Is fanfic, in fact, plagiarism? I know it's illegal-ish in many ways, but isn't plagiarism actually stealing people's words (and maybe altering some details like names and eye and hair colour, but basically stealing them)?
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We all seem to be mixing apples and oranges here as regards copyright law (which I know *nothing* about, so please don't ask and make my skull explode), the academic definition of plagiarism (which are administrative rules set by a private body--i.e. a university--and carry no legal weight or, one could argue, much extra-academic significance), and the common-sense notion that you do not copy several pages out of an obscure novel, claim you wrote them and hope to God nobody else on fanfiction.net happens to recognize the book in question. (If I've got the nature of this whole cause celebre correct, I haven't been following it that closely.)
Personally, I'd say that fanfic is a derivative work--much like, say, parody--and that as such it differs from the outright, uncredited theft of someone else's dialogue and ideas then presented as your own (as someone else pointed out, that's why fanfic is supposed to be presented bristling with disclaimers; they won't save you from a charge of copyright violation, but they are an upfront attempt to acknowledge you're not working from an original source). But that's not a legal/philosophical definition, it's just an opinion.
Please don't now proceed to ask me whether, say, Shakespeare taking plots and characters outright from obscure medieval troubadours and poets and constructing entire plays around those uncredited sources would make him the world's most famous plagiarist, because then my poor skull really *will* explode. ;-)
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Personally, I'd say that fanfic is a derivative work--much like, say, parody--and that as such it differs from the outright, uncredited theft of someone else's dialogue and ideas then presented as your own (as someone else pointed out, that's why fanfic is supposed to be presented bristling with disclaimers; they won't save you from a charge of copyright violation, but they are an upfront attempt to acknowledge you're not working from an original source). But that's not a legal/philosophical definition, it's just an opinion.
Please don't now proceed to ask me whether, say, Shakespeare taking plots and characters outright from obscure medieval troubadours and poets and constructing entire plays around those uncredited sources would make him the world's most famous plagiarist, because then my poor skull really *will* explode. ;-)