contemplativeNow, from a strictly "I am a child of the fanfic mines" standpoint, I can see two really awesome aspects to this:
1. If I publish through Amazon Worlds, I can't be sued for playing in someone else's sandbox.
2. I could get paid.
Let me be very clear here: right now, under the law, you can't be paid for fanfic, because then you're abusing someone else's intellectual property. By creating this license, Amazon has essentially set up a licensed tie-in factory, which allows for payment of authors without any illicit exploitation of someone else's IP. There's even a clause in the Amazon Works program which makes it okay for the IP holders to read the fanfic-for-pay: the rules state that if the IP holders want something you created and put in your Amazon Worlds-published fanfic, they can just take it. Since most of the "no please, don't tell me" attitude among some creators comes from fear of being accused later of stealing someone else's ideas, this is a great protection for IP holders.** For fanfic creators, maybe not so much.
"But wait," some people may cry, "are you saying you want fanfic creators to erode your copyright?" No. I am not. For one thing, copyright doesn't work that way. But original characters in fanfic sometimes shed the skins of their origins and go on to have adventures and worlds of their own. A lot of today's working authors started in the fanfic mines, and many of them brought their OCs with them when they moved on. It's easy enough to change things—Penny from The Rescuers becoming Jenny in Oliver and Company when Disney realized they didn't want to put those moves in the same continuity—but still, it creates a potential muddy water scenario that would make me uneasy if I were a fanfic writer in those fandoms, considering submitting stories that contained original characters or ideas. There's also the concern that, well...fanfic writers like to share our toys. My fanon could wind up in your fic could wind up on the show, becoming canon. And yeah, most of us would kill for that, but since there's no way of tracing things back, it could become a case of "I borrow your ideas, the show takes what they think are my ideas, you were never consulted, you didn't get to opt in."
As for the question of payment, I regularly pay people for fan art of Emma Frost, which then hangs in my house, because I am a nerd. Why should paying someone for fanfic, under the right set of conditions, be any different?
But this is all sort of speculation and relatively harmless "maybe." I mean, much of what Stephen Moffat has done as the showrunner of Doctor Who is make his fanon canon, and it hasn't hurt him any; I dream of the day I get to start making some of my X-Men fanon canonical. What concerns me more is the possibility that creating "licensed fanfic" as a category will lead to more of a legal crackdown on "unlicensed fanfic." "Oh, sorry, your archive is outside the bounds of our derivative works licensing, here is your C&D."***
I've seen a lot of people talk about how fanfic works because it is a community effort. And I've seen a lot of the "ha ha all fic is porn, this won't fly" laughing. But what I haven't seen much of is acknowledgement that fanfic is a way for marginalized people to take control of stories that are so often aimed at a sort of safely privileged able-bodied straight male whiteness, engage with them, and fall more deeply in love for that engagement. Fanfic gave me women who were allowed to be strong, not stuffed into refrigerators. It gave me lesbians and bisexual women, and people who owned their often messed-up sexuality. And it gave them to me in the framework of a world I already knew and loved and was aching to interface with as a coherent equal, not as someone treated as a "fringe viewer" by the main narrative.
Yeah, there's a lot of porn. But don't we all deserve a little porn every once in a while?
Fanfic is a huge, collaborative, interactive way for people to be a part of the stories that they love, and I worry that Amazon Worlds is a big step, not toward monetizing fanfic, but toward mainstreaming it in a way that will sap many of the qualities that make it so important. The minute I can say "sorry, this fanfic over here is licensed, and yours is not, so cut it the fuck out," there is a problem. People need to be unafraid to write their stories, the way they want to write them, and learn in the process.
So yeah. I am leery and concerned.
(*This is my understanding based on a reading of the program rules, and based on discussion by other people. I could be wrong. If I am, I'll update.)
(**This is not true of everyone. Some people just hate fanfic. I've never understood that, so I can't really speak to it, but it's a real and pervasive point of view, so I don't want to sound like I'm speaking for those folks.)
