I'm having trouble thinking of numbers; I may get back to those.
It's hard to answer "how transformative is fanfic?" without a connection to canon. In my mind, part of transformativeness is how much it changes audience and message from the original. So an opera based on a novel is likely more transformative than a short story based on the same novel; a text story based on the events of several episodes of a tv series is likely more transformative than vid based on a single episode.
To decide on transformative-level, I'd have to consider what could be transformed. Hmm ... media could be changed (is a switch from tv show to text story more or less transformative than a shift from song to text story? Is movie to vid more, less, or the same level of t'ness as novel to story?), character details could be added or subtracted or changed; character interpretation could veer wildly from author's intent or most readers' understanding; AU stuff could be thrown in; theme could shift radically (I'm pretty sure Rowling never thought of Hogwarts as an orgy festival); crossovers could be inflicted; canon details could be "fixed." Tone/lit genre could change--serious to funny; spy-adventure to romance; tearjerker to farce. Zombies could be added. Aliens could make them do it.
To decide how much is/is not transformative, I think I'd want to start by reading the books involved two most notable legal cases: Gone With the Wind/The Wind Done Gone and Catcher in the Rye/60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. The first was ruled transformative; the second was not. And since I haven't read any of the 4 books, I have little idea why. (I've read the court rulings, but that's different.)
I suspect that a lot of fanfic leans closer to TWDG--we do a lot of reinterpretation of characters, especially adding erotic overtones to situations that canon tries to keep "tame." We do a lot of retelling from an alternate perspective, shedding light on aspects of canon that are glossed over. We recast a lot of villains as heroes, and vice versa. We do a lot of things that can be described as, "this is never going to happen in the show/comic/books"--which is a fairly solid indication that it's been heavily transformed.
Can't speak for podfic; have never heard any. (Dialup internet.) From what little I know about it (I could be *totally wrong*), it's a fannish audiobook. Audiobooks count as "derivatives" or something resembling "translations"--not transformative works. (If I'm right about how they work, I'm still open to the idea that they really are transformative for various reasons. I just suspect a court would declare "that's an audiobook," and they have a mental niche for that category.)
I also think there's something off about rating transformativeness on a scale of 1-10; it doesn't work that way. Especially across the entire literary genre of fanfic. Not that numbers couldn't be assigned (erm, if I could figure out what to rate), but that there's no *purpose* to assigning a number across the genre, or even the subset of "those fics I have read."
One of the key issues in copyright law is that every case must be evaluated individually; if 90% of unauthorized sequels are "merely derivative," that doesn't mean the next one's not truly transformative and fully legal.
no subject
It's hard to answer "how transformative is fanfic?" without a connection to canon. In my mind, part of transformativeness is how much it changes audience and message from the original. So an opera based on a novel is likely more transformative than a short story based on the same novel; a text story based on the events of several episodes of a tv series is likely more transformative than vid based on a single episode.
To decide on transformative-level, I'd have to consider what could be transformed. Hmm ... media could be changed (is a switch from tv show to text story more or less transformative than a shift from song to text story? Is movie to vid more, less, or the same level of t'ness as novel to story?), character details could be added or subtracted or changed; character interpretation could veer wildly from author's intent or most readers' understanding; AU stuff could be thrown in; theme could shift radically (I'm pretty sure Rowling never thought of Hogwarts as an orgy festival); crossovers could be inflicted; canon details could be "fixed." Tone/lit genre could change--serious to funny; spy-adventure to romance; tearjerker to farce. Zombies could be added. Aliens could make them do it.
To decide how much is/is not transformative, I think I'd want to start by reading the books involved two most notable legal cases: Gone With the Wind/The Wind Done Gone and Catcher in the Rye/60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. The first was ruled transformative; the second was not. And since I haven't read any of the 4 books, I have little idea why. (I've read the court rulings, but that's different.)
I suspect that a lot of fanfic leans closer to TWDG--we do a lot of reinterpretation of characters, especially adding erotic overtones to situations that canon tries to keep "tame." We do a lot of retelling from an alternate perspective, shedding light on aspects of canon that are glossed over. We recast a lot of villains as heroes, and vice versa. We do a lot of things that can be described as, "this is never going to happen in the show/comic/books"--which is a fairly solid indication that it's been heavily transformed.
Can't speak for podfic; have never heard any. (Dialup internet.) From what little I know about it (I could be *totally wrong*), it's a fannish audiobook. Audiobooks count as "derivatives" or something resembling "translations"--not transformative works. (If I'm right about how they work, I'm still open to the idea that they really are transformative for various reasons. I just suspect a court would declare "that's an audiobook," and they have a mental niche for that category.)
I also think there's something off about rating transformativeness on a scale of 1-10; it doesn't work that way. Especially across the entire literary genre of fanfic. Not that numbers couldn't be assigned (erm, if I could figure out what to rate), but that there's no *purpose* to assigning a number across the genre, or even the subset of "those fics I have read."
One of the key issues in copyright law is that every case must be evaluated individually; if 90% of unauthorized sequels are "merely derivative," that doesn't mean the next one's not truly transformative and fully legal.