No copyright infringement is intended....
I might just be getting old and crotchety, but does anyone know what writing "No copyright infringement is intended" on fanfic actually means? Or whether fanfic writers have any idea what they think they mean by it
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I think there's an important distinction, which usually gets ignored, between saying "I'm going to take your characters and worldbuilding and tell my own story with them, whether you want me to or not," and saying "Lookit me I WROTE this thing which really somebody else wrote." Two very different transgressions -- copyright infringement and plagiarism, and it befuddles me how some folks don't seem to know the difference.
When we commit copyright infringement (which I certainly have, many times) and use materials that someone else created in our own art without the creators' permission, I think we lose the right to forbid others to do the same thing with our art. I've seen icons posted with big "Don't take these as bases and put your own text on them -- that's stealing" signs. Um, yeah, and the icon creator cropped those pictures from a copyright work. The images weren't legally theirs to begin with.
That's something different from attribution. I think we can write fanfic and say, "I didn't create these characters. They belong to X, and I'm using them to tell my own story," and still expect other fans to attribute our own stories to us if they re-use bits of the story we told in their own work.
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