Pondering copyright laws; questions for lawyer types
In Which Elf Considers The Legality Of Litigation-Related Intimidation, or, is it legal to say "I'll sue you," even if there's no grounds for a lawsuit?
I've recently signed up at Wowio, which allows free download of three ebooks per day (and a queue of up to 500, so you can pick the ones you like to download later, and adjust the order you want ( Read more... )
I've recently signed up at Wowio, which allows free download of three ebooks per day (and a queue of up to 500, so you can pick the ones you like to download later, and adjust the order you want ( Read more... )
I'm sure you would. But it's not a good parallel: your example has you usurping a prerogative of the gummint, and that always tends to make the gummint a bit testy and hard to get along with.
And these publishers are interfering with free speech, by insisting the public doesn't have the right to use the contents of these books.
The First Amendment (as modified and extended by the Fourteenth Amendment,) says that governments may not limit free speech. It doesn't say anything about private, non-governmental bodies like corporations. Corporations limit speech all the time: try sending everyone in your company an e-mail saying that your boss is an alcoholic, drug-using pedophile racist who runs a dogfighting ring and see how well a free-speech defense works at your wrongful-termination hearing. Even in California.
Or is it legal to try to convince people that a law exists, when it doesn't? Can you deliberately lie to people to claim a right that doesn't exist?
As far as I know, it's legal. Until a legislature or a court says it isn't.
The historical pattern for this sort of situation is that the business makes a broad assertion, and that assertion will stand until a court says it's too broad. It's conceptually similar to the idea of "puffery" in advertising: i.e. saying that your product is "the best" among a range of similar products in the absence of actual proof thereof. Technically it's false advertising, since the advertiser is making an assertion about the product that is not known to be true. But it's been long held to be a harmless act, and therefore not actionable.
It would be different, I think, if there were evidence of deliberate intent to defraud or deceive on the part of the publisher. But the argument that "We simply wanted to protect our rights to the original aspects of this particular work without having to produce three or four pages of legal verbiage explaining in detail which bits are in the public domain and which bits fall under our copyright" is a plausible one, and is likely to be pretty persuasive to a court.
What would have to be shown to get a court to rule otherwise is that the public is somehow harmed by the lack of a more explicit and specific disclosure. I can't see how one could establish standing to file against the publisher in this sort of situation, as one has to establish that an injury has been done, and I don't see any way to make such a case here.
It would be easier to raise this argument as the defendant in a suit brought by the publisher. But that has its own issues, since due diligence on the part of the publisher's attorneys would make it pretty clear that the use of just the baseline text as it appeared in the original magazine publication would be in the public domain, and such a suit likely wouldn't ever get filed.
One could, I suppose, file a suit under an agreement between the parties solely for the purpose of forcing the courts to clarify the law. Such things are not common, but there is precedent for it. But, as the old adage goes, bad cases make for bad law.
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Like, for example, the academic papers that aren't allowed to quote their subject matter? The documentaries that are told to delete relevant footage because a Coke delivery truck drove past during shooting? The stories and art that can't be published-for-money (or even shared openly) because some publishers think copyright covers total rights to control everything remotely inspired by their works?
(I know some dazzlingly touching filksongs that can't be recorded because of overzealous publishers, who want people to believe they own all use of concepts from their books.)
There's plenty of foundation for an argument that over-claim of copyright protection is harming progress, creative endeavours, and free expression, which are all considered to be important facets of our society. We might have to prove a link between unfounded C&D orders and suppression of speech--we should not have to prove that the speech is valuable; one of the nation's founding principles is that it is.
And this isn't private corporations limiting speech: it's private corporations claiming legal rights that they don't have.
This is an oblique civil rights situation: We, all of us, have the right to free expression, limited by certain other laws and considerations. (Like that "fire in a crowded theatre" concept.) One of those limitations is copyright: the author has the right to profit from his/her work for a while. But after that while, and during it, to some extent, other people have the right to use the work for their own purposes.
And here's a company--here's several hundred companies--telling you that you *don't* have that right.
Is it legal to post a sign that says "no coloreds allowed" if you know it's not enforceable? Or if you claim that you only meant people who were looking "green" from illness weren't allowed, and of course your restaurant serves African-Americans, if they want in?
