Plagiarism in Fanfic
Jun. 23rd, 2019 05:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wolffylunaThis is just something I wanted to check other people's opinions on before I get too far into writing this fic.
This fic is a re-write of (part of) Tolkien's The Children of Húrin from the perspective of a particular character, rather than the omniscient perspective of the novel. As such, while I am adding scenes, there are some scenes that are just-- me writing my own version.
Most of the dialogue is original. There's not that much dialogue in the novel, and I can't mantain Tolkien's style. But there are some lines of dialogue where there are recognisable chunks of canon dialogue in their, because either there's just not a good way to rephrase it, or because that phrasing is important to the story. (The chunks are generally no longer than a sentence.)
Now, if these were recognisable chunks of some other novel, than yep, what I'm doing is probably plagiarism. But because these chunks are from the canon source material-- I'm not sure if it is as bad as other types of plagiarism.
What do you think?
not legal advice
Date: 2019-06-23 08:29 am (UTC)Plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's work. If you're open about it, it's *adaptation.* The same sort of thing as publishing a translation, or a sequel, or a theatrical script, or a movie, or an abridged version. The author may be rightly displeased with an unauthorized adaptation, especially if they were planning on doing the same type of adaptation, or already have, and you come into competition with them -- or if you end up coming into competition with what already exists because people like your medium better -- or if you *sell* yours and compete on price while hawking someone else's story.
And with the case of an abridged version it's particularly clear that unauthorized adaptation and copyright infringement have substantial overlap. Adaptation has the additional wrinkles that it's a different product, so depending on how it was done a cheap or free adaptation *might or might not* decrease demand for the original; and also it's potentially appealing to a different audience, so it's possible that the adapter will become more famous/in higher demand than the original author, which if coupled with a lack of compensation to the original author (royalties) seems a bit unfair.
All this has relevance to original authors who were inspired by others, as well as to fandom.
HOWEVER, in this specific case, I'm going to say... you don't seem to have anything to worry about? You're creating an unauthorized adaptation, that being the same thing the creator of basically any fanwork does. Quoting from canon to echo and/or subvert emotional moments is also incredibly common, cf. the number of times I've seen "who the hell is Bucky?" in fanfics, and the many, many different meanings it's held. Not only that, but you're doing active work to minimize the pieces that are straight lifted, and where you do copy, it's specifically parts that can't be elegantly rephrased and/or that you're deliberately referencing -- i.e. the same parts that are allowed to be kept in academic work, and I don't mean high school. In academic work, I'll admit, you're supposed to put quotes around them and cite them, and if you really feel conflicted you could put together a similar system with footnotes and/or a separate page where you list and cite every quote you used, but personally I don't think I'd bother.
A counterargument is that your audience might not be familiar with the original, and thus that you could be hiding which parts are copied. But I think we can trust our audiences to do their own research there if they're curious; it seems a bit condescending to assume that someone who's reading fanfiction of an obscure work (not exactly a mainstream activity) wouldn't be familiar with canon. As long as you don't, say, make an entire chapter that's just canon content and caption it "a few quotes used," I'd argue you've done your duty regarding providing specific-enough credit, and the only remaining issue is the copyright infringement/unauthorized adaptation cluster, which if you're only pulling a sentence here and there for solid reasons shouldn't stop you even if you take a fairly hard-line stance on it.
In my opinion, there's several guidelines here that you could be approaching, I don't think you're actively violating any, and plagiarism isn't on the list.
If you think this is addressing things you didn't say, you're probably right; I've been thinking about fandom, intellectual property, and the Internet for a while now, and I ended up setting some thoughts in order here that may not have been strictly relevant to the scenario you outline in your post.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-24 02:19 am (UTC)If I wrote my own take on Fingon rescuing Maedhros from Thangorodrim, I would include his prayer to Manwe word for word. I wouldn't think to separate it from other dialogue, as I trust the readers to recognize that it's not my wording.
An author's note at the end saying 'some lines of dialogue are taken directly from Children of Hurin' could be nice, as a lot of people who only read the Silm still browse CoH fics. If you still feel unsure, you could mark all quotes with bold/italics/asterisks - anything you're not using elsewhere that after the first time, readers who want to can skip over and keep reading.
I generally assume that if I'm reading fanfic about things covered in canon (as opposed to fourth age Valinor or baby Maglor learns the flute or whatever), there may be quotes from canon. Even with no author's note, I wouldn't feel deceived if I learned a fic writer had done this.
