Unacceptable! Someone is re-posting our fic and other posts without permission!

[badly_knitted]

Re-posted from tardisjournal

Somebody with this website is repostings several authors/fanartists fics on there without listing the name of the authors/fanartists on there and apparently in most cases, without permission. I've seen a good number of stories/fanart I'm familar with on the site (all of them most likely swiped from LJ and LJ comms as several LJ

Comments

[fiwen1010]

I just went to look, and this post was on there. It has picked up your tag and grabbed it.

[badly_knitted]

It's the only thing on my journal tagged with fanfic, which proves a point. Everything else of mine has been ripped from my posts on torchwoodcoffee. That proves it must be an automated process, the 'bot seeking out certain tags. This person needs to be stopped, they're violating our rights to decided where our journal contents are displayed.

Has anything of yours turned up over there?

[fiwen1010]

I've not checked, because it's so long since I posted anything. My last fic post was last year, at the latest.

They were claiming that they were safe to do it under the terms of a creative commons licence the other day, which is dubiously true for fanfiction (basically, we don't have the right to write it in most cases and therefore don't have a leg to stand on in copyright terms) but when they've grabbed journal entries they're definitely breaking laws.

[badly_knitted]

While we don't own the fandom characters and setting, we do own our original characters (Nosy for instance), so I'm not sure where we'd stand there. Nevertheless, it's a matter of common decency and respecting people's right to display their posts where they choose to rather than where someone we don't even know decides to put them for their own unknown purposes. Fic recs are one thing, but this is a horse of as different colour.

I'm lucky in that I don't use the term 'fanfic' on my own journal entries - I created it for my complaint post just to see what would happen. I tag with 'fic', 'ficlet', or 'drabble' and it seems those terms are not included in the set they're using to choose what they take. The only entries of mine (80 of them now) are fic headers and links posted on torchwoodcoffee. And the one entry complaining about the site which I tagged fanfic. My complaint is in a moderation queue, I just hope the person responsible will take my entries down. No much I can do now except wait and warn others.

[fiwen1010]

I agree with you, but it's a legal issue that's never been decided,. Technically, possibly, it's the original authors they need permission from, rather than us. Or possibly both.

I have seen my stuff turn up on other sites in the past, when someone was grabbing stuff from ff.net. The site died before anything happened, but I suspect that this, being an LJ account, will be suspended.

[badly_knitted]

Trouble is, it's NOT an LJ account, it's on a Russian domain. It's simply taking posts from livejournal, so we can't petition to have the account suspended. I wish we could. I'm less concerned about the fics that are being taken than by the number of private posts that merely mention something fanfic related and are therefore tagged with the term. Those I don't think anyone has the right to re-post without the journal owner's permission.

Anyway, it seems to be a matter of courtesy (or in this case the lack of it). It's polite to ask first, and whoever is responsible should at the very least check and remove any posts that are NOT fic. I don't think they care what they're copying as long as it generates more content for their site and therefore gets lots of hits.

[fiwen1010]

I think it's using an LJ engine, or something similar, but private hosting. It's the same formatting, but hard to tell what's going on.

And I agree that they should get permission or not do it at all, but as they evidently don't care about that we're back to the legal side of it.

What's generating them the most traffic at the moment is all the people going to see if their own fics have been lifted,

[badly_knitted]

I know, and that makes me mad because we're playing right into their hands, but what else can we do? We need to know what's getting copied.

Next time I cross-post to torchwoodcoffee I'm going to try just tagging it 'fic'. If I'm right, it won't get copied. Whoever's doing this seems to realise if the scrape entries labelled 'fic', they might get original fiction and then they'd really be in trouble.