I think the people worrying about being sued maybe haven’t realised the sheer scale of fanfic writing. There are several hundred thousand (that’s five zeroes after the leading digit) Harry Potter fanfics on fanfiction.net alone. Nobody’s going to sue you for writing another one, as long as you are respectful of JKR and don’t try to make money from it. I think the key there is respect – some authors ask that you steer clear of certain themes, some ask that you avoid certain periods in their timeline or don’t use certain characters. And some ask that you don’t write fanfic at all (and in general the fanfic sites won’t take stories by such authors). AFAIK there’s never been a lawsuit about not-for-profit fanfic – the worst that’s even remotely likely to happen is that you get a letter asking you to take it down.

Wow…I didn’t know there’s a Gatchaman movie in the works.

BTW (OT ahead), have you watched other similar animation series? I was a fan of Voltes V, Daimos, and Macross. I think they’re all from the same era with Gatchaman.

Role-playing games offer incredible benefits, too, and being involved in a creative writing role-playing game can definitely improve your skills as a writer.

Which is why we’ll be launching an rpg in a week or two. Stay tuned!

http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/hilden/20080121.html

Rowling says she was going to do the same thing, thus the book infringes on her copyright, but even still she could lose the case because it’s not illegal to write a book ABOUT a series of books, as in the case of scholarly works and other references.

Here’s a great description of the whole case
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2264094,00.html

Either way, it has nothing to do with fanfiction.

I even work for a fan fic company, FanLib.com is a site that is working toward getting those license holders to appreciate the fan writer. Face it, fan fiction is like one big advertisement for their show or movie.

Right now we’re running a contest with Warner Brothers for Speed Racer fan fic and the winner gets a trip to Hollywood.

I also run a fanfic critique group at the forum over there, so we’d be happy to have you join us.

@Julie>> Do you write mainly for the Gatchaman fandom? Wow. I remember watching that when I was like 5 years old back in 1989. We’re still having reruns of Gatchaman here in Asia.

Or the bloodthirsty white rabbit in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.

As per copyright issues, many fanfic authors post a disclaimer at the top of their stories, stating that they do not own the characters and citing the proper owner/author. This is often coupled with a statement that the fanfic author is not making a profit and is just writing for fun.

The disclaimers serve two purposes: 1) you let the original author know that you recognize that you do not own the copyright to their stories / characters and 2) you are not making any money — nor do you expect to — in the process.

I probably should have stated that I wouldn’t recommend taking up writing fanfic unless you have a passion for it. It can be frustrating to write a great story and know that you will never see a dime or gain any glory from it. But if you are already in love with a book or TV series and the stories are in your head anyway, why not put them to paper?

And yes, it is a calculated risk to write fanfic, in that someday you could possibly get sued. But I doubt that most authors would bother chasing everyone down. As Mariella mentioned, some authors are very tolerant of fanfic. Personally, I wouldn’t write fanfic where an author has stated a preference against it. However, in my fandom, the TV series that I write about aired in the US in 1978. Not only are there no plans to bring the show back, we can’t even get the full series in Region 1 on DVD! So, it seems like a pretty low risk.

Thanks again for reading!

Hmmm.

*runs off to write a Buffy-verse fanfic*

@Adam = thanks for the explanation above. I use and learn about the internet for what I need to do. I’m not a techie except where I’ve figured out how to do a few useful things. Again, learned a ton here on this post.

The fan-fic author gets the benefits described above plus the built-in audience, and the original author can get some continuous free publicity for their original works. Too bad that one thing is going sour.

Now that it’s been mentioned here, I do recall hearing about it in the news a while ago, but I didn’t realize there was a whole “base” of fan-fic kind of stuff. I thought someone was just trying to rip her off “out of the blue.”

Very very interesting indeed. Totally learned something new here – thanks!

In my experience, there are several areas of fan fiction that are very tolerant of it. The material that I wrote was based on two television characters. The one or two times that I have used an excerpt of it as a clip for professional reasons, I have clearly indicated that it is fan fiction based on TV. It hasn’t led to anything positive, but it also hasn’t been a negative for me either. I wrote it for my enjoyment and for the benefit of my fellow fans, not because I intended it to be a stepping stone to any sort of career in fiction. I learned lots of things about how to craft a good story that pleased people, and I gained personal satisfaction in my accomplishment as well.

Thanks Julie!

And you don’t have to do the search over and over again each day to catch new stuff. The program will automatically check periodically.

Google uses them to create their huge database you search every time you go to their site.