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Dear pro authors,
I would just like to point out that copyright is about protecting your work financially. It is a set of laws designed to ensure that you, the content creator, can earn cold hard cash from your work and that no one else can without your permission.
It is not:
a) about protecting your feelings
b) about allowing you to control interpretations and reactions to your work
c) about the morality of fanfiction
d) about protecting the integrity of your work, whatever the hell that means
I hope this will help clarify why fanwriters are always arguing that we don't profit from fanfic monetarily. You can argue that things should be illegal because you don't like it and omg, you have intellectual property rights, but when it comes down to it, all the courts will care about is whether or not it hurts your ability to make money or that it is someone else making money off your work.
In addition, I am troubled by the difficulties many of you seem to have with understanding the differences between plagiarism (using someone else's work without attribution) and copyright infringement (using someone else's work in a way that could induce them to lose money as outlined by law). They do overlap in many cases, but they are not the same thing by any means. Plagiarism in and of itself isn't illegal, for one thing.
Remember kids, illegal != immoral. Please argue that fanfic is illegal separately from arguing that fanfic is immoral instead of conflating the two ideas, because it's driving me bonkers.
Love,
me
I would just like to point out that copyright is about protecting your work financially. It is a set of laws designed to ensure that you, the content creator, can earn cold hard cash from your work and that no one else can without your permission.
It is not:
a) about protecting your feelings
b) about allowing you to control interpretations and reactions to your work
c) about the morality of fanfiction
d) about protecting the integrity of your work, whatever the hell that means
I hope this will help clarify why fanwriters are always arguing that we don't profit from fanfic monetarily. You can argue that things should be illegal because you don't like it and omg, you have intellectual property rights, but when it comes down to it, all the courts will care about is whether or not it hurts your ability to make money or that it is someone else making money off your work.
In addition, I am troubled by the difficulties many of you seem to have with understanding the differences between plagiarism (using someone else's work without attribution) and copyright infringement (using someone else's work in a way that could induce them to lose money as outlined by law). They do overlap in many cases, but they are not the same thing by any means. Plagiarism in and of itself isn't illegal, for one thing.
Remember kids, illegal != immoral. Please argue that fanfic is illegal separately from arguing that fanfic is immoral instead of conflating the two ideas, because it's driving me bonkers.
Love,
me