ADMIN on Copyright Issues

[Heidi Tandy]

No: HPFGUIDX 180487

The Mod Squad looks over the list and despite the presence of lawyers on
said Squad, does not give any legal advice in this post, but wishes to clear
up a few issues and redirect some conversations to OTC.

First, any discussion of the legal generalities or specifics of the lawsuit
by JK Rowling & company against the publishers of the HP Lexicon book should
take place on OT-Chatter as they're not about the books' canon, or even
what's hosted on the Lexicon site.

Second, anyone with an interest in these issues might want to keep an eye on
http://Fandom_Lawyers.livejournal.com and on
http://transformativeworks.org/- the former is a community where
people - lawyers and nonlawyers - can
discuss legal issues as they pertain to fandom activities. There's been a
lot of discussion there regarding fanfic in the last four or five years, so
it's a good resource for a range of opinions. TransformativeWorks.org (aka
the Organization for Transformative Works or OTW) is a project that was
started by a number of fandomers last summer, which will incorporate, among
other things, an archive of fan-created works and a legal defense project to
protect fans and their works when they are threatened by The Powers that Be.


Third, I wanted to address some things discussed in Pippin Fowler's post of
last week, because we on the Mod Squad don't want Listies to get paranoid or
even concerned about Things Here at HPfGU.

Pippin said:
> However, Yahoo has been quite
> skittish about copyright infringement, when a copyright holder
> complains; or so it was when a knitting yahoo group was shut down by a
> knitting designer's complaint some years ago. JKR seems unlikely to
> complain about fan fiction or the like here, but who knows?  If I were
> her, and I were here, reading some of the comments over the past couple
> of months, I probably wouldn't feel a great deal of warmth and caring
> for this group, with a few exceptions.

It doesn't matter whether she feels one way or another towards this
Yahoogroup. She cannot get rid of it on her own and she has no legal grounds
to ask Yahoo to get rid of it. A copyright holder cannot control the
discussion of his or her work; she can only limit the amount of exact words
from her work that are used in works created by third parties. And since
Listies don't use paragraphs and paragraphs of word-for-word content from
JKR's books in making posts here on HPfGU, there is no
copyrightinfringement going on in the discussions we have here.

Furthermore, JKR has affirmatively stated that she has no problem with
fanfiction (at least, she has no problem with fanfic that's not rated
NC-17). I'm one of the admins on FictionAlley.org, which is the largest
HP-specific fan-creativity archive, and we have regularly worked with WB,
Scholastic, Bloomsbury and other licensees on promoting the HP books and
films; if they don't have a problem with the amount of fanfic and fanart
*we* host, they certainly wouldn't have a problem with fic written in the
context of a discussion here.

But even if they did, there are a number of lawyers standing by to support
fan creativity. Fair use and the aspects of copyright law that concern
transformative works all support the idea that fanfiction, when not sold for
a profit, falls under the parameters of fair use. If you're more interested
in reading up on the issue, I highly recommend Rebecca Tushnet's articles at
http://www.tushnet.com/law/myfairladies.pdf and
http://www.tushnet.com/law/fanficarticle.html  as well as the article at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=984919 by Anupam Chander
& Madhavi Sunder.

As Professor Tushnet said last year, "If we don't hold on to fair use with
both hands, we'll find that norms have shifted." Here at HPfGU, we hold on
to fair use with both hands, plus our feet and a team of specially trained
owls and poltergeists, because it's the only way that our fandom - and every
other fandom - can feel secure in our creativity, whether it takes the form
of fic, arts, vids, roleplaying or "meta".

We on the Mod Squad ask that any further discussion of copyright issues go
to the OTChatter list, where some interesting discussions are going on right
now; any discussion of the patentability of Professor Snape's creations can
stay here on Main, though!

Heidi for the MEG Team


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