There’s been a bit of noise on Tumblr lately about commissioning or selling copies of fanfiction in the same vein as fanart, and this week there were a few rulings in courts that take us another few steps toward establishing secure legal footing for such a thing.
The full story is on the OTW’s website: http://transformativeworks.org/news/important-developments-fair-use-cases
While most authors don’t have much of a problem with artists doing a bit of business with fanart—which clearly isn’t attempting to encroach on their territory, since it’s a whole different medium—many of them remain somewhere between uncomfortable and outraged at the concept of the same thing happening with fanfiction, for various reasons ranging from a sense of creative violation to financial concerns. And indeed, if this becomes a thing, it could severely impact the potential value of franchising a creative property, a la Star Trek novels.
On the other hand, in a world where the copyright threshold seems likely to stand firm at 1927, the definition of ‘fair use’ and ‘transformative works’ needs to broaden dramatically if we don’t want to see the bounds of the cultural imagination crushed under legal restrictions.