Re: not legal advice
Date: 2019-06-24 02:35 am (UTC)I think I'll probably mention in an author's note that some of the dialogue has been copied-- While there is likely to be some people in the audience that haven't read the original (due to some of the weirdnesses of the Tolkien canon, there's two separate versions of this story, and I'm working from the lesser known one), I think that'll give people enough notice to know something is up.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-24 02:36 am (UTC)Re: not legal advice
Date: 2019-06-25 10:25 am (UTC)But this whole post was EXCELLENT and wonderfully detailed and I am in awe, good gentlebeing.
Re: not legal advice
Date: 2019-06-25 04:01 pm (UTC):D
///;///
Did you pick up on my "no gender here, officer, just fandom essays" act,* or do you treat everyone like that?
* I say "act" because it's more a gender presentation than a gender, not because it's meaningfully false (or falsifiable).
This is making me think of writing a thing about adaptation, copyright infringement, ethics, and copyright law in fandom, with the thesis "sometimes fandom overlaps with piracy and that's okay." Once a network is established to spread pirated works, that network can be used to spread high-content fanworks: fansubs, abridged versions, *extended* versions, Characters Read the Books, versions that are exactly the same but missing a typo/an annoying sidekick/the rambling dénouement, genderswaps with nothing changed except pronouns, full copies with annotations... If piracy is accepted as a moral and logistical possibility, the "line" between fair use adaptation and non-fair-use adaptation that contains or largely consists of pirated material is rendered irrelevant. Fair-use transformative fandom, now newly in the open but not long ago very much *not,* can learn some things about the power of not giving a fuck from underground pirate fandom. Right now, I don't think AO3 users think enough about how much the restrictions of fair use are holding them back. I'm not saying that sharing high-content fanworks is always morally upright, but refusing to discuss the parts of fandom that are occurring out of sight of the OTW's narrow, carefully defended legal shelter feels like a dodge to claim that actually, fandom isn't in danger from the law as long as it's fairly enforced. When no, fansubbers are *us,* guerilla editors are *us,* and drawing a hard line between fanworks and piracy is just going to split fandom down the middle. I like the stability of the AO3 but no site that enforces copyright law is going to be able to shelter *all of fandom*; put a copy of a high-content fanwork on a server, and the server will either purge the copy or die. The only way for high-content fanworks to survive is through an underground network that passes media from server to server too quickly for it to be destroyed. As long as the law chases fandom, fandom will be running from the law. The AO3 offers a compromise, a place where *certain* fannish activities are tolerated, but a significant percentage of fandom activity still occurs in violation of copyright law on a rapidly changing rotation of undermoderated hosting websites. The AO3 is the respectable face of fandom, which is important, and the work done by the OTW is honestly incredible. But there are fanworks that can't be permanently hosted there or anywhere until and unless the law changes. The AO3 is one answer; it's not the ultimate answer. The law is not ready for all of fandom to come out into the open.
...oops, I wrote it. -_- Or drafted it, anyway. Hope this isn't too much of a tangent from the rest. I really appreciate that you commented on my comment because I was super nervous to post it and worried it wouldn't be useful to anyone.
Re: not legal advice
Date: 2019-06-26 04:32 am (UTC)I am reading your paragraph about high-content fanworks with interest, and fully admit that my fandoms (mostly video games) don't really fit this model because most fanworks, by their very nature, are not near-replicas of the canon or could conceivably replace canon, so this is purely theoretical from where I stand.
I think the legal basis for distinguishing between underground pirate fandom and the 'approved' transformative fandoms on AO3 is the idea that the pirated works (or fansubs, or versions made to edit out a character or a typo) could conceivably replace the original work, and thus deprive the original creators of income or royalties they might have otherwise made.
Fansubs (again, fully admitting this is not my fandom background so I may be misunderstanding the history) are a more historically gray area because in many cases, the fan communities brought the translated work into popularity and drove up demand for more professional translations years before many of the original canons could have been translated and commercially released. I don't think they were ever meant to compete with the original work either, but as more companies are releasing work in multiple countries with multiple translations or official subtitles, they would want to exercise more control over which version people have access to.
I just pulled this chunk because I know very little about the underground pirate fandom, even though I use AO3. Do you feel like elaborating on what you think can be learned, or how the fair use restrictions are holding AO3 back?
