Just in case you've been living under a rock, yesterday Amazon announced Kindle Worlds, otherwise know as authorized, paid fan fiction (sort of). In response to one of my comments on that post, our own Joanna Cabot linked me to John Scalzi's initial thoughts on the move. I have tons of respect for Scalzi, and I agreed with much of what he said, especially with his opinions of the contract terms (which kind of suck). I didn't agree with quite everything, though. In response to a comment, Scalzi expressed a reasonable concern for how the move will affect fandom communities, and to...

Fan fiction is an interesting genre. You start with characters that already exist from movies or television shows and create new stories around them. Admittedly, I read my share of fan fiction. Sometimes a show’s run ends too early, or a video game pulls me in so deeply, that I want to read more about the characters (this happened to me with Mass Effect, for instance). Amazon announced Kindle Worlds today, the first commercial platform for writers to create fan fiction and earn royalties. Amazon says it has secured licenses for Gossip Girls, Pretty Little Liars and Vampire Diaries. According to Amazon, it...

Joe Konrath published a thoughtful piece yesterday on fair use and copyright. I thought he was spot on and made some excellent points. He started by talking about copyright as it applied to authors, not to the industry. Not surprisingly, the publishing industry (print, video and music) all focus on copyright as it applies to them and their needs and wants. Konrath points out that copyright doesn't belong to an industry. It belongs to the creator of the work, and that industries often exist to exploit the artists that the work creates. [caption id="attachment_83294" align="alignright" width="180"] Joe Konrath[/caption] You can agree or disagree...

"Read Later" apps have become more popular as people use their smartphones and tablets on-the-go. I’ve used Pocket for years, and I recently decided to pay for Instapaper because it offered features Pocket does not. I use both, but for different purposes. Pocket is great for short articles, especially ones with images. I’ve set Flipboard up to share with Pocket, and I’ll often scan headlines during breakfast and then send articles to Pocket for reading throughout the day. Pocket is also my repository for articles I want to reference for later posts. I only use Pocket for short articles because I find the app’s page-flipping option to be...

Ever since reworked Twilight fanfic Fifty Shades of Grey hit bookstore shelves and immediately burned a path up the charts, many publishers have been giving more serious consideration to fanfic. Might it make a decent source of publishable stories, a sort of Internet slushpile they could mine for nuggets at their leisure? But it seems that history shows yet again that you can always count on someone to learn the wrong lesson: If one Twilight fanfic is able to strike it big, why not try again with another one? A Simon & Schuster imprint has just made a “substantial” book deal...

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting piece by Jan Bozarth, an author who has created a series of children’s books, “The Fairy Godmother Academy,” that are intended to be a “transmedia experience” from the very beginning. The article isn’t really too clear about what “transmedia” aspects are incorporated into the series, though the project’s website hosts do-it-yourself projects and activities and a recently-completed contest in which readers submitted their own dance videos. The article does have some interesting insights into how girls feel about technology in general as opposed to what that technology can do for them. For me,...

Some friends called my attention to an interesting-looking book: Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellectual Property Protection by Aaron Schwabach—a legal textbook examining the copyright issues surrounding fanfic. At $81 for the paper form or $70 for a Google e-book, it’s obviously meant for the edification of college or law students, not the enjoyment of one such as you or I. That being said, I found an interesting review of it by Stacey M. Lantagne in the peer-reviewed journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Lantagne’s review gives a pretty good idea of what the book is about, and...

Doctor Science, the blogger who wrote a couple of installments on the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon last month that I blogged about at the time, actually wrote a third piece, which I only just noticed when I went back to check references for the fanfic article I posted earlier. The first two parts talked about “the decline of the publishing industry,” indicating that (at least in some cases) fans were providing a lot better value when it came to editing fanfics than publishers were to editing submitted manuscripts. (Not surprising, in light of a study showing that...

Fifty Shades of Grey certainly seems to be taking the publishing world by storm, catching imagination not so much for the content but for what it represents. On the Bookseller’s FutureBook blog, Agent Orange turns up his (or her?) nose at the reading public’s taste (or lack thereof) in making such a work popular, but adds: What is far more worrying for the business is how completely the Fifty Shades story encapsulates the perilous position the traditional elements of the business are in. This is a book that no agent would have thought to represent had...

  Introduction: The issues of plagiarism and copyright overlap in fan fiction (and fiction in general) causing a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding.  Wholesale copying without attribution (giving credit to the source) is plagiarism but not always copyright infringement.  Copyright infringement can happen even when credit is being given.  This piece attempts to talk about the two in a broad sense. None of the following should be considered legal advice.  If you have a specific legal question, consult with an intellectual property attorney.  This blog and the authors of the blog will not be responsible for any harm or damages suffered...

You may have heard the T.S. Eliot quote that says mediocre writers borrow, but good writers steal. Sometimes this can be astonishingly literal: PaidContent reports on a New York Times bestselling erotic novel that started out as alternate-universe Twilight fanfic, originally posted in its entirety to (though later deleted from) fanfiction hosting site FF.net. The novel, Fifty Shades of Grey by British author E.L. James, reimagined Twilight set in contemporary Seattle, apparently without the supernatural elements found in the original vampire novels: instead of a werewolf, Edward is a “masterful billionaire with secret sexual predilections.” Presumably the published...

On Waxy, Andy Baio made a post called “No Copyright Intended”, in which he pointed out the confusion surrounding copyright in YouTube videos. Literally hundreds of thousands of videos have some kind of copyright disclaimer, saying that “no copyright infringement is intended.” On YouTube's support forums, there's rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no "intentional copyright infringement." Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked...