To my flist, upon having read metafandom

[alixtii]

To Lucasta my flist:

I love you very much, but I love (the pursuit of) truth, beauty, honor, and free creative expression more.

I like to think you would not love me half so much were this not the case.

Love,
Richard Lovelace Alixtii

Yet this inconstancy is such, / As you too shall adore; / I could not love thee, dear, so much, / Lov'd I not Honour more.

ETA: And I've just friended three people today because they argued so sanely, intelligently, and brillaintly, and they shared my vision for what fandom can be. It's not a case of those who view fandom as a community versus those who see it as something else; it's rather those who want to see that community stand for creative expression and the free, critical pursuit of truth and beauty as opposed to those who want it to be the Cult of Nice.

Comments

[inalasahl]

I'm surprised by how divided fandom is on this issue, because to me it seems pretty clear. I just don't see how you can be a fanfic writer and claim that it's a moral imperative to ask for permission to use someone else's ideas (as opposed to their words).

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Do you believe there is a moral imperative to ask for permission to use someone else's words? Because I have to admit I don't see how such a distinction can be maintained. Both types of appropriation require appropriation citation, obviously, if it cannot be assumed with good faith that the majority of the reading audience will recognize the appropriation for what it is (a criterion I doubt would be fulfilled in the case of a fanfic of a fanfic). And both represent appropriation of an author's work, in which they might be emotionally invested or whatever. I just don't see paraphrase can be defensible, but quotation not.

[inalasahl]

Do you believe there is a moral imperative to ask for permission to use someone else's words?
No. In fact, I used a line from a favorite movie of mine, "The Apartment," in this story (with cite), and I did not ask Billy Wilder for permission to do so.

I should have chosen my words more carefully. It's just that I'm open to the possibility that someone could make a case for not using someone else's words (or at the least, that there is a hypothetical tipping point where it moves from fair use to slapping your name onto someone else's story), but I don't see how a fanfic writer can make the case that one must have permission to borrow ideas.