Male-male marriage in Sinophone and Anglophone Harry Potter danmei and slash

The aim of this study is to compare Sinophone and Anglophone fan fiction consisting of female-oriented male-male romance: danmei and slash, respectively. To increase comparability, we analysed Harry Potter fan fiction in which the characters Harry and Draco are married. Male-male marriage was selected because our online Sinophone and Anglophone BL fandom surveys indicate this to be the most popular story element of the nine options we provided. We analysed five stories originally written in Chinese and five originally written in English which subsequently had been fan-translated into Chinese. Using Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) we found some robust patterns. In contrast to the Anglophone fiction, the Sinophone tended to: stress the importance of family approval for the marriage; incorporate a wedding ceremony; employ clearly gendered roles between partners; utilise extended, as opposed to nuclear, families; and showed the couple to produce children, particularly boys. Hence, the stories mirror the relative social conservatism and social liberalism of their cultures of origin. However, in reading and writing such danmei young Chinese women are still pushing at the boundaries of the traditional family

Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellectual Property Protection

As long as there have been fans, there has been fan fiction. There seems to be a fundamental human need to tell additional stories about the characters after the book, series, play or movie is over. But developments in information technology and copyright law have put these fan stories at risk of collision with the content owners’ intellectual property rights. Fan fiction has long been a nearly invisible form of outsider art, but over the past decade it has grown exponentially in volume and in legal importance. Because of its nature, authorship, and underground status, fan fiction stands at an intersection of key issues regarding property, sexuality, and gender. In Fan Fiction and Copyright, author Aaron Schwabach examines various types of fan-created content and asks whether and to what extent they are protected from liability for copyright infringement. Professor Schwabach discusses examples of original and fan works from a wide range of media, genres, and cultures. From Sherlock Holmes to Harry Potter, fictional characters, their authors, and their fans are sympathetically yet realistically assessed. Fan Fiction and Copyright looks closely at examples of three categories of disputes between authors and their fans: Disputes over the fans’ use of copyrighted characters, disputes over online publication of fiction resembling copyright work, and in the case of J.K. Rowling and a fansite webmaster, a dispute over the compiling of a reference work detailing an author's fictional universe. Offering more thorough coverage of many such controversies than has ever been available elsewhere, and discussing fan works from the United States, Brazil, China, India, Russia, and elsewhere, Fan Fiction and Copyright advances the understanding of fan fiction as transformative use and points the way toward a safe harbor\u9d for fan fiction

Legal Issues in Online Fan Fiction

Formally published content represents a tiny fraction of all created content. There are far more outsider creators (including fan authors) than there are insiders. A sufficiently well realized fictional world is one to which fans will want to return on self-guided adventures: fans explore their favorite worlds by creating fan works, and economics inexorably dictates that fans are more numerous than insider creators. The success of, say, Harry Potter depends on an audience of billions. Creating and sharing fan works is an important part of the process of enjoying a work of fiction; the ratio of Harry Potter fan works to canonical Harry Potter texts is probably over a hundred thousand to one. This chapter examines the unclear copyright status of fan works, beginning with an overview of fan works, then examines those works under U.S. copyright law, and finally seeks possible accommodation that can serve the interests of all

Fan Works and the Law: Genre, Distribution, Reproduction

We might think that fictional worlds are, or at first appear to be, bounded by the works that create them. Once the reader has reached the last page of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the story is over: or is it? In fact, Pride and Prejudice has spawned countless adaptations and reinterpretations. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy reprise their difficult courtship on the screen in the persons of Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, or as Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfayden, or Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, or as countless others. They have made it to Bollywood as Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Martin Henderson and, returning to their print origins, they have battled the undead in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). Wickham has been charged with murder in Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), while Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy and others have explored their kinkier sides in Pride and Promiscuity (2003). Mr. Darcy, sans Elizabeth, has found himself unexpectedly transported to the twenty-first-century romantic novel in Seducing Mr. Darcy (2008). And there are over 3,500 Pride and Prejudice stories on fanfiction.net

Fan Works and the Environmental Law of Copyright

Ideas and expression of those ideas are natural resources, and copyright law should take that into account more fully than it does. As copyright law struggles for balance in the newly realigned discourse in which everyone is a potentially equal participant, it may be useful to apply resource management law concepts from resources in the physical world to their noöspheric equivalents. The connection between property in the physical environment and property in the noöspheric environment has been explored as metaphor, but rarely as an underlying legal reality. The most commonly applied of these is the idea of the information commons; the increasingly outdated concept of the “tragedy of the commons” has been used to provide a theoretical underpinning for the economic approach to international environmental law while at the same time providing a useful rhetorical device – “the closing of the information commons” – in intellectual property law, and especially in copyright law. As environmental law moves away from the idea that shared use of a commons is a tragedy, perhaps intellectual property law should follow suit. The physical environment falls into the realm of, or is at least apportioned by humans as, real and personal property, while the noösphere falls into the realm of intellectual property. The allocation of property interests in the products of human creativity involves, as with other forms of property, a bundle of rights. Historically this allocation has been structured in ways that undervalue the creative efforts of women and people of color, a characteristic it unfortunately shares with the law of real property and other areas of property law. This article examines copyright law as a problem in natural resource allocation by focusing on the preparation of derivative works, and in particular outsider works such as fan works. Everyone has the potential to create original works, and nearly everyone has access to an online platform on which to publish those works. The potential for injustice comes from the raw material we have to work with. The ownership of the original works on which derivative works are based is increasingly concentrated, while the public domain, much like the high seas, has been diminished by the legal allocation of greater rights to formerly unowned property. This article looks at some theoretical approaches to natural resource allocation problems and considers how they might apply to copyright and derivative works. It accepts that fan works have value both as discourse regarding the original work and as creative works in their own right, and ultimately reaches an optimistic conclusion: Fan works may be a way for the audience – and especially for historically marginalized subsets of the audience, including trans people and people of color – to reclaim and redeem works otherwise flawed either internally or by association with the original author

Reclaiming Copyright from the Outside In: What the Downfall Hitler Meme Means for Transformative Works, Fair Use, and Parody

Continuing advances in consumer information technology have made video editing, once difficult, into a relatively simple matter. The average consumer can easily create and edit videos, and post them online. Inevitably many of these posted videos incorporate existing copyrighted content, raising questions of infringement, derivative versus transformative use, fair use, and parody. This article looks at several such works, with its main focus on one category of examples: the Downfall Hitler meme. Downfall Hitler videos take as their starting point a particular sequence - Hitler's breakdown rant - from the 2004 German film Der Untergang [Downfall in the US]. The user then adds English subtitles, creating a video that is, or is intended to be, humorous, with the humor largely derived from the incongruous and anachronistic content of the subtitles as well as from the inherently transgressive use of the original content for comic purposes. This article examines whether the Downfall videos, and other similar works, are more transformative than derivative under 17 USC section 107, as well as whether the use of the copyrighted material, even if otherwise derivative, is fair use under 17 USC section 107. The article also considers whether the videos are parody within the meaning of Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994)

Publications for the PhD by Published Work "Copyright Law and Fan Works"

Publications for the PhD by Published Work "Copyright Law and Fan Works" https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/w257w/copyright-law-and-fan-work