Creativity, fandom and copyright
I watched We are wizards, a documentray mostly about the musical fandom that has arisen from Harry Potter, today. I was reading a HP fanfic of the next generation and there was a reference to Wizard rock song. I couldn't find the song itself, but I found this blog post about Harry Potter references in Nerdcore hip hop songs. Nerdcore being a subgenre of hip hop with geeky and nerdy themes. I listen to hip hop in very small doses, but I'll have to look into nerdcore sometime later on. There was this pretty neat song about Neville by MC Chris. Give it a listen.
Also, I found this playlist for wizard rock on Grooveshark and put it on a widget. So I can't take credit for the playlist. I especially like Forever Together, Battle of Hogwarts and Gryffindor Rally Cry by the Ministry of Magic and So This Is It (Taking off the Locket) by The Hermione Crookshanks Experience.
I tried to find some kind of documentary about fanfiction, but came up empty. I know that there are books written about the fanfiction fandom, both by the fans themselves and by academic people. But yeah, even though fanfiction as a phenomenon is big, it's still largely underground, I think. I have some kind of idea about the scope of the wizard rock aspects of HP fandom after watching the documentary, but it looks like pretty small beans compared to the fanfiction segment of the HP fandom. Maybe it can give you some kind of idea, if I say that it took me a week to read the Harry Potter books and less than that to watch the movies, but for the year and a half since then I've been reading HP fanfics on a weekly and sometimes daily basis and I feel like I've just scratched the surface. HP fanfic fandom is one of the biggest out there. People will probably be writing HP fics for decades to come, keeping the fandom alive. It's a great fandom to be in.
I've never had any sort of moral problem reading fanfics, even though they're in the grey area of copyright infrigment right along with AMVs and fanart and so forth.
(I'd just like to point out that I think that it's important that fic writers label their stories appropriately with warnings, so that little kids don't end up reading about things that they're too young to understand. Sex in itself is all right, I think that I was around 12 or 13 years old when I started reading novels with full out detailed sex scenes in them. But there are things in fandom that even I wouldn't let kids read.)
I think that my thoughts on culture and what's original creative work color my views when it comes to fanworks. I'm just going to come out say that I don't believe that there's a single piece of truly original creative work in the whole worlds in the strictest sense of the word. They all draw something from our shared cultural background, from the people around them. If a person grew up isolated from the rest of society and human culture from infancy and created some kind of artwork, that I might acknowledge as being truly original. But babies die without contact with humans or other animals, and babies adopted by animals (all though I'm not completely sure, if those stories are to be believed) don't have a culture that we could identify with, or even a way of communicating with other humans.
My studies in the history of classical music in my music school have greatly influenced my ideas of how culture and creative work evolves through time. It's easier to see with the centuries over which classical music has evolved. It built on existing pieces of music and theory and every once in a while someone came up with something unheard of, like a new chord, which was accepted with time. Think of it like a pyramid that keeps growing upwards. You need that base on which you can build on. Creativity is borrowing, mixing, remaking and also sometimes but rarely coming up with things that nobody else has come up with before. But it's not cut off from the rest of culture, because as humans culture is a part of us. Whatever we create, we are indebted to thousands of others who came before us and contributed something to our shared culture.
Thus I think that copyright as a basic concept is pretty awkward. I recognize that people who create things need to make a living somehow, but I'm hoping that people will come up with a better system in the future. Copyright doesn't work very well in the Internet era. I'm not endorsing stealing credit from the creator and most of fandom clearly states that they are not behind the original work from which they're gotten their inspiration. I don't really see any harm in the things that fandom creates as long as they don't get money from it. If anything, the industry should be happy, if the fandom adopts something from them. In the end, fandom keeps up interest in it's chosen medium and most probably raises sales as well.
Having an active fandom is good publicity. Now days I sometimes pick up books or movies because I know that they have a good sized fandom, as I can then get into the fandom after I've familiarized myself with the original work. If a book or a show has an active fandom, it shows me that there are that many people out there who love that book or show. And that has more weight with me than commercials, trailers or what critics are saying.
