thank you!! yes, you're absolutely welcome to publish my ask. from a lil creeping on your blog i see you're in australia, so maybe things aren't completely transferable to my situation, but i'm wondering about how you're navigating copyright law when selling fan-things, whether you've even been subjected to it, and what your plans are if you do receive some kind of notice from a copyright holder. thanks so much!!!
Hey, no worries at all, and thanks for giving me the okay to publish your ask!
Okay, just to put some context around this: my answer’s only going to relate tothe book versions of my fanfic which I’m making available to people. Itdoesn’t automatically apply to other fanthings, as I’ve not thought about how it might applyto other fanthings. My reasoning is based on the situation as it exists in the US (not in Australia),since that’s where AO3′s based (see this post for a great overview of Fanworks,Fair Use, and Fair Dealing), and also: I am not your lawyer, so please do notrely on this as legal advice.
So the first thing that’s really important to understand inrelation to the books I’m making available is that I’m not publishing them. There’s a distinction between self-publishing andhaving a book vanity printed, the biggest being the assigning of an ISBN(international standard book number) and the assumption of making it availablefor sale at a profit.
My fanfic is currently published on AO3, is available for downloadthrough that platform in a variety of different formats, and is legitimate transformativework. There’s no distinction between a copy of my fanfic in the form of, say, aPDF you downloaded from AO3 to your mobile phone and a printout of that PDF. What I’m doing with my fic is essentially the fancy versionof printing the PDF. It’s no different (except in terms of cost and how thefinal product looks) than adding a pretty cover to the PDF and taking it intoOfficeworks or Kinkos or Staples and having them print and spiral bind it.
Where things get iffy (to the best of my knowledge this is alegal grey area, and I’m aware it’s a subject of some contention in fandom, soI’m stating for the record, because I don’t want this to be misunderstood: I fullysupport people making money from their fanworks, whatever form those fanworks maytake) is me selling the printout, which loops back to why it’s important thatI’m not self-publishing.
Even if you used a self-publishing service to create a bookof your fanfic and only made it available to you, I believe you’d have difficultlyovercoming self-publishing’s implied intent to sell and profit. (Does thismatter? Is any copyright holder ever going to call you on it? It mattered to mebut YMMV.) That’s why I’m using a vanity printer and why I’m being scrupulouslycareful not to make a profit.
The way I’m approaching it is: I’m basically having thecopies of my fanfic printed on behalf of each person who wants one, and they,kind people that they are, will reimburse me for the expense I’ll incur. That’swhy I’m not asking for any money up front. (I’d actually never intended to openthem up to other people: basically I wanted copies for me, and I had to getextras because getting one book printed is very very expensive, but then peoplewere interested and so here we are.)
Would this argument stand in a court of law? I have no idea,but the ‘there is no fundamental difference between a hardcopy version and a PDFversion of a legitimate transformative work’ argument is pretty damn solid. Allowingmyself to be reimbursed for printing and postage costs, ie once money entersthe occasion, brings murkiness to the waters.
However, taking into account all of the above, even themurkiness, I’m fairly confident that making the last few copies of Werewolf? There Wolf and now Chase This Light available as printedbooks constitutes fair dealing in the same way that making the originalelectronic versions available through AO3 does. Particularly, their extremely limited existence asphysical items in the real world does not in any way serve as a market substitutefor the original work.
If I got served with a notice to desist? Ihonestly don’t know what I’d do. Probably frame the letter, for a start, andthen go from there.
