I recently watched a broadcast on YouTube with one of my favorite writers. She was participating in a question and answer session at one of the book signing events that her publisher arranged for her latest published work. I love watching these types of things on YouTube and really wish that more of them were produced and released by the publishing companies. It would be great to have more professionally published author sessions that we can hear everything being said as well as see the author in focus, etc. However, it is really nice of these fellow fans to record these sessions for those of us who are unlucky enough not to be able to attend any of them.
Anyway, someone brought up the question of fan-fiction stories and what she thought about the treatment of one of the characters or the story-line or something. She shut down that question right away. Apparently, if she knows about the fan-fiction, she is obligated to contact her lawyers and have the stories removed from whatever site they are posted on. But, if she is unaware of it then her copyright is still in tact and she doesn’t have to sue anybody.
Yes, it may be considered a form of flattery to copy someone like creating stories about characters that belong to another writer. But most of these writers who have gone through heck just creating these characters, fleshing out their back-stories and slaving over the plots of each and every book deserve the respect of the rest of us. And they deserved to be paid for their work.
Granted, fans do make the world go round and get those book selling dollars rolling in. Most of them are fairly harmless. By that I mean they would just like to explore what happens with other characters playing in the world’s created by these talented writers or even proposing another path that these characters may have gone down in that particular story. Some new writers even begin their careers with writing stories about their favorite book characters (Not to sell but just to practice). But where do you draw the line?
Another side of that coin would be about the authors who are no longer with us? Do we, as fans, have to worry about some lawyer come crashing down on our fantasy writing worlds? Or, can we be safe in the knowledge that so long as we do not “Sell” any of the stories as our own we can continue to create stories for our favorite book characters and/or play in the worlds created by our now deceased favorite authors?
Till next time.
