A.k.a. "legalities and fanfiction." Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I am not a paralegal, nor a legal secretary. My experience with law is pretty much limited to essays on the web, and scanning depositions for law firms. I'm comfortable with legalese, but I'm aware that I don't understand the fine nuances. This is not legal advice; it's an essay about casual understanding of legal principles.

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Every time a discussion of fanfic being "discovered" by mainstream producers-of-whatever it is that fanfic is derived from (as if they didn't know it existed), a loud chorus goes up, saying, "Keep it down! We all know this is illegal, and we only survive because we're hard to find and expensive to prosecute! Shove our existence in their faces, and they'll *have* to come after us with lawywers!"

It's NOT TRUE.
Repeat: FANFICTION IS NOT ILLEGAL. QUIT CALLING YOURSELVES CRIMINALS. Quit callling me a criminal.

Copyright infringement is illegal. Is fanfiction "copyright infringement?" Plenty of authors think so. Plenty of fanficcers think so. But that doesn't make it true.

( examples, excerpts, references, and random pontificatingCollapse )

I used to have a button that said, "Conservatives need to learn the difference between a sin and a crime, and liberals need to learn the difference between a virtue and a requirement." It especially applies to copyright, a set of business laws that have no connection to any moral obligations towards other people's creations.

From terpsichorus: What Colour Are Your Bits?
Emphasis added:

In intellectual property and some other fields we're very interested in information, data, artistic works, a whole lot of things that I'll summarize with the term "bits". Bits are all the things you can (at least in principle) represent with binary ones and zeroes. And very much of intellectual property law comes down to rules regarding intangible attributes of bits - Who created the bits? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Are they copies of other bits? Those questions are perhaps answerable by "metadata", but metadata suggests to me additional bits attached to the bits in question, and I'd like to emphasize that I'm talking here about something that is not properly captured by bits at all and actually cannot be, ever. Let's call it "Colour", because it turns out to behave a lot like the colour-coded security clearances of the Paranoia universe.

Bits do not naturally have Colour. Colour, in this sense, is not part of the natural universe. Most importantly, you cannot look at bits and observe what Colour they are. ....

In intellectual property law the Colour of bits exists and is of absolutely paramount importance. A computer scientist who won't tell what Colour the bits are is being deliberately unhelpful, and a computer scientist who denies the very existence of Colour (as any conscientious computer scientist must eventually do) is a dangerous idiot and/or a Commie Mutant Traitor....

Long article. Worth reading, if only because I adore the idea of Paranoia gaming mechanics being used in a serious discussion of copyright law.

Fandom has been all ababble (which sounds so much better than "all awank") with talk about whether rapefic causes rape--or more accurately, whether incest fic promotes incest and chanfic causes or encourages child molestation. bradhicks went so far as to claim that Harry Potter slashfic and Yaoi "are clearly defined under US law as child pornography."

A quick look at the laws about "child pornography" shows this isn't true. Child porn laws are a form of child protection laws; they involve
1) Images of some sort, and
2) A real child.

( IANAL. Some commentary on laws that might relate to fanfic.Collapse )

It is legal to write "porn," which has no legal definition. Distribution of obscenity, however, is limited by law... but the question of whether slashfic (even gruesome, graphic slashfic) is legally "obscene" has not yet gone to court. While it hasn't, I'm assuming--on that "innocent until proven guilty" theory--that restricting access to minors is a matter of community choice for politeness' sake, not legal necessity.

Joining the crowd; I saw this post about Buddhist ethics relating to fiction by umbo at metafandom, and wanted to reply.

And then the reply kept growing, and I figured I should put it here where my own f'list can read it.

I've been pondering the whole "it's just fiction" claim, and I'm not buying it. We love fiction because it influences how we perceive reality, because it helps us create the reality we want to exist. It does matter what content is contained in fiction (just like any other writing), especially if that content is publicly available (it could be argued that writings only shared by a private group are different).

( Continued inside, with religious mirror and zombie metaphors.Collapse )

I keep meaning to make a list of "pagan definitions," a set of descriptions of the terminology used in occult, wiccan, pagan etc. groups. I want to make both the list of commonly accepted defs like "Athame: Magickal blade" (only with more detail, describing what makes it different from a boleen or sickle or sword or whatever), and with definitions that describe my personal understanding of certain concepts, and how I categorize some activities and ideas.

I may never get it finished to a point where I'm ready to share a whole list or set up a website with it, but I have a few that are stable enough to share. Here's a couple of the definitions I use when doing online discussions:

Pagan: worked out with help from c_korone; 2004-12-08 13:07 at http://www.livejournal.com/community/pagan/1380095.html?thread=15723775#t15723775:
(noun): a person who follows a religion with an immanent (non-transcendent) and/or polytheistic concept of divinity and rites & ceremonies based on or inspired by pre-Christian indigenous religions, Western occultism, feminist spirituality and/or nature-based spirituality.
(Adapt accordingly for the adjective version.)

Witchcraft: a set of magickal practices involving tuning the self to natural patterns & harmonies, in order to bend or twist reality to a new shape. It does not (in itself) involve asserting mastery over those realities; the witch herself (himself, sometimes) remains a part of the pattern, and is changed along with whatever s/he affects.