It's a confusing and frustrating subject :b There are all kinds of arguments, based on morality, artistic integrity, economics, historical tradition, copyright law, and I don't know what else.
At the extreme end, some people think that *all* fanfic/doujinshi is automatically immoral because it's based on someone else's original work without the author's specific consent and it might "violate" the original characters in some way-- the professional author Robin Hobb has a famous rant (http://www.robinhobb.com/rant.html) from this point of view. (Tolkien probably would've been startled, to say the least, by some of the fanfic that's being written about this characters.) On the other hand, I don't think when Virgil wrote the Aeneid, way back in Imperial Rome, that he had permission from Homer to use characters and events from the Odyssey.
(There's an *extremely* long discussion thread about fanfic here (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007464.html), on the personal webpage of two of the editors of Tor Books (they publish SF/F; I don't know which of their authors might've been reprinted in Russia-- Robert Jordan?), based on a slightly earlier discussion (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007459.html) about someone who tried to sell her Star Wars fanfic book on Amazon.)
...Cassie Claire is slightly more complicated, since the original controversy about her "Draco" series was about large-scale plagiarism-- lots of small(?) pieces picked up from published books, tv dialogue, etc. and re-used in her story without any indication that she'd borrowed them from somewhere else instead of inventing them. I don't really know a great deal about the case, since I only read some of "Draco" and I've never read the main book she was accused of lifting *really* big pieces from, though I did recognize a distinctive line of dialogue somewhere as having been written by the British author Tanith Lee. (shrug)
For me, my gut feeling boils down to part economics, part artistic integrity. Is the fan author/artist making significant original effort? Are they making money from it? If the respective answers are "yes" and "no", then generally, I don't see the problem. But that may just be me. (more shrug)
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2006-05-18 03:17 pm (UTC)At the extreme end, some people think that *all* fanfic/doujinshi is automatically immoral because it's based on someone else's original work without the author's specific consent and it might "violate" the original characters in some way-- the professional author Robin Hobb has a famous rant (http://www.robinhobb.com/rant.html) from this point of view. (Tolkien probably would've been startled, to say the least, by some of the fanfic that's being written about this characters.) On the other hand, I don't think when Virgil wrote the Aeneid, way back in Imperial Rome, that he had permission from Homer to use characters and events from the Odyssey.
(There's an *extremely* long discussion thread about fanfic here (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007464.html), on the personal webpage of two of the editors of Tor Books (they publish SF/F; I don't know which of their authors might've been reprinted in Russia-- Robert Jordan?), based on a slightly earlier discussion (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007459.html) about someone who tried to sell her Star Wars fanfic book on Amazon.)
...Cassie Claire is slightly more complicated, since the original controversy about her "Draco" series was about large-scale plagiarism-- lots of small(?) pieces picked up from published books, tv dialogue, etc. and re-used in her story without any indication that she'd borrowed them from somewhere else instead of inventing them. I don't really know a great deal about the case, since I only read some of "Draco" and I've never read the main book she was accused of lifting *really* big pieces from, though I did recognize a distinctive line of dialogue somewhere as having been written by the British author Tanith Lee. (shrug)
For me, my gut feeling boils down to part economics, part artistic integrity. Is the fan author/artist making significant original effort? Are they making money from it? If the respective answers are "yes" and "no", then generally, I don't see the problem. But that may just be me. (more shrug)