I'm probably preaching to the choir here as I think that my whole flist, with a few exceptions, consists of people who have been involved in some fandom or another, be it with AMVs, fanfics, fanart etc.
Also, I found this playlist for wizard rock on Grooveshark and put it on a widget. So I can't take credit for the playlist. I especially like Forever Together, Battle of Hogwarts and Gryffindor Rally Cry by the Ministry of Magic and So This Is It (Taking off the Locket) by The Hermione Crookshanks Experience.
I tried to find some kind of documentary about fanfiction, but came up empty. I know that there are books written about the fanfiction fandom, both by the fans themselves and by academic people. But yeah, even though fanfiction as a phenomenon is big, it's still largely underground, I think. I have some kind of idea about the scope of the wizard rock aspects of HP fandom after watching the documentary, but it looks like pretty small beans compared to the fanfiction segment of the HP fandom. Maybe it can give you some kind of idea, if I say that it took me a week to read the Harry Potter books and less than that to watch the movies, but for the year and a half since then I've been reading HP fanfics on a weekly and sometimes daily basis and I feel like I've just scratched the surface. HP fanfic fandom is one of the biggest out there. People will probably be writing HP fics for decades to come, keeping the fandom alive. It's a great fandom to be in.
I've never had any sort of moral problem reading fanfics, even though they're in the grey area of copyright infrigment right along with AMVs and fanart and so forth.
(I'd just like to point out that I think that it's important that fic writers label their stories appropriately with warnings, so that little kids don't end up reading about things that they're too young to understand. Sex in itself is all right, I think that I was around 12 or 13 years old when I started reading novels with full out detailed sex scenes in them. But there are things in fandom that even I wouldn't let kids read.)
I think that my thoughts on culture and what's original creative work color my views when it comes to fanworks. I'm just going to come out say that I don't believe that there's a single piece of truly original creative work in the whole worlds in the strictest sense of the word. They all draw something from our shared cultural background, from the people around them. If a person grew up isolated from the rest of society and human culture from infancy and created some kind of artwork, that I might acknowledge as being truly original. But babies die without contact with humans or other animals, and babies adopted by animals (all though I'm not completely sure, if those stories are to be believed) don't have a culture that we could identify with, or even a way of communicating with other humans.
My studies in the history of classical music in my music school have greatly influenced my ideas of how culture and creative work evolves through time. It's easier to see with the centuries over which classical music has evolved. It built on existing pieces of music and theory and every once in a while someone came up with something unheard of, like a new chord, which was accepted with time. Think of it like a pyramid that keeps growing upwards. You need that base on which you can build on. Creativity is borrowing, mixing, remaking and also sometimes but rarely coming up with things that nobody else has come up with before. But it's not cut off from the rest of culture, because as humans culture is a part of us. Whatever we create, we are indebted to thousands of others who came before us and contributed something to our shared culture.
Thus I think that copyright as a basic concept is pretty awkward. I recognize that people who create things need to make a living somehow, but I'm hoping that people will come up with a better system in the future. Copyright doesn't work very well in the Internet era. I'm not endorsing stealing credit from the creator and most of fandom clearly states that they are not behind the original work from which they're gotten their inspiration. I don't really see any harm in the things that fandom creates as long as they don't get money from it. If anything, the industry should be happy, if the fandom adopts something from them. In the end, fandom keeps up interest in it's chosen medium and most probably raises sales as well.
Having an active fandom is good publicity. Now days I sometimes pick up books or movies because I know that they have a good sized fandom, as I can then get into the fandom after I've familiarized myself with the original work. If a book or a show has an active fandom, it shows me that there are that many people out there who love that book or show. And that has more weight with me than commercials, trailers or what critics are saying.
I'm probably preaching to the choir here as I think that my whole flist, with a few exceptions, consists of people who have been involved in some fandom or another, be it with AMVs, fanfics, fanart etc.