I've been busy reading the new comments to this post before I knuckled under to answer you... *g*
A legal defence fund is going to have to look at a number of issues. And you hit one of them on the head in your reply to me. Vidding. That is another whole new ballgame when we are talking about C&D's. And I think it is a situation that OTW would be mad to use as their first test case. It is only my personal opinion, but I think that, on a sliding scale, vidding is actually the least defencible of our fannish works.
RPF/RPS is probably, from my limited thought on the subject, the most easily defencible as long as it is clearly marked as fiction. That would hopefully get around the libel/slander angle. There is usually no copyrighted material to be poached from, and RPF writers would hopefully only need to watch out for anyone who has trademarked their public persona. KISS would be a good example of this. Write about the band members, rather than their created characters, and libel/slander is probably all you'd need to worry about.
FPF/fanfic would be the middle ground, with fic based on material no longer copyrighted being safe, and a test case needed to decide if fanfic based on a copyrighted property is transformative enough to avoid being derivative.
But vidding, much as I love the artform, has a problem in that it uses a soundtrack with little change beyond cropping, and uses existing images to tell a new story. It is in the same medium as the source material, and is therefore harder to argue it is sufficiently transformative. Personally, I think the remixing of images is enough to make it transformative, but I think it is the music that is going to do us in!
no subject
A legal defence fund is going to have to look at a number of issues. And you hit one of them on the head in your reply to me. Vidding. That is another whole new ballgame when we are talking about C&D's. And I think it is a situation that OTW would be mad to use as their first test case. It is only my personal opinion, but I think that, on a sliding scale, vidding is actually the least defencible of our fannish works.
RPF/RPS is probably, from my limited thought on the subject, the most easily defencible as long as it is clearly marked as fiction. That would hopefully get around the libel/slander angle. There is usually no copyrighted material to be poached from, and RPF writers would hopefully only need to watch out for anyone who has trademarked their public persona. KISS would be a good example of this. Write about the band members, rather than their created characters, and libel/slander is probably all you'd need to worry about.
FPF/fanfic would be the middle ground, with fic based on material no longer copyrighted being safe, and a test case needed to decide if fanfic based on a copyrighted property is transformative enough to avoid being derivative.
But vidding, much as I love the artform, has a problem in that it uses a soundtrack with little change beyond cropping, and uses existing images to tell a new story. It is in the same medium as the source material, and is therefore harder to argue it is sufficiently transformative. Personally, I think the remixing of images is enough to make it transformative, but I think it is the music that is going to do us in!
cont...