And while it's plausible to say "We just wanted to protect our rights without putting a treatise in every book," that doesn't mean it's what happened. It'd take a lot of research to *prove* that publishing corps are deliberately implying more protection than they have... but then again, it was proven that tobacco companies knew their products were unsafe, and deliberately tried to convince people otherwise.
Saying, "we might not have known they'd take it that way" isn't a compelling argument.
(I have the choice here, of either believing they are greedy bastards trying to intimidate the public... or they are idiots. While I usually vote for idiocy, I have trouble believing Disney's IP lawyers really are that clueless.)
It would be easier to raise this argument as the defendant in a suit brought by the publisher.
I believe that's very true, and it's part of why I'm considering it--because OTW is likely to eventually be involved in one of those cases.
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And here's a company--here's several hundred companies--telling you that you *don't* have that right.
There is a parallel here to the old adage that "ignorance of the law is no excuse." If a reader of the work in question is unaware that the claims in the copyright notice are over-broad, and that certain limited uses of the copyrighted material ARE legal and permissible, the holder of the copyright is under NO obligation to correct that ignorance.
On the other hand, you (and by that I mean Erica specifically and not a more generic sense of "you,") CANNOT claim in court that you were ignorant of the concept of "fair use," and so were injured by the overly-broad copyright statement. You are already aware that you can legally use short passages from a work under copyright in a review or to illustrate a point in an essay or monograph without needing to seek permission from the copyright holder.
You seem to want publishers to explain in excruciating detail, in advance, what they know or believe would be an infringement on their copyright. I think that that is an unreasonable expectation, and I think that the courts would agree with me.
If the issue at the heart of this is still fanfic, I'll list a few thoughts that have occurred to me over the past weeks:
1) All fanfic is derivative work, and under the law potentially subject to the control of the copyright holder, UNLESS it falls under the provisions of one of two exceptions: "fair use," or "transformative work." (Note that this refers only to fanfic offered for non-commercial publication: unauthorized commercial publication would be a de-facto infringement.)
2) SOME fanfic might fall under the provisions of fair use, depending on the extent of the work and the context in which it is presented. A re-writing of a single scene from a different character's POV, especially if presented as part of a discussion about events in the original work, MIGHT be seen as fair use because it is of limited scope and in the nature of illustrating commentary on the original work. Short stories and longer works intended to stand on their own would almost certainly NOT be considered fair use.
3) Some fanfic MIGHT be considered transformative work. But this would require an alteration of POV, the setting, and the behavior of the characters that makes it clear that it is an entirely different perspective on the events and characters described in the original work. Most fanfic, when viewed through the eyes of that famous legal fiction, "the Reasonable Man," is going to fail to meet that test. Some fanfic WILL meet that test. But it will NOT be all fanfic. Nor, I think, will it even be a majority of fanfic.
3) The absolute freedom to write fanfic about any aspect or character of any original work that the fanfic community seems to want would, if enacted into law, eviscerate the law of copyright, because it would essentially be eliminating the right of copyright holders to control the creation of derivative works. Courts are simply NOT going to be receptive to making that sweeping a change in the law. The idea that fanfic is not commercial work is not strong enough of an argument, IMO, to counter the destruction of a core premise of copyright law. Technically, the law as presently construed makes no distinction between commercial and non-commercial work, and I doubt that the courts are going to be willing to carve out a new exception of that breadth.
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4) Fanfic was far less of an issue for copyright holders when it was passed hand-to-hand or through the mail in mimeoed/xeroxed forms, or in APA's, or in any of the other means fen used to use before we had the Web. It was extremely difficult to locate fanfic if you weren't actively involved in fandom in some degree, and it was well UNDER the radar of the publishers' legal departments. Now all one needs to find fanfic is Google, a little patience, and some search terms. Fanfic may be becoming a victim of its own success.
5) A good case can be made that if LJ is deriving advertising revenue from people reading fanfic posted to LJ comms, then the fanfic in question really ISN'T non-commercial, even if the people who wrote it aren't getting a penny from it.
6) The fanfic community would fare better if its loudest voices didn't consistently come across as suffering from oppositional-defiant disorder. A constant litany of "We're going to write fanfic whether you want us to or not! Just try and make us quit!" is NOT the best tactic I could think of for persuading the lawyers that you are mostly harmless nuts who can safely be ignored.
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Well, yeah...
But if they outlawed witchcraft, would you agree to go into the broom closet? If it was commonly accepted that pentagrams symbolized evil, would you suggest that people just don't ever wear them in public?