Re: not legal advice
Date: 2019-06-27 08:37 pm (UTC)Video games are a prime example of what I'm talking about, actually. Take, for instance, a game written for Windows XP in 2007. Windows XP was a buggy mess of an operating system, huge technical debt, it had an API but it also had a bunch of admin tools lying around which people found and used. So programs for Windows XP had to be totally rewritten for Vista and then again for 7. (Programs for 7, I'm pretty sure, still run on 10... mostly.)
Fast-forward ten years. It's 2017. Nobody uses Windows XP anymore. The copyright for the game has been bought out by a big company that doesn't care about it at all, like EA or something. But a fan who's a programmer has a copy of the game, and if you don't care about the law, that's all you need. The fan decides to port it -- to make a program that works exactly the same as it did, except it works on Windows 7 (and/or 10). It takes a year, between their day job. In 2018, they have the only copy of the game that works on modern computers. However, they have no legal right to distribute it, and may not have had the legal right to port it (although until they distribute it, nobody is going to care). What do they do?
Say they do distribute it. They revive the game. Ethically-minded fans go looking for copies of the original, because of the idea that "if you get alternate forms of media from pirates for convenience, you should also buy it" (a creative reworking of the concept of royalty income). The price of old, totally useless copies of the game rises. EA realizes people might pay for a rerelease, and puts someone on porting it.
If EA tells the professional to use sections of the fanporter's code, is that fair? If the professional does so without telling their boss, is that fair? If the product EA ultimately sells is heavily based on the fanporter's work, what does that mean? If the fanporter is prosecuted for piracy at the same time as their work is used, what does that mean?
Let's say that EA decides to forbid the professional from using the fanport. Instead, they crank out an in-house port based exclusively on the original game. It's rushed, shoddy, heavily DRM-locked. It's sold as a 500-copy "commemorative edition" for Windows 10 in early 2019, priced as a collector's item. There are no signs that more will be produced. The forums where it had been an open secret that everyone used the port are eating themselves alive. Are there obligations on the fan who ported it first to attempt to withdraw the port? What about the fans who have the port? The fans who are considering downloading the port now?
Let's further say -- EA only ported it to Windows 10. But the original fanport was Java, and it worked on Mac too. What do Mac users do? Try to get a commemorative copy? Try to get one of the old copies? Does it count if they bought an old game disc that had a crack right down the middle, if they aren't going to be using it anyway?
Then say a couple months later EA quietly starts selling the game again at a reasonable price -- same shoddy port with a couple bells and whistles from the commemorative edition shaved off. Whose responsibility is it to notice? Who should do something about this? Let's say *this* is when they go after the fan-porter. Does it matter whether the fan-porter retracted their work?
Video games don't have high-content fanworks *often,* but when they do, they're even thornier than high-content text fanworks. Duplicating a video game can sometimes actually be necessary in order to keep using it (unlike with text which typically can be preserved, and at least lightly used, up until its copyright expires), and then how many copies are you morally allowed to make from there? One? One and a backup? How many people are you allowed to let use the copy? What if you have permission from the creator but not from the current copyright holder?
High-content fanworks that are designed to replace the original are, at baseline, no worse than piracy, and in this day and age most people are okay with piracy under some circumstances. I do completely agree that if you have a beef with pirates it's fair to extend it to high-content fanwork creators and audiences -- although I do think that when high-content fanworks are in fact efforts toward accessibility (such as PDFs/ebooks of a printed text book that are designed to be searchable and screen-readable) there should be some leeway given ethically and legally, and that similar gray areas pop up in most kinds of copyright infringement.
The first fansubs exclusively increased demand, because they were reburned VHS tapes mailed overseas to people who had a 0% chance of buying anything related to the franchise without them. (I think some were even done destructively, meaning that each fansub copy required a canon copy to create.) Then official translations/localizations started happening more, but fansubs still didn't *replicate* so they made only a small dent in the (overseas) market. At this point, though, although fansubs may increase or decrease overseas demand depending on how much it increases brand recognition vs substitutes for the official thing, they markedly decrease *domestic* demand. Think about it: if you could find Game of Thrones on a Spanish language website with hardcoded Spanish fansubs, would you want to pay for a higher-definition copy? The most ethically minded fansub circles are closing, as far as I know, specifically because they had been founded on the idea that they were providing a service no one else would, and now that official translations of animanga to English are becoming standard, the only remaining audience for fansubs is (a) people who prefer fansubs over official subtitles (not a huge group) and (b) people who don't want to pay. A lot of early fansubbers *really fucking hated* group b, and tried not to cater to them, so now they're shutting down rather than do so. I find this sad because I'm in group a -- a good fansub is less a "translation" than a set of instructions for how each fan can translate the media according to their own sensibilities -- but with the economic realities being what they are I understand that it's not feasible to fansub without ripple effects on local and foreign demand, and if those effects aren't worth it to someone, I'm not going to push them.
