Readers and writers

[owlmoose]

So I know that fanficrants can be a scary place, but this post is actually generating some interesting discussion, particularly in this thread.

Who owns a story? The writer? The reader? A writer of course can pull down any story at any time, but do they have the "right" to demand that every copy of the story be deleted? (From the Google cache, from the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine, from people's harddrives, etc.) Does a reader have the "right" to be able to find the story again? Do they have the "right" to download it, to pass it on to friends, to write their own fanfic based on it? Complex questions, I think.

I tend to think that, once a story is posted to the Internet, we lose control over what happens to it. It's out there, in the world, free to be read, reviewed, linked, copied, downloaded, fanficced. Why should we expect more control over our writings than traditionally published authors? A professional writer could never demand the return every publically available copy of a book. Once published, it's out there. Even if such a thing were possible, the story would live on, in the minds of the people who had read it.

Personally, I tend to think of a story as a collaboration between its writer and its readers. The writer creates the story, but it doesn't really come to life until someone else reads it. Perhaps this is a part of why we all adore reviews so much: a review is proof that someone read, that the story did indeed take on that life of its own. Maybe not the life we inteded for it, but a life all the same. (I think this is true for all stories, not just fanfic, although of course the feedback loop is more immediate in fandom.)

Anyway. Just my random thoughts on a Thursday evening. What do you all think?

Comments

[owlmoose.livejournal.com]

I certainly understand that there can be good reasons to take down an archive, and I don't particularly agree with the entitlement that comes through in some of the comments in that thread. I can see the frustration, though, if you didn't save a copy of a story you adored and then you go back and all the files are gone, and so is the author's site and all their contact information. And that can happen on the Internet, even sometimes when the author didn't intend it.

I don't know how much experience you have with ffrants, but I wouldn't take any opinions expressed there too seriously, or as particularly representative of fandom. I mostly found this post interesting as a jumping off point.

[rabbitprint.livejournal.com]

I think the word, 'right,' tends to cause definate problems in something like this. When you start bringing that sort of thing in, it always seems that people get really adamant of what they feel their 'natural rights' are (or aren't.) And then it goes downhill from there.

I guess what bothers me the most about that thread is how easily people jumped to scathing, negative conclusions about anyone who chose to remove themselves from archive. It's like.... give them the luxury of the doubt, mm?

[owlmoose.livejournal.com]

I think the word, 'right,' tends to cause definate problems in something like this.

I suspect you are correct about that.

I've found that the quickness with which we assume the absolute worst possible motivation for an action to be a problem in all Internet debate. We do tend to jump to the least flattering conclusions about the reasons for someone's actions. I don't know why that happens so often online, but it really seems to.