New affiliated communities:

[lustmordred]

We are now affiliated with stop_plagiarism - Investigation into and Censure of Plagiarists
and
the_empty_pale - A prompts community for fiction writing. All fandoms and original fiction welcome.

Comments

[lustmordred]

I know it's not that straight forward. I just didn't want to spend an excessive amount of time outlining it all. I really don't feel when I write a fan fiction story that I am plagiarizing, but that's me. I also don't feel in any way that I have a right to go out and try to publish that fan fiction, so I suppose those are conflicting ideas.

Yes, I've gathered that. I think that everyone feels differently about it for their own reasons. I personally don't think that if I were published and people wanted to write crap fan fic about my stuff that I would be upset by this. I don't consider fan fiction to alter the source material or influence it, I look at it as something apart, like done in honor of it. But I do get that it doesn't strike everyone this way.

The problem with plagiarism that I have with people online, fan "writers" I suppose, is when they steal the fan writing of someone who has actually written something, who has talent or whose stuff they liked, and they pretend it's their own work. For one thing, that writer has done all the work to write that and the plagiarist has done nothing but find it. They take the credit for it and that is no different than if it were published--money is the only difference really. The other problem I have with it is that it's fan fiction, which by its very definition is created by someone with ideas to celebrate something they love or admire. Stealing this and claiming it as your own completely defeats the purpose of fan fiction. Then there is just the writer. They feel cheated and wronged and it doesn't matter that it's fan fiction, if you've worked on it you're going to feel strongly possessive of it and have every right to feel that way.

I have very strong feelings about this, you can probably tell. I've had fan fiction stolen from me--passages and entire stories--in several of the fandoms I've written in. This is not the natural exchange of ideas that happens within fandom, like Draco Malfoy wearing leather pants for example--the origin of which incidentally is a story by Cassandra Claire who used her popularity as a fan writer online to get herself published even though she was banned from fan sites for plagiarizing entire story ideas for her fan fiction--I mean actually stealing. I think exchange of ideas and concepts is normal and part of fandom, but I suppose it's an ethical thing. I don't like the idea of stealing full works, or even passages of them. I like the idea of you writing something of your own.

[unsentimentalf]

I've got no problem with any of that; having your stuff lifted must be infuriating. Guess it just quirked my funny bone; the one thing that the rest of the world knows about fanfic being that we plagiarise!

I do have difficulty; I can quite understand book authors in particular hating the existence of fanfic. I find TV series are easier; the characters exist a bit more independently of the plot and of a single creator.