With today’s technology, everything are transmitted easily, including commercial creative works (DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Disney’s Mickey Mouse, etc) due to trade and improved transmission of goods and information. As a result, more people read (book), watch (animation), and entertained by those creative works that broadcasted (distributed for book) to the public. Some of the creative works are so popular, interesting, heartwarming, etc; that some creative consumers decide to compose derivative work from the original work which known as ‘fan fiction’ to the public. However, some authors despise it if their consumer create story based on their own work and its enforcement do more harms than good. This writing will explain why fan fiction is LEGAL.
Entertainment is needed from time to time by everyone, which
trigger entertainment industry thanks to better technology. Creative works for
entertainment have everything what traditional story had, including plot-holes
and accidental inappropriate content that goes unnoticed. For example, most classic western animation
at times has inappropriate content for today’s standard, like Professor
Utonium’s cigarette (inappropriate content) and unexplainable skip of scene
between Gobber the Belch’s comments regarding Hiccup’s condition to Hiccup on
bed downstairs with his dragon in the chief’s home (plot-hole), all without
explanation. Some scenes, verses, story parts, and everything that got the
attention of everyone that watch an animation (or read book intently) will make
someone process those ‘story’ abstractly, which in turn form a story in the
watchers’ mind for their own amusement. As a result, some of watcher will write
fan fiction as an outlet for their creativity.
With internet now in widespread use, fan fiction now easily
published and read by everyone, including the copyright holder. Since internet
initially intended to help other scientist, some people start to code program
to create social website. Combine fan fiction with online social site (like
Facebook) will make a website that specialize in displaying thousands choices
of stories written by fan, for fan, and review each other works. In short,
everyone now able to post stories based on certain original work and review
each others’ narrative to improve their skill as writer.
In addition, fan fiction will improve the author’s skill in
grammar and writing skill, also give people chance to apply words they just
learnt, which will improve the vocabulary of those that use new, sophisticated
words and increase writing proficiency from reading comprehensive review.
Also, with lots of fan fiction online, the fans of a
creative work indirectly increase marketing effectiveness of a copyright
holder, without using additional cost, result in cheap but widespread ‘promotion’
of certain work.
Nevertheless, some copyright holders not tolerate certain fan
fictions and some are outright ban the fan fiction based on their works. For
example, J. K. Rowling, author of Harry Potter series, dislike sexually
explicit fan fiction and Anne Rice that always attempt to stop spread of fan
fiction based of her ‘The Vampire Chronicles’, other authors that ‘hate’ fan
fiction argue that fan fiction is a copyright infringement and bad exercise for
writers. In spite of that, fan fiction will always present no matter how
irrational a copyright holder try to stop them.
Therefore, fan fiction is legal and in fair use because the
fan just use the character from some work and make it into completely ‘new’
story and the fan that writes fan fiction usually have great care and accuracy
in grammar and writing full pledged article. Also, it trains the vocabulary of
writers.
References
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_fiction
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction
