copyright & zines (way too long)

[Alex Corvus]

No: HPFGUIDX 9580

Legally, disclaimers mean nothing. When we write fanfiction, we are infringing
on a copyright, we're doing it wilfully, and that could be legally actionable.
Now, whether a specific case would be won or not, that's another question. I'm
waiting for the day when we get a good fanfiction test case in court, because
I think the argument can be made for fair use and the validity of art forms
that incorporate appropriated material and popular culture as modern folklore
and yadda yadda yadda. That's why I'm keeping an eye on the MP3 cases, because
music tends to be the sentinel art form for copyright legislation, and they
could set a slippery-slope precedent for how copyrighted material and
intellectual property is treated on the Internet in fan culture. Good test
cases are hard to come by, however, because TPTB that do care about such
things send out cease and desist letters and fans immediately fold.

Disclaimers are a polite fiction that grease the social wheels between fans
and TPTB and, as someone else said, allow TPTB to turn a blind eye if they're
tolerant of fan culture and fan creative work. We promise we're not making any
money, we let people know that we're playing with someone else's toys, and
that's a sop to the suits. Whether you get away with it or not is something
else entirely and depends on how the producers of a particular work feel about
letting someone else play with their toys. From what I've seen, HP seems to
have been incredibly tolerant, although I have to wonder if the C&D letters
Warner Bros. has been sending out to website owners might not be a portent of
things to come. There are other people who are tolerant of such things - I
know the official Fontana/Levinson website has links to fansites, including a
number of archives specifically for Homicide fanfiction. Paul Gross, who
produced the TV show due South, was asked about slash fanfiction in a magazine
interview and was highly amused over it. His response about fanfiction was
that if he was going to beam the characters into fans' living rooms, they
belonged to the fans just as much as to him. OTOH, there are people like
George Lucas, who was tolerant of general fanfiction in his Star Wars universe
- even gave some of it an official seal of approval - but cracked down so hard
on "adult" fanfiction that it was driven way, way, way underground for years
(until TPM came out and oodles of slash fans, convinced that Qui and Obi were
doing it, had the guerila tactic of the Internet at their disposal). Anne Rice
is currently making things very, very uncomfortable for VampChron writers, and
you'll hardly be able to find any VC specs on the web right now.

HP has seemed tolerant, but I want to see what happens now that Warner Bros.
is in on the act. Because it may not matter a stitch how tolerant JKR is, now
that there's a corporate finger like that in the pie. Joss Whedon was
supportive of Buffy websites, and that didn't stop some of them from getting
hit with corporate C&D letters - I'm thinking particularly of AleXander's
transcript site.

I've actually seen discussion that fanfiction from literary sources might be
harder to get away with than fanfiction from media sources because it is the
same format as the source material and therefore could be seen as a
"substitute" in a way that stories about a TV show or movie couldn't. Although
you'd have a hard time convincing *me* that fanfiction was going to drive down
the market value of the HP franchise.

None of this, of course, has stopped a huge culture of fanfiction, both
pre-Internet and on the Internet. If anybody is interested in doing HP zines,
they'll be following in the venerable footsteps of millions of pages of
printed fanfiction - zines or a circuit were the primary ways fanfiction was
circulated pre-Internet, after all, and zines are still a healthy cottage
industry, although largely non-profit, if zine publishers want to cover their
a**es as much as possible.

I like zines, a lot. I like having some portable fanfiction (although it gets
interesting when you're reading an explicit slash story on an airplane and the
guy next to you decides to make conversation by asking about what you're
reading. <g>) I like being able to read it in the bathtub without worrying
that some of my pages are going to get loose and fall into the water. I like
the art that comes with many of them, and I like having the material
well-formatted and nice to look at, and if the publisher is really good - and
generally I don't spend money on zines unless that's so - edited.

If someone was interested in producing HP zines, I'd be surprised if they
didn't find enough of a market to cover the costs. There shouldn't be any
question about who gets the profit, because there shouldn't *be* any profit -
cost of zines is generally kept at a level that covers cost-of-production and
mailing, to maintain the non-profit status. Desktop publishing capabilities
would allow you to format and lay it out, you can get it printed up in mass
quantities and bound at a copy shop. Most of the zines I've seen look like
college course-packs: 8 1/2x11 sheets, printed back and front, and
spiral-bound, although some people also produce them in trade paperback size.
I've seen them ... erg, I don't know what the proper word is ... glued, I
guess, on occasion instead of spiral-bound - although I think that would drive
up the cost. I'm not saying it's easy, because any zine publisher knows it's
time-consuming and labor-intensive, particularly if the material is going to
be edited - which IMHO it should be, if people are going to spend money on it.
But it's completely *feasible* if some people want to take it on.

There's new HP fanfiction coming out everyday, and there might be enough
interest in formatting and selling some of the "classics" that are on the
Internet. Generally, zine publishers ask for zined stories to be kept off the
Internet for a 1-2 year period, to make sure there's incentive to buy the
zine, and some writers prefer to publish in zines and never put their work on
the Internet. I've also seen stories that are highly popular and already
web-published put in zines anyway, because the demand for them in bound form
would be high enough to cover costs. There's no reason PoU, for instance,
couldn't be published as a zine novel, or DD and DS together as two novellas
in a single issue, particularly if you include illustrations. If the interest
is high enough within the fandom, you could probably do a series of classics,
as well as zines with all-new material. The only stumbling block I can see is
whether people are going to be willing to pay $10-$20 dollar for each zine.

I can check and see if there's a zine-publishers list somewhere, like the
vidders list at egroups, if anyone is interested. I've also got a couple of
zine publishing sites bookmarked, and I can scrounge up the URLs.

Alexa

In Oz, bad is good.
- Ryan O'Reilly, OZ


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