I'm all chatty and stuff...

[kho]

Ya know, I don't know why, or how even, but I was thinking about that fanfic for profit thing that happened forever ago just now (which I thought, and still think, was blown WAY out of proportion, and was discussed ad nauseum over here, so if you simply must tell me why I'm wrong again, please do it there) and it makes me want to think about it

Comments

[kho]

No, I agree with you. Asking for money for fanfic is out of line, and retarded, and shouldn't happen. But in that particular case I didn't feel like she needed to be driven out of fandom altogether beause she's an idiot. It doesn't make her less of an idiot, but. I don't know. That thing got way out of hand, I thought. To me it was one idiot asking for money, a few idiots being stupid enough to give it to her, and a LOT of idiots taking it upon themselves to point out the obviousness of her idiotness. (Not everyone who weighed in on the topic was an idiot, but there were some posts I saw that were just, wow, idiotic)

It was one big whole idiot fest in my mind. LOL. It just got way out of hand. People talking about how it was a threat to fandom, and being scared that fandom would be killed off because of it, when the fact of the matter is that the only reason it became so well known was because people MADE su ch a stink out of it.

But no. Fanfic writers should not make profit. And your downloading and burning a cd and selling it is a really good point. But I don't really think that if you WERE to do it, that whole thing should happen. You and the idiots that paid for burned CD's could just be weird together, ya know? LOL. I don't know.

I guess on the one hand I can see why it might have been a good thing, because it did reaffirm just how idiotic it is to ask for money for fanfic. I still feel like she got needlessly lambasted for it, and I think it sucks that she got kicked out of fandom.

[kho]

Can I just point out that I used the word idiot way more times in that post than I probably have in real life ever. WOW. Find a new word, Kelly!

[michellek]

I don't know man, I just... don't feel bad for her. Maybe this makes me a bad person? But I think that if you're going to be dumb and full of yourself enough to think you should get paid for fanfic, I think you *should* step away from fandom and get some perspective. And OMG who would even do something that dumb in a public post? My God, if you're going to make an ass of yourself, at least use a flock. and yes, fear of others seeing my asshattery is why all of my non-fic posts get locked now. Also, I think it would've been bad for fandom down the road. I mean, I hate making the slippery slope argument, because I find them silly on the whole but who's to say that, if paying for fic became a standard practice, the people who don't give a shit about fic might start being offended? Not likely, but I think anything that could make more Anne Rices needs to get smacked down hard.

[norwich36]

While I'm always up for the mocking of Anne Rice, I think you really do have to distinguish between producers of TV/movies who ban fanfiction, and writers who do, because most writers barely make a living as it is, if they write professionally, so whether they are good writers or not, their living is threatened by fanfic in a way that TV and movie producers are not. There just aren't big enough profit margins in publishing these days.

Furthermore, legally authors who find out about fanfic HAVE to crack down. There was some infamous case where a person who wrote fanfic about one of Marion Zimmer Bradley's universes later sued her claiming MZB had stolen ideas from her in a later work, and even though it was completely untrue, it set a very bad precedent for novelist-fanfiction relations that persists to this day. (I think a lot of fantasy novelists, if you check their websites, have statements about not permitting fanfic for this reason).

Now, I'm completely in agreement with you when it comes to TV or film producers who go after fanfic, because there I agree that it only helps them, it doesn't hurt them.