Copyright laws unreasonable with FanFic

It’s your birthday, and you sit down at your favorite restaurant. After your meal, the wait… It’s your birthday, and you sit down at your favorite restaurant. After your meal, the wait staff, hostesses and even some cooks from the kitchen surround you, and you know what’s coming next. It’s the embarrassing birthday celebration brought to your very table. They begin to sing a goofy little birthday song.

Ever wonder why they never sing the traditional birthday song, the one you’ve heard over a dozen times with your friends and family? The reason for their goofy rendition of “Happy Birthday to You” is that you can’t sing the original song in public without buying a permit from the copyright owner. That’s a little-known fact I learned while reading “Owning Culture” by Kembrew McLeod for a communication class.

Prior to that, I knew what a copyright was, but I never knew the extent that owners of copyrights go to in order to protect their investments. Some of the measures they take are pretty ridiculous. For example, in McLeod’s book, he talks about the owners of “Happy Birthday to You” attacking the Girl Scouts of America for not paying royalties while singing their song around a campfire.

A more recent brush with copyright issues came when I learned about something called Fan Fiction. For those of you who haven’t been exposed to this, Fan Fiction, or FanFic, refers to the creative writing of amateur authors using characters from movies, television and popular culture, putting them into new situations and creating new plots.

There are tons of stories that include such characters as Zach and the gang from “Saved by the Bell” and Harry Potter and his sidekick Ron Weasley from the Harry Potter series. Some writers even create different plot twists for movies such as “10 Things I Hate About You.”

The original authors of the works are being called out because they believe that the FanFic authors are committing copyright infringement. There are some authors who have taken this literary phenomenon as a compliment. One author even supported this by writing the first few pages of an upcoming novel and posting it on the Internet so fans could fill in the rest.

Because violating copyright laws concerns money, there are few supportive authors. Some authors and copyright owners feel that FanFic contributors should pay for the right to use certain elements of different media.

FanFic isn’t like taking a track from an old song and putting it into a new song – like half of Diddy’s musical output, for which he indeed does pay. In the case of FanFic, these stories aren’t used for monetary gain. They are displayed on different Web sites, but there is no cost to sign on or read any of these stories. The authors aren’t writing the stories for anything but entertainment purposes.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think that copyright laws have a purpose. Copyright laws should be enforced in order to keep people from unlawfully copying material for personal or monetary gain and to keep the creators from losing money.

For instance, downloading movies on the Internet cuts into the profits of the movie studios. As much as I would like to say that the law should allow this because studios make more money on one movie than I will probably ever make in a lifetime, this is illegal in every sense.

One problem with copyright laws is that punishing the little man for wanting to use a main character such as Zach Morris from “Saved by the Bell,” as opposed to a static character such as Kelly’s dad, in a short story is unreasonable. FanFic is a creative outlet for writers that enables them to use their favorite characters from different media. These writers who experiment with characters that have laid a literary foundation, do it for the love of writing, not for money. Writers should support other writers in developing their craft.

The original authors and copyright owners have the right to be mad, but they shouldn’t see FanFic as a major financial threat. I suggest they read some of the stories, because they are not groundbreaking works of literature. Most don’t even compare to the original work. It’s merely an exercise tantamount to an assignment one would receive in a college fiction writing class. Who knows, the original authors might find inspiration from one of them for their next best-selling novel. Then, the tables may be turned.

E-mail Jennifer your FanFic stories at mjk18@pitt.edu.