Lee Goldberg

Ah, another fascinating view into the bizarre workings of the fanfic mind from a writer/reader of Potter porn:

To be perfectly clear: I don’t give two shits about minors having access to sexually explicit material on the internet. This may well be a byproduct of my own hypersexualized childhood (I started reading romance novels at age 8 and my barbies were doing some very nasty kinds of nasty shortly thereafter), but I don’t buy that reading about sex or
seeing images of sex is going to warp kids’ fragile little minds. Which is why "Won’t someone please think of the children?" is one of my chief sarcastic lines. "The children" don’t need half the protection we insist on giving them, and I wish prudes would just admit that it’s not
"the children" they’re safeguarding when they’re arguing for censorship
— it’s their own delicate sensibilities.

But anyway. I do give several large, steamy, well-textured shits about respecting
artists and creators. That was part of my oh-so-eloquent and
not-wanky-at-all OUTRAGE over fanfic plagiarism.

[…]Even though I can’t point to anything Morally Wrong about
copyright-infringing fanfic, even though I’m a pomo slut, even though I
would cry if there was never another Blackcest dub-con femslash fic
waiting for me on my flist, part of me still wants to concede to
artists the right to disallow derivative works that they don’t like.
It’s their sandbox, and all the justifications about "just playing with
their toys" don’t change that. And so: guilt. Not enough guilt to keep
me from reading and (if I ever get my lazy ass past the outlining
stage) writing adult-rated HP fanfic. But enough to make me feel dirty.
Not in the good hatesex-on-the-Hogwarts-Express kinda way, either.

Let me get this straight — exposing kids  to kiddie porn is okay, copyright infringement is okay, but she is OUTRAGED by fanfic plagiarism.  Uh-huh. She feels a slight tinge of guilt about violating an author’s wishes regarding their works, but not enough to actually stop writing or reading the crap. But fanfic plagiarism — that’s INTOLERABLE (she even wrote this howler:  "In short, fanfic matters, so plagiarism in fanfic matters.")  Interesting set of principles she has.

I was a writer/producer on SEAQUEST 2032, which was cancelled mid-way through production of  its third season, though scripts were ordered for several more episodes. William Rabkin and I wrote one of those scripts, which was entitled "About Face," and would have been episode 14 of the season. The script has been lost, but a SEAQUEST fan named Rod J. Glasbergen has taken  our one-page treatment for the episode and used it as the basis for his own fanfic story, which he’s posted on the net with this byline and disclaimer:

seaQuest
2032: the Continuation is as the title suggest the continuation of
seaQuest 2032.  I have for this reason started with episode 14 of the
incomplete third season.

About-Face

By Rod J. Glasbergen

Based on an original outline by Lee Goldberg and William
Rabkin

– used without permission –

Since he admits that he did it without permission,  I guess that makes it okay, right? Fanficcers certainly have a bizarre take on what constitutes copyright infringement.

Rod even lifts some of our lines of description and bad temp dialogue word-for-word and uses them in his story as his own (I can’t imagine what Rod would have written, and claimed as his own, if he’d actually managed to get his hands on our detailed outline or our actual script).  He’s not some kid, either…he’s in his mid-20s and even has the chutzpah to take credit for the creation of the rest of the third season:

SeaQuest 2032: the Continuation and all related materials are the concept of Rod Glasbergen.

I don’t think his version of our SEAQUEST 2032 "About Face" story would even qualify as legitimate  ‘fanfic’ to fanficcers. This is simply a blatant  rip-off of someone else’s work.

Shame on you, Rod.

(Thanks to Adam for the heads-up)

UPDATE 8-20-2006: I heard from Rod today. He wrote:

I clearly intended no offence to you or Mr Rabkin in my attempt to
flesh out ABOUT FACE  as a fan fiction.  The idea behind continuing
SEAQUEST 2032 as a multi-episode fanfic was not designed to offend or
insult the writters and producers or anyone involved in the making of
SEAQUEST. I apologize if my work too closely resembles your own, and if you would like I will remove the episode from my website.

