i've heard and read up slightly about the whole Anne Rice going after fanfic writers and such a bit ago, ive read some of the Vampire Chronicles too, and out of strong curiosity i found the VC series on AO3 with fics written for them and i got quite confused, does AO3 specifically with its law team protect writers from Anne Rice or is it still not allowed? its very interesting to think about nonetheless.
First of all, I’m not a lawyer so all of this is my own understanding and opinion.
Yes, AO3 has a legal advocacy team and yes that team has helped authors in the past. But from my (admittedly hazy) memory, Anne Rice used to send Cease & Desist letters but no one had the cash to actually take her to court over anything. People acceded to the C&Ds and took their fics down.
I’m not personally aware of any cases of a published author suing a fanfic author in court and winning. The OTW is called the Organization for Transformative Works because transforming a canon is considered fair use under US copyright law.
You can’t reproduce Anne Rice’s (or anything else’s) works word for word on the archive. Not only is it plagiarism, but if it the work is published it’s also breaching copyright. Taking her characters or plots and creating your own stories with them transforms her work. That means it’s fair use.
That’s also the reason why AO3 does not allow anyone to request payment or link to payment sources like ko-fi or patreon. Being able to say that none of us are profiting off of our work is another protection against copyright claims.
Anne Rice still hates fanfic. She just can’t do much about it is all.
I’ll come back to my not-a-lawyer statement now and open up the replies and reblogs for people to correct anything I might have gotten wrong.