It's not exactly parallel... but it's close. We don't really want to sound defiant and pushy... but we can't figure out how else to say "this really isn't something you can control."
We can be reasoned with.
Several years ago, the "Dysfunctional Family Circus" was a popular webpage. Someone took Bill Keane's artwork, and put new captions on it. Some of them were obscene. Some were funny. Some were just crazy. Keane's lawyers sent a C&D letter. The site owner sent back a note saying "it's parody; you can't stop me." Repeat three or four times, with increasing levels of lawyerese. It obviously *was* parody.
Bill Keane called the parody artist, and asked him to stop. So he stopped.
Bill Keane is apparently a Nice Guy. A Mr. Rogers type. Someone who loves kids and families. (My dad's one of those.) And he was hurt at his nice, family-friendly artwork being, well, perverted. It bothered him.
And when he asked the artist nicely to stop, he did. But no amount of legal pressure would've done it; DFC could've gone all the way to the SCOTUS, and, like Falwell vs Flynt, been found an acceptable parody. And that's the message we're trying to get across: no threats are going to work on this... all you might succeed in doing is shutting down the stuff that's most similar to canon. (One story at a time, even.) The depraved "Hogwarts Graduation Day Orgy" stories are too obviously parody to be infringing.
Most fans avoid writing in worlds where the author objects to fanfic. However... some fans also boycott any author who objects to fanfic. Don't want my inspiration? Don't get my money. I don't pay to support censorship.
Re: noncommercial: Yes. And that's why fans got nervous about Fanlib.com, planning on "bringing fanfiction out of the shadows!" Because we know that the line between "ad-supported site that has lots of fanfic-related traffic" and "site owner making money off Disney's IP" is very, very thin... and if that line is considered legally crossed, it's not the site host that's likely to lose out in the long run.
OTW is gearing up for the lawsuit(s) it believes are coming, based on this new awareness of various legal departments. And yes, it's potentially trying for a ruling that'd shred copyright law... because copyright law has become a strangling noose in some cases, not serving to promote progress and creativity by allowing the author to profit, but instead allowing authors (or worse, the media companies that bought the rights to their works) to stifle competing forms of creativity. And the final ruling about The Wind Done Gone included the excerpt:The law grants copyright holders a powerful monopoly in their expressive works. It should not also afford them windfall damages for the publication of the sorts of works that they themselves would never publish, or worse, grant them a power of indirect censorship.
So... the more different and exotic the fanfic, the more likely it is to be not infringing. If it's addressing a market that the original doesn't touch, it's much more likely to be found legal. If it's dealing with a topic the original doesn't address, or aimed at an audience that wouldn't read the original, it's likely to be found legal.
For Paramount to go after Kirk/Spock slash archives, they might have to claim they're planning on publishing it themselves.
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For Paramount to go after Kirk/Spock slash archives, they might have to claim they're planning on publishing it themselves.
The alternative argument is that that sort fanfic diminishes the commercial value of the original work by portraying the original characters "in a false light." Before you tell me that's stupid, "false light" is ALREADY a ground for a defamation-of-character action. It's NOT too far-fetched to see a lawyer for Paramount (or their successors-in-interest) making that sort of argument. And it's a MORE plausible argument, to my mind, than arguing that ALL fanfic is by its very nature transformative work.
I think OTW is vastly over-estimating the courts' willingness to undo several hundred years of jurisprudence, because an attack on copyright is also an attack on patents and trademarks. I just do not see it happening on as broad a basis as they think they are going to get. I suspect that the best they can reasonably hope for is a broadening of the definition of "transformative work."
I do agree that the greater the degree of differentiation from canon that fanfic displays, the more likely it is to be viewed as transformative. Writing about Professor McGonigle and Hermione having hawt lesbian sex in the Gryffindor common room might well qualify. Writing the eighth book that J. K. Rowling did not write probably would not.
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A collage is not required to pay royalties to the original artist(s). Not even if all the art in the collage is from the same book. Most fanfic is verbal collages; snippets of character persona arranged in a new setting.
I'm aware that "false light" is a real concern--but fanfic's common practice includes heavy disclaimers that say "these are not my characters; the original characters belong to [author] and [media company] and they would never do these horrible things I'm inflicting on them." In order to claim "false light," they have to claim the stories could be mistaken for official ones. (They may also have to prove that the false light is something other than critique or parody.)
