Ethics of creating a fanfic archive

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

There is another side to all this. If I die, and my personal site dies with me, and FFnet dies -- then my fics die. I'd like to imagine literary immortality. But nobody is going to be getting any permissions from me.

There are benefits to being archived in many places. Some authors may be bothered, others may be thrilled. And -- I have run into some wonderful stuff. But the author has burned down and gone sour on the whole project. I should be deprived because somebody else is in a snit, even if it's a very important somebody in this particular case?

Just another argument for cost/benefit analysis.

[TerraEpon]

Which raises another interesting point. I don't know how it is in the literature world, but people are often finding old sketches or even full pieces of classical composers, and then going and recording them. People are often quite thrilled, even if it's a case where it was a "first version" (thus the composer didn't like the original and changed it) or whatever else.
Stuff like this usually garners a general positive attitude in reviewers and other people, even though it's usually followed by "and he was right to revise it" or whatever (though not ALWAYS, there's some cases where the original is often performed as much as a revision nowadays).
People VERY often lament that Sibelius or Brahms or whoever else tossed so much work into a fire, and we'll never see what they came up with.

[Togashi Gaijin]

I have run into some wonderful stuff. But the author has burned down and gone sour on the whole project. I should be deprived because somebody else is in a snit, even if it's a very important somebody in this particular case?

Deprived? What the heck gives you the right to dictate to the artist how / where / when he or she should publish his/her own creation??

I'm not picking on you personally, Ellen, but this attitude is something that needs addressing. As a "consumer", you have certain rights in regards to the ownership of a copy of an artistic work under US law. The one right you explicitly DO NOT have is the right to republish or distribute copies of the work without permission.

If an author wants his/her works to "disappear completely from the net", that is his/her right to do so. The fact that you may not like it is your problem, not the authors.

The copy you obtained by legitimate means before it "disappeared"? That's still yours. You can read it, you can delete is, you can loan it out, give it away or sell it - that is your right as a consumer and you can do all of this without the artist's sayso (provided it doesn't violate the terms of the original copyright). What you CAN'T do is distribute copies of the work to others without permission. Archiving a fic without permission is doing exactly that.

[Cheb]

Thus, the fanfic authors should be more responsible, adding to their fics the the Opn Document License or some similar stuff. "You are free to redistribute this if you keep it intact", something like that.

Still, not all fics disappear from the Net by their autor's will. Often author moves on with his life, abandons his website... Then hosting expires or hosting provider goes out of business... And that's the end.

Once in a time there was a Russian equivalent of FF.net, fanfic.ru. Then its hosting expired and it is no more. The fanfics it hosted (not many, but some of them were good ones) are GONE FOREVER.

Do you honestly believe all FF.net authors keep the local copies of their stories? Do you believe their backups are immortal? What allows you work to live forever are the readers who keep copying and re-destributing it. The only immortal things are those that got into the BitTorent network.

P.S. Thank you for attracting my attention to this problem. I'll add a re-distribution conditions notice to all my fics, something along the lines "you are free to re-distribute this text without modifying it if the website xxx no longer exists or doesn't contain this text".

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

Still, not all fics disappear from the Net by their autor's will. Often author moves on with his life, abandons his website... Then hosting expires or hosting provider goes out of business... And that's the end.

[snip]

Do you honestly believe all FF.net authors keep the local copies of their stories? Do you believe their backups are immortal? What allows you work to live forever are the readers who keep copying and re-destributing it. The only immortal things are those that got into the BitTorent network.

You have the right idea, Cheb. I've seen fan authors who put "do not distribute" on their fics, and authors who specifically authorize it.

I'll have to consider what to do about this myself. In any case, "unaltered" is bound to be a feature of any permission I give.

[PCHeintz72]

I've been monitoring but for the most part staying out of these discussions, but I had to comment on this stuff.

Do you honestly believe all FF.net authors keep the local copies of their stories?

...

Wow...

IMHO... it would be really DUMB for any author of any work to not keep a local copy of their stuff, of every scrap of every story/program/picture/music/video program they took part in creating. I find the thought horrifying and inconcievable that any person would not do such a thing as keeping it.

Only exceptions would be corporate, private contracted, or government work, which may well have stipulations in the contracts to not allow for such a thing.

I personally have kept everything I've ever done on a home computer, heck, I eveen have stuff going back to about 1989 when I had my first PC's (most of that was resaved in newer formats without the Y2K bugs). Only stuff I no longer have is the stuff from my old 8bit Atari 130XE with 256kb ram and double density floppy drives from around 1987-1989.

