses in their contracts or have made public statements to that effect, but... I find it annoying when someone who isn't that author decides to be the Fanfic Police and do a "no fanfic plz" on other people. Might be a backlash from the debacle with Lee Goldberg on the original Orange Board version of Godawful Fanfiction, where the guy castigated all of us for being fans of fanfiction and attacked me for my "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" fics. You could tell the guy had no teeth in his arguments when he yelled at me because I'd written Gigolo Joe as a male prostitute. Duh! Anyone who's watched the movie would know I was in the right because, well, as the green-eyed silicon hottie would say, "It's what I do." ( :: Pauses a moment to chase off a plot bunny for an "A.I."/Evangelion crossover:: Joe/Ritsuko might be really cute and Ritsy-poo might be less bitchy afterward [plus I could totally see her hiring our silicon hottie to try and make Gendo jealous, but we know how badly that would backfire...], but I don't need any more ideas...)

The case at hand: a middle-school teacher saying there is a "no fanfic plz" clause in their classroom, the poster's argument being that it's to protect the kids from plagiarism suits. I think after the file-sharing debacle in which RIAA went batshit on middle-school kids, no lawyer in their right mind would do something like that, if they didn't want the press to do the same thing to them, and make them and their client look like bullies shaking kids down for their lunch money (the case where RIAA tried to get CPS to slap an "unfit parent" charge on the single mom of one kid was an all-time low; thankfully, CPS turned around and said, "What are you talking about? This kid is doing just fine, now stop wasting our time when we could have been saving kids from being molested."). This could have it's upside: it could be protecting us from yet another bumper crop of bad Twhinelight fanfic, but I can't help seeing a lot of kids being denied a pastime that I find dear to my heart. Maybe a "don't ask, don't tell" policy ala Jim Butcher's take on it would be a good compromise.

"Shag, Marry, Kill" Meme

Twigged by zekass

It's the good old Shag Marry Kill game, but with Kiss added.
Comment, and I'll give you four.

( Cut for picses )

"Fanfic as Critical Commentary"

Found this linked in a comment on the discussion I posted (read "ranted") about last night/earlier this morning: it's from the blog of a professor at MIT who is himself a fanguy. I want to hug this guy: here is a serious, articulate academic who's serious about pop culture, but doesn't take it seriously, unlike a lot of the elitists among the academia who forget that today's classics were once yesterday's pop culture: "Madame Bovary" was once what "Desperate Housewives" is today.

http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/09/fan_fiction_as_critical_commen.html

I'm swooning over this passage in particular, in which he compares fanfic with critical essays. My argument has always been, "If Fair Use can apply to authors of critical essays, why not apply it to fanfic?" The arguments of some critical essays can be as eye-opening or as "did we read the same story??"-inducing as some fanfics.

Fan stories are in no simple sense just "extensions" or "continuations" or "extra episodes" of the original series. Unlike the model critical essays discussed by the various university writing centers, the insights about the work get expressed not through nonfictional argumentation but rather through the construction of new stories. Just as a literary essay uses text to respond to text, fan fiction uses fiction to respond to fiction. That said, it is not hard to find all kinds of argumentation about interpretation woven through most fan produced stories. A good fan story references key events or bits of dialogue to support its particular interpretation of the character's motives and actions. There are certainly bad stories that don't dig particular deeply into the characters or which fall back on fairly banal interpretations, but the last time I looked, fair use gets defined in functional terms (what is the writer trying to do) and not aesthetic terms (what they produce is good or bad artistically). Fan fiction extrapolates more broadly beyond what is explicitly stated in the text than do most conventional critical essays and may include the active appropriation and transformation of the characters as presented but even here, I would argue that the point of situating the characters in a different historical context, say, or in another genre is to show what makes these characters tick and how they might well remain the same (or be radically different) if they operated in another time and place. Fan fiction is speculative but that does not mean that it is not at its core interpretative.