Writing about Professor McGonigle and Hermione having hawt lesbian sex in the Gryffindor common room might well qualify. Writing the eighth book that J. K. Rowling did not write probably would not.
That's pretty much my thought. And it's baffling to me that authors might push the point to the courtroom, when any half-competent IP lawyer would tell them flatly, The stuff that squicks you most, is most likely to be found legal. (Of course, that conversation may have already happened, and may be exactly why there haven't been any Anne Rice or Laurell K Hamilton lawsuits against fanfic writers.)
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I'm not arguing that IP law doesn't cover derivatives, just that exactly what counts as "derivative" versus "transformative" is a blurry-as-hell line. (If I write a song about the Jenna 6, is that derivative of the DailyKos articles I read about it? If I count the letters in the first Harry Potter book, and come up with an equation that converts those numbers to musical notes, is that music derivative?)
2) The laws don't distinguish between commercial and non, but they *do* consider financial impact as part of fair use--as in, a work that doesn't take away from the original creator's income is more likely to be fair use. Derivatives have no commercial value if they're not competing with the original... if they are, for example, sold (or otherwise offered) in a venue the original has no interest in.
3) Already, some "derivative" works are legal: commentary, critiques and reviews, parodies. Specifically, works that the original creator might not authorize, but are considered to be in the public interest to allow (because "new stuff" is considered valuable; no artistic judgments are involved with that); copyright is not censor-right. I am proposing that most fanworks are in this category: new creative works which draw on the existence and details of another, just like an essay.
I wrote an essay about The Value of the Galleon. I wrote another one about a key chapter in Half-Blood Prince.
I also wrote a poem about a cook-off between Snape and Molly (gen; non-explicit) and a story about Snape and Harry (links to warning page; story itself is very explicit).
Are the first two less derivative than the others? Less reliant on canon for their content? I used more direct quotes in the essays. They require more understanding of the original to follow--that should make them more derivative, not less. In the poem & story, I explored themes that were not well-covered in the original; I brought minor details to the forefront and made them central issues. Also, I made up stuff, and worked to make my details attach believably to JKR's details.
How is that less creative, less transformative, than writing about what's already there?
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1) The right to control derivative works is the very heart of intellectual property law. As regards copyright, every printed copy of a book is ultimately a derivative work based on the original manuscript. The publisher produces them with the consent and cooperation of the author, in respect of which the author is paid a royalty. Prior to the introduction of copyright statutes, it was routine for other publishers to bring out competing editions of a book, from which the original author would receive nothing. Don't you remember the Ace Books editions of LOTR? THAT is the several centuries of jurisprudence I was mentioning, the basic idea that the author owns something BEYOND the original physical manuscript.
2) The statutes at present do not distinguish between commercial and non-commercial derivative work, on the premise that ALL derivative work potentially has commercial value. Wouldn't you think that an anthology of additional stories about Harry Potter would have sold well at the height of the Potter craze, assuming that they adhered strictly to the canon? And the lines between commercial and non-commercial work are getting blurrier all the time. As I've pointed out earlier in this thread, if a Web host is generating advertising revenue from eyeballs reading fanfic, it's arguably a commercial use of the material even if the fic author isn't getting a penny for it. I simply cannot see the courts carving out a big exception for "non-commercial" material when there really isn't such a thing.
3) Attacking the right to control derivative work attacks the process which insures that the original author gets paid by the publisher. If the author cannot control the production of derivative work, a publisher could take a manuscript, xerox it, produce a book based on the xerox copy, claim it was a derivative work, and not pay the original author a dime. If I can figure that out, you can be certain that the publishing companies have lawyers that can figure it out too. And if the principle is applicable to copyright, it's applicable to patent law, too. Your position reduces to the idea that the only thing that an author can legitimately claim a property interest in is the original, physical manuscript. I don't think that you and OTW have really thought through the implications of what you are arguing.
4) Most fanfic is defacto an infringement on the copyright of the work upon which it is based, because it is derivative work that does not fall into the category of "fair use," nor is it sufficiently transformative to qualify as new work. This is no more and no less true than it was thirty years ago. When fanfic was below the radar, it was relatively safe, because most publishers didn't know about it, or it was obviously not going to affect the publisher's revenue. Now, having dragged itself up out of the sf ghetto onto the Interwebs where it can be easily found, the rules have changed. Please note that the publishers didn't change the rules. The fanfic community changed the circumstances. Actions have consequences. Deal with them.