Fair use restrictions aren't holding AO3 back! They're what AO3 was built on, and AO3 is far, far stronger for them. Fair use restrictions are holding AO3 *users* back. Not the fact that the restrictions apply on AO3 itself, but because there's a growing consensus that it's natural and inevitable that decent fans won't ever get to play with a whole work anywhere. There's a sort of derision toward the idea of copying even small amounts of canon, and a pedestalization of originality, that just doesn't jive with what fandom has always been -- a place where people took more of canon than they were allowed to, and made things for love and out of love and loved them deeply, using canon the way they chose to. Fair use transformative fanworks are great, don't get me wrong. And having an island of stability that pushes out our fringes in order to be safe is overall good. But disowning that fringe, I can't endorse. Underground pirate fandom is the people who supply copies of works that are out of print, the people who spread secret recordings of Broadway productions, the people who start conversations about how different directing could have changed the course of a series. Star Wars alone has dozens of fancuts, one of which recently made headlines... admittedly for its astoundingly insensitive treatment of gender (it's known as the "Chauvinist Cut" in certain circles), but there's other influential fancuts; that's just an especially eye-catching one from the recent past.
Published music that fits certain criteria *must* be sold at a certain rate to radio companies, if I remember correctly. I like that system; it does an end run around how outsiders have to bid indefinitely high in order to give popular culture to the people. I think a similar system should apply to unauthorized adaptations: of course authors should have the right to choose what movie made of their work gets *their approval,* and audiences can then boycott movies that the author disapproves of if that's what society decides is moral in a particular case, but if fans want to put together a movie, as long as they give royalties to the author (in an amount of at least whatever calculated fair market rate like with the radio music + a percentage of the profits), they should be allowed to publish it.
And similarly, if someone wants to put an out-of-print book back into circulation as a secondary edition, I think they should get to, as long as the author gets the automatically calculated royalties. Or an in-print book! I think the competition would lower prices, improve products, and do everything else healthy competition does in a free market; that the author's endorsement of an edition would continue to carry weight; and that effectively taxing piracy and splitting the proceeds between authors, publishers, and sales-tax/service-tax would massively decrease public support for non-paying pirates.
This would have the side-benefit of removing a law which, because it is universally violated, is only useful for selective enforcement. I could swear there was a word for these laws -- overcriminalization? legalism? -- but I don't need to remember the word to say that copyright reform is necessary in order to admit the possibility, necessary in a functional state, that a citizen could be innocent of all crimes.
Re: not legal advice
Date: 2019-06-28 07:27 am (UTC)Aaaaa I see, that makes so much more sense! I was originally thinking about how the most popular types of fanworks (gifs, fics, videos, art, mods) by their nature can't actually replace the original games, but I hadn't considered the ephemeral nature of the games themselves.
I genuinely wish I had something more insightful to respond to this fantastic essay you've written. This was very interesting and educational, thank you for taking the time to write it! You've definitely given me new food for thought.
Re: not legal advice
Date: 2019-06-28 01:31 pm (UTC)But I think it's important to think about what kind of fanworks might need to incorporate aspects of copyright infringement in order to exist, and what the cost is of preventing them from doing so. Consider for instance that fans were making ebooks of popular books *before official ebooks were being generally sold.* Underground fandom -- and I mostly don't mean the leeches who are using high-content fanworks to avoid paying, here, but preferential creators/curators/consumers -- makes experiments in format, translation, accessibility, durability; calls into question what "editing" even *is*; and then its greatest achievements are coopted and everything else it's done is criminalized, derided, and destroyed.
I'm thinking of rewriting my part in this thread to be a single essay and putting it on my DW/AO3/elsewhere on the Internet. Do you object to your responses being mentioned? Would you want credit or anonymity? (I tend to default to "no, as long as no direct quotes are used" and "anonymity" in cases like this, for the record.)
Re: not legal advice
Date: 2019-06-28 03:35 pm (UTC)