December Days #30: Hit the Remix Button
Dec. 30th, 2018 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. There are no more suggestion spaces left! It's been a fun month for everyone.]
We've been talking a lot about original creations, or things where the seed of the idea or a prompt is all someone gets, and then they create a work from that. Even when the prompt is as minimal as you can get from it. Or is just a small thing in your own head that blooms into a lot. Or a little.
When you're writing transformative works, you're borrowing bits from another story and mixing it together to create an entirely new thing, but what happens when someone creates a work, and it puts an idea in your head and you want to write not only those characters, but the specific universe that these characters inhabit. Or you want to tell that same story, but from free perspective of a different character. Or turn the story in on itself and tell it with a different idea. Or it's a lovely story in writing, and it would be even better if it was recorded as an audio production, whether with a single narrator or with a full cast taking on the roles. Or perhaps the story itself got some pictures in your head and you wanted to get them out in some other medium.
Some creators will say "Oh! You wanted to use that to write your own thing? Fabulous! Go ahead." Others are phenomenally jealous of their creations and will snarl at you for deciding to take their work and create something from it. This is also true of the creators of canons from whence the transformative works come, with the additional danger that sometimes they send out the lawyers with regard to fanworks of their own. For that reason, it's sometimes dangerous for fans to ask creators about what they think with regard to fanworks, and why plenty of signature lines make it very clear they will only be autographing official works. (That sometimes gets interesting now that some comic properties are producing blank-covered issue books, with the express intention of having a commissioned art piece by someone other than the official cover artist be the cover of that book, but that is currently an edge case.)
TV Tropes, among other places, maintains in a series of tropes lists of creators that have been enthusiastic about fanwork, this that have been not at all inclined and litigious, (or that declare anything other than their interpretation is "interrogating the text from the wrong perspective") those that have (attempted) to impose rules on what their fans can and can't do, and those who have made suggestions and requests about fanworks and where they be set, what gets used, or who the rights belong to. I'm sure there are fans that pay attention to that list when they consider what to nominate and what to write about, but I suspect much of fandom has a certain gleeful disregard for creators that try to keep too tight a control on their creations. They are often more respectful of suggestions made in a spirit of understanding and basically saying "look, we need to not confuse your work with ours. If we can do that, we're good."
There are ways, though, of letting people know and make sure that you're okay, or not okay, with the idea of people taking your works and building upon them for their own works. The transformative works statement is one of the easiest ones to lay up in your archive profile (or link to somewhere else more permanent that you want associated with your pseud). Fanlore calls it a blanket statement, and I'm sure it gets other names in other places, but the linked article has a pretty good framework for what it might look like (and examples at the end). It's a good way of stating up front what your preferences are about people reworking your material into something of their own. I like calling it a transformative works statement, because that seems to be what it's mostly about, and that way people don't necessarily get confused about what it is, like they might with something like the Creative Commons licenses (also really useful to have and know about, although they're not necessarily as fine-grained with regard to transformation as the transformative works statement).
"But wait," says the person. "If the copyright is mine when I make it, and I don't want anyone producing anything from my work, I should be able to assert my copyright and that will stop people from doing things with my work." Well...except for the parts where there are exceptions carved out in copyright for things like criticism and parody, so if someone wants to quote your work and use it to tell people what sort of terribly -ist shenanigans are going on in your work, or even just to say that they don't like your writing style and they feel they could do better, that's generally protected. As is deciding to take your work and twist it into the grotesque and the parodic, using what are clearly your characters, even if occasionally they might not use the names, and then they can do whatever they like with them, so long as the parody is clear enough. Copyright won't save you from people doing all sorts of terrible things to your work and telling you exactly what they think of you while they're at it. It won't protect you from people who you think are interrogating the text from the wrong perspective interpreting your text in all sorts of very wrong (but amusing or even erotic) ways. And the anarchic streak present in a lot of fandom is likely to exercise as much freedom as they can to make sure you know about all of it.
And while copyright is a terrible monster in the United States that guarantees it'll be three generations (or more) before anyone can legally start putting their fanfic anywhere, there's a long memory in fandom, and I suspect they're going to make absolutely certain there's an absolute flood of material, archived or otherwise, available everywhere the first day that it's legally available. (And, truthfully, it will have been there all the time, in places where it's less easy for the lawyers to find it. We hope their archives can be assimilated or transferred and kept going while they wait.)
In any case, if you're cool with remix, you should say so. If you're only cool with certain remix, you should say so. If you don't want anyone doing anything with regard to remix, say that. It will make it easier for everyone involved to make decisions about whether they're going to put in the time and effort to create something they're going to want to share with others and that they hope you'll be proud of them for making.
