I’ve been thinking about how the idea that “fanworks are not made for profit” is a big part of the reason why they are usually not attacked for copyright and trademark violation.
(Which is why AO3 cracks down so hard on users advertising paid commissions – because OTW worked hard to fight corporate lawyers for the right to share fanworks, and only won us the freedoms we have by promising that fanworks were not made for money.)
But the weird part is…
if the owner of the canon property is worried about fan art and fan fiction competing with their official material…
then, wouldn’t being free make it much MORE competitive?
I mean, I don’t know how often people will actually decide to read fanfiction and look at fan art instead of buying the canon book or movie or show or comic or whatever
But I’m pretty sure that, if it does happen, it’s largely because the fanfic and fan art are free
so… ????
I mean, I’m guessing the reason they get way more litigious when there’s profit involved, is the same reason why there’s usually more legal red tape around selling something than giving it away free…
Which I think is mostly based around the fact that an activity will usually not become widespread enough to be a problem if it doesn’t somehow make someone money
But there are exceptions.
There are things people will gladly put lots and lots of effort into, even if it doesn’t bring in any money.
And fanworks are definitely among these things.
So in this case… is there any actual reason why for-profit fanworks would be more of a problem than nonprofit fanworks?
I guess maybe… people having limited amounts of money…
Maybe for-profit fanworks would compete with official material just because people might not have enough money to buy BOTH …
Fanworks might actually get someone interested in the original/official thing. It’s happened for me.
Oh definitely. I’m only into Tron because of a fanfiction story I stumbled across, haha.
(And while I’ve done as much as I could to avoid bringing any actual profit to Disney from this obsession, getting all my canon from secondhand DVDs whenever possible… I still can’t say they’ve gotten absolutely zero money from me. So, free fanfic did work in their favor this time.
(Not sure how this dynamic would have changed in a hypothetical situation where fanfiction cost money. I probably wouldn’t have stumbled upon that so easily.)