In some ways, I can't believe that more than 15 years after the first evidence that the Internet can be eternal, we're still fighting this fight
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Man, I didn't realize people that wrote fanfiction were that worried about copyright of their own work considering writing fanfiction can be seen as violating copyright laws in itself (hence why we use disclaimers to kind of cover ourselves and hope most authors/producers/writers have a good sense of humor
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For various reasons, I long ago gave up trying to hide my connection with fandom. Ironically, the final reason why I gave up--which was the publication of my name in an article about online fandom in the New York Post in 1997--is NOT available any longer (digitally) due to licensing issues with freelance media authors. But it available in online news databases for many years.
I don't think I ever really tried to hide my writing. Although as time has passed the name I use online has changed from the one connected to my fanfiction accounts (I'm jennickels here and at ff.net but just about everywhere else I'm justanotherjen). That was simply because when we moved from Pittsburgh we lost access to our email account that was jennickels so I came up with the other one and started using that when making new accounts.
When I publish on my LJ it actually has my real name in the title info... says by jennickels (aka Jen Connelly). I guess I've never really been embarrassed of my hobby or slight obsession, lol. Plus, I'm pretty proud of the stories I've written.
I could understand some of those writers that started young (13-14yo) with really horrible, horrible stories wanting them and any association with them to disappear.
This is a really interesting read and thought process. I've thought about all these things, as a fanfic writer and a fiction writer, but haven't quite laid it out like this.
Ironically, this post isn't even what I set out to write. It's only the groundwork for what I wanted to write, but as I wrote I realized that copyright as understood by many in fandom often even lacks that groundwork. We've been so loud about making sure that we all know that our work is covered by copyright (which is good), but really have ignored the "negatives" of what that means to us while focusing on the "positives".
Once you've published, there's no guarantee that your work will survive the limit of its copyright and enter into the public domain (even deposit with the Library of Congress is not a guarantee, really). There's also no way to reliably prevent it from doing so, because the ultimate result of publication and copyright is the public domain. It's kind of a catch-22. I think too much about this kind of thing when I'm in the right mood.
Oooh, lovely. (Here from Metafandom, in case this is coming out of nowhere.) Copyright law is all crunchy and complex and online fandom needs more general awareness of it (especially 'cos, in less than a decade, barring bizarre acts of disneytude, we'll start getting new toys to play with, including The Mouse Himself).
Currently, with the public domain set at Life+70, it looks like such a long stretch that nobody has to think about it. But it's still there--and nothing prevents congress from shortening copyright; they could decide to go back to 26+26 years. (I'm not expecting it. But there's no meta-law that requires copyrights to only get longer, or to not retroactively change--or else they couldn't have been extended for existing works.) And along with changing copyright lengths, there's the issue of why copyright ends at all--which is so that material *does* enter the public domain, so there *is* an expectation that, once people have a legit copy, they can keep it, and make that copy available to other people
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For the purposes of this post, I was mentally putting "protected" fan fiction into the category of maybe-not-published. At my heart, I think from the standpoint of a publicly accessible fan fiction archive, since that's what I've always run.
I think of selective-membership locked content as probably-not-published. (It may count as published; if you make 40 copies of a chapbook of poetry to distribute to the guests at an invite-only wedding, that may be publishing.) I grant that that particular aspect isn't likely to be important to the discussions; for the most part, we're talking about stuff that was viewable by anyone with an internet connection
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The social side of fandom has a much better chance of influencing people's behavior than calling on the law. Saying "people who share authors' works after they've removed them are asshats who deserve to be shunned" can be a reasonable & effective statement; saying "people who ... because copyright law forbids it," are lacking some awareness of how copyright law actually works. It's designed to allow rather a lot of casual, low-level, noncommercial infringement. Yet the social beliefs of fandom do differ widely from fandom-to-fandom, which is why we end up with discussions like the one about passing around deleted or lost fiction. They also tend to change over the course of the history of the particular fandom
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And fascinating to see the different aspects about reposting deleted fic being highlighted. I (obviously, riding hobbyhorse a lot) am coming from the angle of implications around not just current but future fannish privacy and identity protection, plus (potential changes in) etiquette and courtesy around that issue, but it is definitely educational to see other angles like the copyright-area legal aspects of fanfic (re-)distribution being discussed. :)
When ever, what ever you publish, there's an aspect to privacy you are giving up and cannot regain. You can try and while I see that I have a responsibility not to actively interfere with that, I'm not going to forever govern my actions and behavior to prevent against accidental interference in that.
In my experience, purging and departing is about the WORSE way to go about identity protection in fandom (if you've been popular to any degree). Changing your name is usually a lot more successful.
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If you want your head to further explode, you can go read more about the meta side of fandom: http://metafandom.livejournal.com/
This post was in response to the most recent discussions.
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When I publish on my LJ it actually has my real name in the title info... says by jennickels (aka Jen Connelly). I guess I've never really been embarrassed of my hobby or slight obsession, lol. Plus, I'm pretty proud of the stories I've written.
I could understand some of those writers that started young (13-14yo) with really horrible, horrible stories wanting them and any association with them to disappear.
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Once you've published, there's no guarantee that your work will survive the limit of its copyright and enter into the public domain (even deposit with the Library of Congress is not a guarantee, really). There's also no way to reliably prevent it from doing so, because the ultimate result of publication and copyright is the public domain. It's kind of a catch-22. I think too much about this kind of thing when I'm in the right mood.
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Currently, with the public domain set at Life+70, it looks like such a long stretch that nobody has to think about it. But it's still there--and nothing prevents congress from shortening copyright; they could decide to go back to 26+26 years. (I'm not expecting it. But there's no meta-law that requires copyrights to only get longer, or to not retroactively change--or else they couldn't have been extended for existing works.) And along with changing copyright lengths, there's the issue of why copyright ends at all--which is so that material *does* enter the public domain, so there *is* an expectation that, once people have a legit copy, they can keep it, and make that copy available to other people ( ... )
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Yet the social beliefs of fandom do differ widely from fandom-to-fandom, which is why we end up with discussions like the one about passing around deleted or lost fiction. They also tend to change over the course of the history of the particular fandom ( ... )
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And fascinating to see the different aspects about reposting deleted fic being highlighted. I (obviously, riding hobbyhorse a lot) am coming from the angle of implications around not just current but future fannish privacy and identity protection, plus (potential changes in) etiquette and courtesy around that issue, but it is definitely educational to see other angles like the copyright-area legal aspects of fanfic (re-)distribution being discussed. :)
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In my experience, purging and departing is about the WORSE way to go about identity protection in fandom (if you've been popular to any degree). Changing your name is usually a lot more successful.
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