Creative Commons and Fanfiction

So Cory Doctorow put an entire book of short stories of his on the internet under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, which is kind of cool and kind of interesting.

This licence explicitly states that you can modify the work and distribute the changes any way you want as long as you a) credit him for writing whatever he wrote, b) don't make any money off of it, and c) license your work under the same license. Those of you familiar with such things will recognize that this license is a whole lot like, but not identical to, the GNU GPL, which is used for licensing code and has been the cornerstone of the free software/open source movement.

What's interesting about this is that it completely legalizes fanfiction, which is something that tends to live in a legal gray area. I doubt that these particular stories have enough fangirl appeal to really form an actual fandom, and even then, they probably don't have the depth necessary to spark fanfiction (which isn't a slight, really. Most short stories don't).

But what if the work was something that did inspire fanfiction? I mean, in the Yuletide Archive there are 1009 different fandoms represented, some of which are things like Penny Arcade, a web comic. If more authors also start releasing books like this (which is up to debate, of course), it's entirely plausible that one year, a novel licensed under this particular license will spark some sort of fanfiction.

And that brings up the question of whether or not the written fanfiction is automatically licensed under the same license. Or would it just exist in the same legal gray area that it does at this moment? Would fanfiction authors want it that way? Ideas in fandom spread pretty far, which is how fanon happens, but would a change like this mean more fanfiction fanfiction? More blatant fanfiction fanfiction, at least?

I think that it wouldn't, in my mind, at least. Fandom does take to changes pretty easily, but this is more of an etiquette thing than a legal thing, so while it would be nice to be legally protected while writing fanfiction, I doubt it would significantly change the way fandom works.

Anyone else have thoughts?

More random crap

Amazon books finally came. They're for this dystopian literature class that I'm taking this semester, so I actually have to read one of them and write up discussion questions about it tonight. In the process of doing this, I also managed to accidentally buy the movie version of Logan's Run and not the actual book. I realize that this makes me a complete and utter moron.

It amuses me that Neil Gaiman wrote an essay for Sim City 2000, because it only confirms that he's a complete and utter writing whore, and is really not ashamed of this at all. You can find it here, and I completely love it, because I love cities and he manages to capture some of the reasons why.

I am also interviewing for an internship at Adobe tomorrow. I have a vague idea of what to expect. Mostly me getting a nice rejection letter.

remixredux is starting up. I need to figure out what fandoms I'm going to offer to write in before I sign up, but I am quite excited about it. This and yuletide are my two big ficathons for the year. I barely squeak by with adding Harry Potter as one of the fandoms that I have written. Same with House, oddly enough, because out of the nine House stories I've written, four of them are crossovers.

Have also been messing around with Tomboy. Seems pretty neat, especially because I'm really unorganized. Perhaps this will help.