(***Technically those C&Ds would be legal even now. I've seen them served. But without something like Amazon Worlds to be held up as proof that fanfic writers are somehow "stealing income" from either the IP holder(s) or the publishing program, they seem to be short-term things that everyone quietly forgets about.)
June 3 2013, 16:42:14 UTC 4 years ago
1. Given that they fail to define "what the copyright term" is I'm assuming they mean the one generally used in the United States when another term is not stipulated. That's 70 years after the death of the author. (source: http://copyright.cornell.edu/resour
2. So, immediately after stressing that you the writer own the copyright to your purely original characters, setting, events, ect that you create out of your wonderful head at the time that you create them out of your wonderful head, Amazon says that once you submit it for publication via Amazon Worlds, *they* now take the copyright.
3. They then make a point of telling you that you cannot use those characters, settings, events, ect outside of the licensed world. So. The original copyright holder of the "world" can go "That's a fantastic idea" and work it into an official work. Other "fanfic" (I say this in quotes because at this point it's licensed and not really fanfic anymore as I would define the term) writers can use it in that licensed world. But you couldn't use it in ANOTHER licensed world. In other words, you can't go pumping out "Find-replace" variants for every World Amazon offers, and insofar as that goes, I don't think that's overly problematic.
But I think it could be very, very problematic for the aspiring writer in the long run.
But let us say that you had a really nifty idea that you originally worked out via, say, a Vampire Diaries story. This is what I, personally, consider the true value of fanfiction--as an idea generation system. Let us say that five years have gone by and over time you're still mulling over this idea, only now you've generated an entire original work around it--you've taken out the Vampire Diaries elements, and by any standard, it's now a purely original work, generated by you. Yes, of course, someone who is familiar with Vampire Diaries may read your story and go "ah, this reminds me of this other character" but, frankly, that's hardly unusual (and i find it unobjectionable personally: I'm of the "all writers are magpies collecting shiny things they like and building it into an awesome new nest" mindset). You spend a year working on a draft. You have something that's exciting and new and cool and you want to publish it. This obviously happens. I can think of dozens of examples right off the top of my head wherein the author has either admitted the work began as fanfiction or I can make a highly educated guess that it did.
I don't think you'd be able to publish your new, totally original work, because of those overlapping elements.
Why: When you published the Vampire Diaries story where you were first tinkering with the idea, you gave Amazon copyright over all the original material therein that could theoretically BE copyrighted (as in all the stuff you didn't borrow from Vampire Diaries.) Now, later, you've dropped all the Vampire Diaries material and you want to publish it as a purely original work but Amazon STILL HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT on all those ideas that are still central to your original story.
Meaning it's theoretically possible you could get hit with copyright infringement BY AMAZON in a purely original work for some ideas you used in a fanfiction work they published five years ago. Or you could be locked into using Amazon as your publisher, since, well, they hold the rights already. And that's not a good negotiating position to be in, I promise you.
I don't know that this would happen. But i see where it could in the language, and I don't think that's good for genre fiction. Not at all.
June 3 2013, 23:39:04 UTC 4 years ago
I'm a humble recent law-grad, so not to quibble with your analysis which I entirely agree with, but given the properties Ms. McGuire lists above slash Disney, wouldn't it more likely be under the corporate copyright statute of limitations - 100 years from publication? Just my thought. Not exactly a better deal (somewhat more predictable, at least, than 70 years from the death of the author) but different.
June 4 2013, 00:15:12 UTC 4 years ago
The fact that all those settings that they have 'licensed' now are (to the best of my information) both published novels by an original author and also television productions done by a production company may change that analysis. I really don't know; it's not an area I've studied in depth so I just guessed the one that seems to most commonly apply to authors.
A copyright or entertainment lawyer would probably have a better idea--I've been a lawyer for a few years but I've never worked on any of these kinds of issues.