RE DFC - a collage is clearly a transformative work. I don't think that simply recaptioning a single-panel comic is sufficiently tranformative, even with the assertion of parody, to not be an infringement. One time, perhaps. But NOT an ongoing, every-day-a-new-panel Web site.
Disclaimers are a feel-good thing, but readers don't pay much attention to them. The relative importance of a 20-word disclaimer against a 5000-word story is nil. Get a couple of readers to testify "Oh, I never bother to look at the disclaimers; I'm only interested in reading the story," and the disclaimer has just become useless.
As regards "false light," the copyright owner doesn't have to prove that people confuse the fanfic characters with the canonical ones, they simply have to prove that the fanfic alters people's perceptions of the canonical characters in such a way as to diminish the canonical characters' commercial appeal (and by extension, their value.) I'm not certain that it would be easy to prove, but OTOH it would be a difficult argument to counter if, say, the fic in question involved James T. Kirk being gang-raped by Romulans.
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it is derivative work that does not fall into the category of "fair use," nor is it sufficiently transformative to qualify as new work.
Says who?
It's a common belief, but there's no court ruling to support it. How derivative or transformative it is, is still up for debate. (In general. We're all aware that each specific piece would have to be judged separately... but there aren't a lot of rulings that would help us make that judgment.)
Most of the few relevant rulings point the other way: TWDG is transformative, therefore a retelling of the Harry Potter series from Snape's POV should also be transformative; 2 Live Crew's song was a parody of "Pretty Woman," ergo the stories about Harry getting drunk and shagging half of Griffyndor tower should be parody.
And both of those were ruled legal even though they compete economically with the original. Fanfic, which doesn't have any provable negative impact on original sales (quite the opposite, in many cases... I can guarantee I wouldn't have bought a single Harry Potter book without exposure to the fanfic), is less likely to be found infringing.
they simply have to prove that the fanfic alters people's perceptions of the canonical characters in such a way as to diminish the canonical characters' commercial appeal
To prove that, they'd have to prove that fanfic (or a particular piece of it) causes people to not purchase/watch/whatever the originals. I think that's impossible.
1) Fanficcers buy the original, sometimes several copies, plus ancillary things like worldbooks and sometimes costumes and accessories.
2) Fanfic introduces new customers. I can't count how many books and discs I've bought because I heard filk about them first. We recently bought the Invader Zim series on DVD (3 volumes, 6 discs) because I heard a filksong about it. I plan on buying Buffy and SG1 so I can read the fic written for the series.
3) Anti-fanficcers may or may not buy the original... but I doubt you avoid reading Harry Potter because you know there's a pile of smut written about it. I deeply doubt any court could find any number of people to say, "I read this piece of fanfic, and I was so grossed out that I didn't buy the original."
I mean, I could point you to some fic involving James T Kirk being gang-raped by Romulans. (Or Klingons, or Vulcans in ponn farr, or possibly Cardassians. Gang-raping Kirk is a fannish hobby.) Would that convince you not to see the next Trek movie? To avoid a new Trek TV show?
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And apropos of nothing at all, is this 4300 word limit on comments something new? Or am I just getting too prolix in my old age?
To be honest, the SINGLE legal argument FOR fanfic that seems plausible is the argument about transformative work. I still believe that far less of fanfic would qualify as being transformative than you would wish, but IMO, that's the only approach to the issue that seems likely to get you even part of what you want. Asking the courts to entirely re-define the concept of intellectual property, or to take away a long established property right from authors/creative artists is a non-starter.
So too, for that matter, is complaining about censorship and limits on creative freedom. The issue before the court is going to be exceptions to a long-established property right. And yes, that IS a legally-sanctioned and perfectly acceptable (in a legal sense,) form of censorship. Deal with it. It's what the courts will most likely say on the matter. As to the creative freedom point, the courts will simply note that copyright law does nothing to prevent someone from creating their own entirely original work. Indeed, encouraging that sort of thing was one of the reasons for the whole idea of copyright to begin with. SO the creative freedom argument is not going to get anyone any traction.
