Fandom Whiplash

"I've yet to figure out the justification for some of these moral shades of grey that pop up in fandom. It is okay to steal from the producers. It is okay to plagiarize from professionals. It is OH MY OM! WRONG! to plagiarize from your fellow fan and wrong to write derivative fiction based on their original characters. It is okay to profit from fandom for product. It is not okay to profit from service. It is wrong to archive a person's fiction without permission but it is perfectly okay for Google and The Internet Archive to archive it, long after they have removed it themselves. It is wrong for a fan fiction archive to claim copyright on your fan fiction but web service providers like MSN, Geocities, Tripod, if they were to claim copyright to everything posted, it is okay. It is okay to threaten other fen with lawsuits but TPTB should realize their greatness and not threaten them."

From a 2005 discussion about RPS fandom.

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