I might have got overzelous in deleting stuff once in the mid 1990's, I think I lost a couple high school book reports... I know I never bothered keeping every version of a program I made, but I kept the newest ones of each.

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

Somewhere I have a copy of a fanzine containing the first fanfic I ever wrote, circa 1962. But I carefully disposed of everything before that.

[PCHeintz72]

Somewhere I have a copy of a fanzine containing the first fanfic I ever wrote, circa 1962. But I carefully disposed of everything before that.

Considering that is some 46 years... I think I could forgive that. It is not like it is likely on electronic media.

Hmmm... on 2nd thought... Google and other did have scan projects... it might well be available somewhere on-line.

[Battlekrome]

republish or distribute copies of the work without permission.

Now the question becomes is putting it up on a website actually publishing or even distributing?

cause if you hold to that standard MOST of the web is illegal and only text based pages consisting of completely non-copyrighted works ie government regulations and such are legal...

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

Considering that is some 46 years... I think I could forgive that. It is not like it is likely on electronic media.

Hmmm... on 2nd thought... Google and other did have scan projects... it might well be available somewhere on-line.

Neither a Google search of the Web, nor a search of Google Books, turned it up. A fanzine collector might have it. But its survival is questionable, and probably within my hands.

Maybe I should put it on FFnet? Nah.

[TerraEpon]

As an interesting aside, an old archive of stories (as it's somewhat adult in nature I won't mention what) is being regrouped and moved to another place. This isn't a fanfic archive, rather it's a shared story type (kinda shared universe but not always, and it's pretty loose) strung from one author who gave her blessing for others to write and expand on it.
As far as I can tell, the new archivist is taking everything in the old archive as well as whatever else people can find, but is allowing authors to remove stories they don't want there.

That reminds me of another point -- usenet was reguarly archived in various places (until FF.net got big, a large majority of stuff on Rakhal's archive were links to usenet archives). So it seems to me, at least, that some of the objections may not hold quite as true...just throwing it out there.

[Kadunta]

@PCHeintz72: And then there's people like me who intentionally delete fics off their HD and wish their fics were forgotten for good in the public when they're deleted off the sites they were first uploaded to.

For the most part, though, the latter is just a dream I know to unfortunately never come true.

--

One more hypothetical case: About two years ago, I had the idea of a "plot search tool" for fics, but after some experimentation it turned out not to work as well as I had hoped (without certain crutches). There needed to be a large amount of fics before it would work even to its current extent, so it would've been best used as a WWW service. The thing is, it requires analysis of the fic content -- a local copy (web service case: held at the server). Finally, it could show the segments where the tool thought it found the parts you were looking for, and then give the name (web service case: a download link) to the fic.

So if I understood this thread so far, this service would not (necessarily) have had extra trouble with copyrights and author assents if I didn't have the preview of the fics, the download links were directed offsite and I had the permission from each author separately to include their fic in the service (which sounds a bit backwards, thinking of how Google and other search engines work... but apparently some can still object to that (entry of 07/07/2007))?

(The last part is a definite dealbreaker... since the tool wouldn't start working without at least some 0.5M words or so archived.)

(Personal note: for me, it's maybe a bit surprising how game modding and the discussion of modders' rights compares to fanfic authors' rights in this aspect.)

[Togashi Gaijin]

Criticism and comment is specifically allowed under the Fair Use clause (section 107) of US copyright law. It allows you to directly quote small sections without having to worry about permissions. What Fair Use doesn't allow is the wholesale quoting of large portions of the work without permission - even if you then attempt to "justify" it by critiquing every line. <g>

In regards to the plot search service, as long as your service didn't actually display or otherwise republish the content of the fics, you should have been okay. Local caching of online content is a requirement for viewing - the permissions to do so are inherent in the media. Allowing others the access to your cached content is what turns you into a republisher as opposed to simply a user of the content.

[Battlekrome]

now ideally to mirror an existing archive would you need archive maintainers permission or would you need to ask all the authors who have work archived there?

assuming nigh identical mirror mind you...

[Togashi Gaijin]

now ideally to mirror an existing archive would you need archive maintainers permission or would you need to ask all the authors who have work archived there?

assuming nigh identical mirror mind you...

The latter - although it also depends upon how each author gave the archival permission in the first place. If the author gave a blanket "this may be archived anywhere" release, then you already have permission.

But just because a fic is archived somewhere, it doesn't automatically mean that it can be archived everywhere. The author may very well have given permission to that particular archive - and only that archive. I've seen that occur.