As for the economic/commercial viability argument, as in "Derivatives have no commercial value if they're not competing with the original... if they are, for example, sold (or otherwise offered) in a venue the original has no interest in," it may simply be that the original author was not yet aware of that particular market niche. I doubt that Gene Roddenberry foresaw that people would want to play ST-universe space-combat games, but no one ever tried to suggest that bringing out a ST-universe space combat game without Paramount's permission would have been anything else BUT an infringement.
Everything you have been grumping about these past few months with regard to the legal status of fanfic has been sitting there in potentio, as long as people have been writing fanfic. We're in a far more litigious society than we were forty-five-odd years ago when I first became aware of fanfic. The ONLY significant change that I can see beyond the general increase in litigation is in fanfic's visibility. Too late to try and put those worms back in that can, I'm afraid.
I'm going to be really honestly surprised if OTW ever wins anything more than an expansion in the definition of transformative work. A key point is going to be that the PLAINTIFF gets to pick the specific works to be litigated, the defendant, and the injuries complained of. I doubt very seriously if the first targets are going to be the fringe material that would make the best case for expanding the definition of "transformative." Why should plaintiff's attorneys choose to play on your turf?
Would you want to bet that the initial targets for litigation will not be fic authors at all, but the Internet companies hosting fic sites and deriving advertising revenue therefrom. Getting a C&D order against every fic author in the world would be prohibitively expensive. But one can mulct a company for damages. And it won't take more than one or two lawsuits before fanfic has a VERY hard time finding a commercial host.
It won't help that most 'Net hosts already prohibit the posting of material that is violative of copyright as part of their TOS. It's going to be a LOT cheaper for hosts to simply ban fanfic than it is to litigate the question every few months. I expect this will seem unfair. But it's the way our system is designed to work. Lots of companies only comply with non-discrimination laws because of the threat of lawsuits if they don't. This is no different.
Frankly, y'all were better off when you were still back in the ghetto and under the radar.
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So too, for that matter, is complaining about censorship and limits on creative freedom.
But that's not just my opinion--that was confirmed by several judges: authors have the rights to income from their work & derivatives thereof; they don't have the right to censor all work inspired by theirs, especially if that work reaches a market they had no interest in. The purpose of copyright is to *promote* progress and creativity; it can't do that if authors get to stifle public reaction to their works.
it may simply be that the original author was not yet aware of that particular market niche
It could be, yes. However, in the case of TWDG, the defendants were able to prove that the estate specifically *forbade* authorized derivative works that touched on same-sex relations or mixed-race characters... meaning they denied an interest in developing the market for those themes.
I believe a similar argument could be made for Trekfic: since there were authorized derivatives, and they forbade certain topics (including slash), Paramount claims no interest in that market.
Would you want to bet that the initial targets for litigation will not be fic authors at all, but the Internet companies hosting fic sites and deriving advertising revenue therefrom.
Yep. And that's where OTW came from: Fanlib's ad-supported "bring fanfic public!" campaign. OTW was originally an idea of "let's have an archive that won't cave to advertisers, and that won't start yanking accounts the first time a DMCA notice comes from an author." The idea of a legal defense team was an obvious corollary. But the original purpose--and I believe, still the main focus--is to have a "safe" archive: one that posits that most fanfic is legal, that exceptions to that will have to be addressed on a case-by-case basis, and is ready to occasionally send out notes to the media that say "this is not some freaky pervert habit; it's a possibly-eccentric hobby of normal, sane people, with thousands of years of historical relevance."
OTW is not looking to rewrite copyright law. (It'd maybe be nice, but we're all aware that's a fantasy.) They are looking to establish that the claim "fanfic is illegal" is FALSE... in the same way that saying "calling someone an asshole" is false. In some settings, it'd be illegal, depending on context & circumstances--but overall, it's a permitted act, especially if you can show it doesn't cause any damage. No matter how much it bothers some people.
It's going to be a LOT cheaper for hosts to simply ban fanfic than it is to litigate the question every few months.
Hence the reason for An Archive Of Our Own.
y'all were better off when you were still back in the ghetto and under the radar.
Yeah, but it wasn't us that decided to come forward. Oh, we maybe got careless on Yahoo & LJ with not-hiding-stuff, but we didn't bring media attention around to fanfic; the media companies did that. And some of them are looking to it as a nifty new source of "user-created content" to drive advertising revenues... which makes a lot of us very, very nervous.
This is defensive posturing; we're not looking for a legal battle--we just expect one. Or more than one. And we want a pool of lawyers and expert witnesses available to explain why we believe this is legal.
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