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Re: trying not to be too tl;dr, sorry

purplepopple
2006-06-24 03:12 am UTC (link)

I is not a law student. :( I is a fannish type historian and the ~~stupid ass hat~~ person who explained to CC's fans why her stories had disappeared off FanFiction.Net.

Fan fiction legal type issues are vaguely addressed on Chilling Effects. I've also had a few too many conversations with legal related people. The last one was after Heidi threatened to sue me again.

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	Re: trying not to be too tl;dr, sorry (Anonymous) 2006-06-24 03:22 am UTC (link)
	wtf, she threatened to sue you? For what. Explaining why CC could have gotten busted? If it had been an original piece of work, I can understand the legal threats. But over a piece of fanfiction? Give me a break. The characters didn't even belong to CC in the first place. Fandom, fandom, what ever will we do with you. - Kate (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

Re: trying not to be too tl;dr, sorry

purplepopple
2006-06-24 03:31 am UTC (link)

CC did not threaten to sue me. Heidi did. Repeatedly. Three times in one month. She has also threaten Wikipedia. I think she might have threatened JournalFen but the details were a bit of a blur. :/

If you want to follow the discussion sort of, the Heidi disagrees with my version of events there. I don't read her though. *shrugs* (And the only reason I'm free to talk about this now is I think Heidi is a bit distracted. As such, she's probably not singing "There she goes again" by Six Pence None The Richer and following me around when I open my mouth on the subject. (She trolled on over to

fanthropology once when I posted a timeline of events in the Harry Potter fan fiction in order to call me obsessed with CC. It was two or three events on a list of something like 74 total. Erf.)

And no set of characters belonged to CC, whether is was the ones that Cassandra Claire bastardized into out of character Harry Potter characters, NOR Harry Potter categories.

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	Re: trying not to be too tl;dr, sorry evieangelique 2006-06-24 03:40 am UTC (link)
	She threatened to sue you for libel? Wow! Also, for a non-law ish person, you're pretty knowledgable on all this , so props to you. :) This whole thing has got me more interested in the practical application of copyright law, so if something positive comes out of the wank... (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

rambling on ethics, plagiarism, copyright

purplepopple
2006-06-24 03:51 am UTC (link)

The copyright aspects of fan fiction were fascinating. I did a big huge read on it a long time ago. ~~And I wrote first FanFiction.Net's Terms of Service. So HA! Er. Yes... And then, when FictionAlley.Org first opened, they plagiarized that. Der! The irony kills me.~~ And I also ran/sort of run very large fan fiction archive, dealt with the whole get a cease and desist letter, etc. I have... ethical issues with fan fiction.

If you get bored, Fan Fiction, Novels, Copyright, And Ethics was written by me a long time ago and a galaxy far far away.

The best possible case law that could have answered the whole derivative works thing would have been the Wind Done Gone case. Sadly, it went into settlement so there is no precedent.

Plagiarism (and fan fiction is NOT inherently plagiaristic. It is DERIVATIVE. I don't buy it as parody. I can buy it as educational. But ignoring those, ethically, if the creator says no, I think fan writers should stop.) isn't against the law as plagiarism but it is as part of copyright law. Copyright law can be enforced at any time.

What is plagiarism? explains it rather well when they say:

Copyright violation is closely related to plagiarism, but it is a federal crime (U.S. Copyright Act 17 U.S.C. §§ 101 - 810). Copyright laws protect the rights of creators of any literary, graphic, musical, artistic, or electronic form. (Facts and ideas are not covered, only the expression of those facts or ideas fixed in a tangible form.) The laws, in effect, keep the right to copy those forms in the hands of the people who created them.

Another good explanation is Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing:

The use of relatively short direct quotes from a published work does not usually require permission from the copyright holder as it typically falls under the “fair use” provision. However, extensive quoting of text from a copyrighted source can constitute copyright infringement, whether the appropriated text is properly enclosed in quotation marks or correctly paraphrased, even if a citation is provided according to established scholarly conventions. Obviously, the same applies if the material is plagiarized outright. Moreover, the reader should note that intellectual or artistic work does not need to be published in order to be copyrighted. In fact, the moment the work becomes final it is automatically copyrighted. Thus, instances of plagiarism, whether from a published article or an unpublished manuscript, such as a grant proposal, can also constitute copyright infringement, though, obviously, copyright infringement does not always constitute plagiarism.

Iverson, et al., (1998) cautions the reader that the amount of text that can be taken from a copyrighted source without permission depends on its proportion to the entire work. However, the reader should also note that some publishers have established word limits for borrowing text. For example, according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), authors who wish to borrow text of more than 500 words from a published APA publication must seek permission from the APA.

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	Re: rambling on ethics, plagiarism, copyright evieangelique 2006-06-25 11:01 am UTC (link)
	Oooooooooh. Thanks for the linkage and the extra information! I'm reading through it all right now. :) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: rambling on ethics, plagiarism, copyright purplepopple 2006-06-25 02:01 pm UTC (link)
	No problem. :) Glad some one likes it. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	Re: trying not to be too tl;dr, sorry evieangelique 2006-06-24 03:43 am UTC (link)
	Oh, duh self, it was you she was wrestling with over at fwgreatesthits! I remember reading that a few months ago and just boggling for the longest time. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

more babbling about Heidi and the fwgreatesthits entry

purplepopple
2006-06-24 03:57 am UTC (link)

I posted once and pretty much left it at that. I don't reply to Heidi. I don't read Heidi. (Which is annoying to a certain degree in following this bit of wank because Dude! PEEPS KEEP LINKING TO HER! STOP THAT! JUST SUMMARIZE SO THE BOYCOTTERS CAN CONTINUE!) The Wikipedia Heidi stuff started when I was editting Wikipedia. And damned, I'm boggled as to how that got out as I wasn't broadcasting that I was editting that entry and I was editting a whole bunch of other articles at the same time. *growls at Wikipedia* The deletion of the Diane Marchant article pisses me off more than the Heidi on Wiki threats oddly enough.

Heidi's version of reality does NOT in anyway mesh with my own. And I commented recently to add some more to that, specifically the Flourish stuff, to give any readers a clue as to what was going down on the FanFiction.Net end and explain the FanFiction.Net Liberation Front that some one had mentioned. (Not connected. They used the CC thing to their advantage. No one from CC's side ever contacted that bunch of nut jobs to ask them to STOP HARRASSING ME. Hearing that Heidi et al. did similar things later regarding Charity Wank thus did not surprise me. It's consistent.)

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