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Originally Posted by Morthoron
I would suggest that Snorri Sturluson, Boccaccio and Chretien de Troyes could sue Tolkien, Chaucer, Malory, Tennyson, T.H. White and and any number of authors and poets for copyright infringement had they not died centuries ago. Likewise, Malory could sue Tennyson and White, Chaucer could sue Shakespeare, etc. Unfortunately, they would all lose their suits because they had, in their turn, lifted material from earlier sources.
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Exactly...there's nothing new under the sun. The only thing that matters is how much new authors can change their starting material.
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The difference lies in the fact that Fan-fiction is not-for-profit creative writing.
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And of course, the fact that no matter how much authors might complain that it's competing with their book sales, there's very few fanfics that you can read without an idea of the starting material. Try reading a Silm fic, for example, without an undertanding of the Silm. It'd end up like when I was explaing it to my mother - "Wait did you just say he cut off his cousin's hand?!?!"
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No one bats an eye at going to a symphony of Mozart or Bach pieces and shelling out $100 per ticket to enrich the musicians and promoters (the composers being, naturally, beyond all legal recourse), but good lord, try to find a studio version of a Bob Dylan song on YouTube (even though nearly 1/2 off all songs from his first three albums were written by Woody Guthries, Leadbelly or some other folk artist from a previous generation)! But Dylan and his record company expressly forbid such transmission of his material, even in a not-for-profit venue such as YouTube; whereas, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin (who seem to have no difficulty selling millions of CDs a year, even though they have been defunct as groups for 30-40 years), do not have such prohibitions on their music.
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Exactly - in fact, I'd say I'm more likely to buy a CD or iTunes copy of a song if I've been able to listen to it on Youtube first. Being on a limited budget, if I don't know whether I'm going to like a CD, why in the world would I buy it?