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. There are no more suggestion spaces left! It's been a fun month for everyone.]We've been talking a lot about original creations, or things where the seed of the idea or a prompt is all someone gets, and then they create a work from that. Even when the prompt is as minimal as you can get from it. Or is just a small thing in your own head that blooms into a lot. Or a little.
When you're writing transformative works, you're borrowing bits from another story and mixing it together to create an entirely new thing, but what happens when someone creates a work, and it puts an idea in your head and you want to write not only those characters, but the specific universe that these characters inhabit. Or you want to tell that same story, but from free perspective of a different character. Or turn the story in on itself and tell it with a different idea. Or it's a lovely story in writing, and it would be even better if it was recorded as an audio production, whether with a single narrator or with a full cast taking on the roles. Or perhaps the story itself got some pictures in your head and you wanted to get them out in some other medium.
Some creators will say "Oh! You wanted to use that to write your own thing? Fabulous! Go ahead." Others are phenomenally jealous of their creations and will snarl at you for deciding to take their work and create something from it. This is also true of the creators of canons from whence the transformative works come, with the additional danger that sometimes they send out the lawyers with regard to fanworks of their own. For that reason, it's sometimes dangerous for fans to ask creators about what they think with regard to fanworks, and why plenty of signature lines make it very clear they will only be autographing official works. (That sometimes gets interesting now that some comic properties are producing blank-covered issue books, with the express intention of having a commissioned art piece by someone other than the official cover artist be the cover of that book, but that is currently an edge case.)
TV Tropes, among other places, maintains in a series of tropes lists of creators that have been enthusiastic about fanwork, this that have been not at all inclined and litigious, (or that declare anything other than their interpretation is "interrogating the text from the wrong perspective") those that have (attempted) to impose rules on what their fans can and can't do, and those who have made suggestions and requests about fanworks and where they be set, what gets used, or who the rights belong to. I'm sure there are fans that pay attention to that list when they consider what to nominate and what to write about, but I suspect much of fandom has a certain gleeful disregard for creators that try to keep too tight a control on their creations. They are often more respectful of suggestions made in a spirit of understanding and basically saying "look, we need to not confuse your work with ours. If we can do that, we're good."
There are ways, though, of letting people know and make sure that you're okay, or not okay, with the idea of people taking your works and building upon them for their own works. The transformative works statement is one of the easiest ones to lay up in your archive profile (or link to somewhere else more permanent that you want associated with your pseud). Fanlore calls it a blanket statement, and I'm sure it gets other names in other places, but the linked article has a pretty good framework for what it might look like (and examples at the end). It's a good way of stating up front what your preferences are about people reworking your material into something of their own. I like calling it a transformative works statement, because that seems to be what it's mostly about, and that way people don't necessarily get confused about what it is, like they might with something like the Creative Commons licenses (also really useful to have and know about, although they're not necessarily as fine-grained with regard to transformation as the transformative works statement).
"But wait," says the person. "If the copyright is mine when I make it, and I don't want anyone producing anything from my work, I should be able to assert my copyright and that will stop people from doing things with my work." Well...except for the parts where there are exceptions carved out in copyright for things like criticism and parody, so if someone wants to quote your work and use it to tell people what sort of terribly -ist shenanigans are going on in your work, or even just to say that they don't like your writing style and they feel they could do better, that's generally protected. As is deciding to take your work and twist it into the grotesque and the parodic, using what are clearly your characters, even if occasionally they might not use the names, and then they can do whatever they like with them, so long as the parody is clear enough. Copyright won't save you from people doing all sorts of terrible things to your work and telling you exactly what they think of you while they're at it. It won't protect you from people who you think are interrogating the text from the wrong perspective interpreting your text in all sorts of very wrong (but amusing or even erotic) ways. And the anarchic streak present in a lot of fandom is likely to exercise as much freedom as they can to make sure you know about all of it.
And while copyright is a terrible monster in the United States that guarantees it'll be three generations (or more) before anyone can legally start putting their fanfic anywhere, there's a long memory in fandom, and I suspect they're going to make absolutely certain there's an absolute flood of material, archived or otherwise, available everywhere the first day that it's legally available. (And, truthfully, it will have been there all the time, in places where it's less easy for the lawyers to find it. We hope their archives can be assimilated or transferred and kept going while they wait.)
In any case, if you're cool with remix, you should say so. If you're only cool with certain remix, you should say so. If you don't want anyone doing anything with regard to remix, say that. It will make it easier for everyone involved to make decisions about whether they're going to put in the time and effort to create something they're going to want to share with others and that they hope you'll be proud of them for making.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 05:29 pm (UTC)It might also be that their attention is mostly focused on people and companies trying to profit on knock-offs and lookalikes to devote much effort to fanworks, unless those works get sufficiently high up on the radar to catch Sauron's eye.