Member-only story
Selling Fanfic is Illegal: Here’s Why
If you haven’t heard, some people are selling bound fanfiction on Etsy and other fanwork they have no rights to.
Here’s the problem with that: it’s illegal. Plain and simple. There’s no grey area or loopholes.
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Anne Rice and the 2000s
I did some digging on the internet and came across this article that discusses the incident in the 2000s with author Anne Rice and her attack on the fandom. Anne Rice made her stance on fanfiction clear: she did not support it, and even sued several individual fanfiction authors.
Another article says, “much of the early Anne Rice fanfiction from the 1990s to the late 2000s has vanished off the Internet; that’s because in the 2000s she used her lawyers to get them removed from the Internet. Entire websites and communities vanished.”
At the time, she had legal grounds to do this, but ultimately, “Non-Commercially distributed fanfic is seen as legal in the United States as long as it’s a transformative work.” Non-Commercially essentially meaning not-for-profit. The minute money passes hands it becomes Commercial and therefore illegal.
This is due to intellectual property and copyright laws.