I appreciate his willingness to remove the "episode" from his site (and I’ve taken him up on his offer). But he still doesn’t get what he’s done wrong. He’s sorry if his work too closely resembles ours? It is ours.  He literally took our story idea and tried to write it himself.  At least he’s taking it off the net…

Author John Scalzi has irked fanficcers by <gasp> saying that he believes fanfiction is illegal which, of course, it clearly is.

it’s clear that some portion of fanficcers actually seems to believe
that writing fanfic isn’t actually copyright infringement, and that
therefore it "exists in a gray area" or is actually not illegal
via some interpretation of fair use. Some of this belief stems from the
contention that there has not been (to the common knowledge) a
copyright suit specifically dealing with fanfic, probably because a
"Cease & Desist" letter is usually enough to cause the fanficcer to
take down his/her fanfic so no court case is necessary. The thinking
here seems to be that if a suit does not specifically address fanfic, then the legal status of fanfic is in fact indeterminate.

I can’t help but think this is a bit of magical thinking, based on
the idea that fanfic is in itself a legally special class of writing
(possibly under the "we’re doing this for fun" idea), which as far as I
can see it’s not. It’s bound to the same injunctions and restrictions
as any other piece of creative writing. Certainly US copyright law
carves out protections for fair use, parody and criticism, and equally
certainly some fanfic qualifies under a realistic reading of
these protections. But I hazard to guess the vast majority of fanfic
could not be shoehorned into these protections even under the most
liberal of terms.

He backs up his assertion with a lengthy post that quotes an intellectual property attorney and the Chilling Effects Clearing House (a joint project of the Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San
Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington Schools of Law) on the subject.  What I found especially interesting was a letter sent by JK Rowling’s attorneys to some fanficcers who were writing porno Harry Potter stories.

As you are aware, Ms. Rowling is the author of the Harry Potter books. Ms. Rowling therefore owns the copyright in the Harry Potter books. The sexually explicit content of the fan fiction available at www.restrictedsection.org, which is plainly based on characters and other elements of the fictional world
created by Ms. Rowling in the Harry Potter books, is a matter of
serious concern to our client. In addition, our client Warner Bros,
which owns the film and merchandising rights to
the children’s series of Harry Potter books, is concerned to protect
the integrity of its Harry Potter properties. For the avoidance of
doubt, our clients make no complaint about innocent fan fiction written by genuine Harry Potter fans.

She’s okay with fanfic but is ready to go after people who write sexually explicit material using her characters. That should serve as a warning to anyone who thinks that writing about Harry and Ron exploring the magical delights of anal sex is "fair use."

You gotta love the hypocrisy and idiocy of fanficcers. It seems the "fanfic community" is in an uproar because some fanficcer stole from another fanficcers work. Author John Scalzi sums up the laughably inane situation nicely:

Let’s remember one fundamental thing about fanfic: Almost all of it
is entirely illegal to begin with. It’s the wild and wanton
misappropriation of copyrighted material (I’m sure there is fanfic that
features public domain characters, just not nearly as much as there is
of, say, Harry Potter fanfic). Copyright holders may choose not to see
it, or may even tacitly encourage it from time to time, but the fact of
the matter is that if you’re writing fanfic, you’re already doing
something legally out of bounds. And, really, if you’re already wantonly violating copyright, what’s a little plagiarism to go along with it? Honestly. In for a penny, in for a pound.

I recognize this attitude probably won’t sit well with fanficcers,
but this is really an "honor among thieves" sort of issue, isn’t it? If
you’ve already morally justified intellectual theft so you can play
with Harry and Hermione and Draco and whomever else you want to play
with, I’m not entirely sure how one couldn’t also quite easily justify taking juicy chunks of other people’s text to play with as well.

[…]Out in the real world, I take plagiarism rather very seriously, but
then, out in the real world, I take appropriation of copyright
seriously as well. If fanficcers want me to oblige their outrage about
fanfic plagiarism, I suppose I would have to ask how it is essentially
more serious than the appropriation of copyrighted characters and
settings, and how if I must criticize one why I am not also therefore
obliged to criticize the other.

(Thanks to Jim Winter for the heads-up on this).