paulgadzikowski:

orlissa:

Oh dear.

Okay, you get an answer, because at least you took the effort to write your ask out properly, even if you are hiding behind the grey, sunglassed circle.

Do I, or any fanfic author for that matter, have any legal claims to our work? No, not really, no. (Although if someone took a fic, filed off the serial number–deleted the fandom specific elements–, and then had it published for financial gain, yeah, that would be a case.)

BUT

Fandoms are built on a social contract that says we respect each others work, the effort people put into their art. We don’t steal or disrespect the work of our peers. By feeding people’s fanworks to AI you both steal and disprect it, and we need to make people realize that before it’s too late–before fandom falls apart, because there will be no more real, actual fanworks.

Disrepectfully,

Orlissa

(i can’t believe I have to say this)

Anon’s argument is ignorant, or in bad faith, or both:

You don’t own fanfics. They’re inherently public domain because they aren’t your IP.

IANAL but this is factually incorrect. Any work you create is, under the law, yours. Being unlicensed derivative work of someone else’s intellectual property does not convert the work into “public domain”, and it doesn’t convert the work into property of the owner of the copyrighted work. It’s still yours and protected as yours under copyright law despite whether or not it’s unlicensed, infringing derivative work. Infringement on other work or not in your work is an entirely separate quality of the work, legally, from ownership of the work, which under the law is automatically yours the instant you create it (though there are steps to take to register it with the authorities before every t is crossed and every i is dotted). Any infringement incurred by the work does not legally/automatically remove the work’s ownership from you in favor of the copyrighthlder or of the public domain. Technically the infringement doesn’t even legally exist unless the work is found to be infringement in a court of law; the innocent until proven guilty principle.

Have you seen the discussion going around in the last week, notably between @neil-gaiman and @dduane and their readers, about authors not reading fanfiction or fans’ ideas, and fans crossing a line when they surprise authors’ inboxes with it? The reason why professionals don’t read fanfiction, or can get in trouble when they do, is because fans own their work and authors don’t want to be accused of infringing on it – and there have been lawsuits on this in the past. QED.