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A free market gal on fan fiction
May. 8th, 2006 08:42 pmThere was an interesting post on the starwars.com's blogs about a Time magazine writer named Lev Grossman who had some nice things to say about fan fiction but called Lori "Another Hope" Jareo a "hero." I think ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fernwithy also had a post about Grossman. The starwars.com blog entry said that Lucasfilm is one of the most fan friendly companies out there and I'd have to agree. As I posted a week or two ago, it doesn't have to let people write and distribute fan fiction but it does and has done so for several years. Compare that with Anne Rice, who went after fan writers with a vengeance.
People like Grossman or Henry Jenkins, author of "Textual Poachers," think fan fiction is all about sticking it to the Man. They say fan writers are "taking back" the grand tradition of storytelling from eeeville corporations and the eeevilles of capitalism. They say once an author or filmmaker or t.v. producer puts out his work, it belongs to everyone, not to the author or a studio or a publisher. I've met plenty of fan writers, especially older ones, who buy into this view because they think they have the unbridled right to crank out whatever they want. They see themselves as the little guys (gals?), while the author is viewed as a greedy rich despot or a studio/publisher is viewed as a big bad money-hungry faceless inhuman conglomerate.
There are greedy authors and it's hard to have fuzzy feelings for a conglomerate, but these academics are Marxists. In their world, there is no right to private property (aside from their own published works, natch). Everything one produces or one creates belongs to the collective (in actual practice, it ends up belonging to the government). Of course this is not the basis of our economic or legal system. In our system, someone ought to benefit from the fruits of his labor, whether it's $20 or $2 billion. Copyrights exist to protect those benefits for the author and his heirs. People can cry all they want about the unfairness of those rich people or rich corporations reaping in the big bucks, but the law applies equally. The same rights that cover Lucasfilm also cover the guy who writes country songs in his spare time. When I did some summer internship work at the U.S. Copyright Office some years back, there were big companies like Playboy applying for copyrights but the overwhelming majority of applications I saw were from regular schmoes like you or me. And those laws don't apply forever; eventually every work legally enters the public domain. It just takes a long time.
What about this grand tradition of storytelling when everything was free? Not really. In the olden days, artists survived off of hospitality and patronage. They often didn't get much, but they still got paid.
I don't write fan fic because I have a problem with the free market. I realize my Anakin/Padmé mini-epics are all at Lucasfilm's sufferance and it doesn't bother me. It should have the exclusive right to market and sell stuff. If an author loses the right to benefit off of his labor the moment his work finds an audience, he has no incentive to create anything worthwhile, if anything at all. Then what would the fan fiction crowd write about?
fernwithy also had a post about Grossman. The starwars.com blog entry said that Lucasfilm is one of the most fan friendly companies out there and I'd have to agree. As I posted a week or two ago, it doesn't have to let people write and distribute fan fiction but it does and has done so for several years. Compare that with Anne Rice, who went after fan writers with a vengeance.People like Grossman or Henry Jenkins, author of "Textual Poachers," think fan fiction is all about sticking it to the Man. They say fan writers are "taking back" the grand tradition of storytelling from eeeville corporations and the eeevilles of capitalism. They say once an author or filmmaker or t.v. producer puts out his work, it belongs to everyone, not to the author or a studio or a publisher. I've met plenty of fan writers, especially older ones, who buy into this view because they think they have the unbridled right to crank out whatever they want. They see themselves as the little guys (gals?), while the author is viewed as a greedy rich despot or a studio/publisher is viewed as a big bad money-hungry faceless inhuman conglomerate.
There are greedy authors and it's hard to have fuzzy feelings for a conglomerate, but these academics are Marxists. In their world, there is no right to private property (aside from their own published works, natch). Everything one produces or one creates belongs to the collective (in actual practice, it ends up belonging to the government). Of course this is not the basis of our economic or legal system. In our system, someone ought to benefit from the fruits of his labor, whether it's $20 or $2 billion. Copyrights exist to protect those benefits for the author and his heirs. People can cry all they want about the unfairness of those rich people or rich corporations reaping in the big bucks, but the law applies equally. The same rights that cover Lucasfilm also cover the guy who writes country songs in his spare time. When I did some summer internship work at the U.S. Copyright Office some years back, there were big companies like Playboy applying for copyrights but the overwhelming majority of applications I saw were from regular schmoes like you or me. And those laws don't apply forever; eventually every work legally enters the public domain. It just takes a long time.
What about this grand tradition of storytelling when everything was free? Not really. In the olden days, artists survived off of hospitality and patronage. They often didn't get much, but they still got paid.
I don't write fan fic because I have a problem with the free market. I realize my Anakin/Padmé mini-epics are all at Lucasfilm's sufferance and it doesn't bother me. It should have the exclusive right to market and sell stuff. If an author loses the right to benefit off of his labor the moment his work finds an audience, he has no incentive to create anything worthwhile, if anything at all. Then what would the fan fiction crowd write about?
