Concerning Fanfiction

Mercedes Lackey has announced the following on her blog:

News: Concerning Fanfiction:

As you folks already know, my agent, Russel Galen, has in the past been opposed to fanfiction. However, he is also Cory Doctorow’s agent now, and Cory is a persuasive little gnome.

As a result of this, I am happy to announce that we are officially permitting fanfiction to be licensed as derivative fiction under the Creative Commons umbrella…

Thanks, Cory, for helping Mercedes and her agent recognize that fans’ reaction to works can (and already do!) legitimately include creative responses. We don’t think we need her permission, but we’re always happy to have her blessing–and as fans of hers, we’re happy that she’s happy! 🙂

2009-10-21 admin
Legal Advocacy, News of Note ,
  1. cesy commented: I am so happy about this. It'll make fanfiction of her works much easier to find (assuming the big sites update their policies appropriately).
  2. Kirrily Robert commented: You don't license something under CC "as a derivative work". CC lets you explicitly *allow* derivative works (or disallow them, as you see fit), so if she wants people to do that then *she* could license *her* work under CC and omit the ND (no derivatives) clause, but she can't require people to license *theirs* as CC-this-is-derivative because there is no such license.
    • cesy commented: The way I heard the message was phrased slightly differently - she was strongly encouraging fanfic writers to license their work as CC to make it clear it was non-profit. Which is still missing the point, but not quite so badly. I may have misread it, though - the phrasing above is rather different.
      • fcoppa commented: Oh, the blog message continues with her various stipulations. But as Kirrily points out above, you don't license anything as derivative vs. cc anyway, so its all sort of moot. Forgetting any issues of "permission" or "licenses", she & her people seem now to at least understand that noncommercial fanworks won't hurt her. In fact, the OTW's position is that fans have the right to make noncommercial fanworks whether or not the author likes it and without any permission or license.
    • fcoppa commented: That's right, yeah; I mean, this business about permission and licenses and all that is sort of nonsense, but the post does seem to recognize that neither she nor her ouvre have anything to fear from noncommercial fanworks.