Posted by Wayne Hammond on February 02, 2000 at 17:08:25 from stetson-whammond-w95.williams.edu:
In Reply to: Re: Fan fiction and the AR Pages posted by Peter H on February 01, 2000 at 21:42:18:
Peter is quite right: the idea of having a Ransome fan fiction website should first, and indeed before anything more is said, be put to the Ransome Estate. John Bell and Christina Hardyment may well not approve of the idea, and in that event their feelings should be respected. My own opinion is that Ransome would not himself have liked anyone else writing stories which used his characters; we know that he was very possessive of them.
I also applaud Tim Johns' suggestion that any Ransome fan fiction site be separate from the TARS pages, lest it seem as that TARS was lending its imprimatur to possibly objectionable writing. But this question is academic until the Estate is consulted. Although the question of whether posting on the Web constitutes publication remains a grey area of law, it could be argued (and I myself would argue) that it does constitute publication, and it seems to me a dangerous, or at least discourteous, presumption that the Estate's blanket permission to reprint or reproduce AR's works in TARS publications also extends into the realm of derivative works.
Under U.S. and U.K. copyright law, not having a profit motive for publishing a work is no defense against a charge of copyright infringement, but only one factor to be considered in determining whether infringement has occurred.
Wayne