xiphias: (Default)
[personal profile] xiphias
So I'm going to post it here.

DIS? CLAIMER:

I did not create all of the characters which I'm using here, although, of course, I created my take on them. Most of the time, when people write fan fiction, they include here a note as to whose characters they actually are, and note that they are being used without permission, and without an intention to make a claim to said characters. However, while I can tell you that Fran Striker was instrumental in creating the core characters, it was done as a work-for-hire. I can further say that, after much bouncing around, the legal rights to the intellectual property currently might sit with a company called Classic Media, or they might not, because various pieces of it have been sold to various companies.

But the MORAL rights of the characters? That's another question entirely. Perhaps the actors who played the characters have rights to them, especially since they continued to appear as those characters, and were beloved as them.

In the end, I claim only the same right to these characters as any child playing in his or her yard with sticks as six-guns has. My toys here are words, and typing, but I am nonetheless playing the same games of make-believe as a child playing with action figures in her room, or running around outside yelling, "Bang! You're dead!" "No, I'm not! You missed!"

I claim no greater right to these characters than that, but no lesser, either.

(no subject)

Date: 2010-08-31 10:03 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] browngirl.livejournal.com
Well, woot!

(no subject)

Date: 2010-08-31 10:07 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] vvalkyri.livejournal.com
aiee how many chapters? (they're all showing up in my flist one after another. )

(no subject)

Date: 2010-08-31 11:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] xiphias.livejournal.com
Five. That's how many I wrote. And I posted them in one chunk.

(no subject)

Date: 2010-09-01 12:39 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] greenlily.livejournal.com
yay! I will read it ASAP, right now I'm fighting with a sea chanty. :)

(no subject)

Date: 2010-09-01 12:47 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] papersky.livejournal.com
You have the absolute right to do that in your room, with anybody's characters. But doing it in public is different. If the kid were to be videoed playing and the video posted, that would be a copyright issue.

Copyright is important, it's there to encourage people to feel safe to publish things.

(no subject)

Date: 2010-09-01 01:10 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] xiphias.livejournal.com
I certainly agree with your last sentence and the general conclusion. This particular fandom is a particularly weird example, though.

Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels actually chose to live their lives as the characters they portrayed, to a certain extent, and to use their own lives to inspire the ideals their characters espoused. As such, the fandom largely felt that they, more than anyone else, "owned" the characters. Because they chose to be those characters.

After the intellectual property rights changed hands several times, in 1981, in advance of a new movie, the people coming out with the movie sued Moore to make him stop portraying the character.

As you can imagine, the fans of the character rebelled, and the movie tanked at the box office, because the feeling was that Moore had more of a right to the character than the people who'd bought it.

For the most part, copyright is an awkward tool, but one that generally manages to protect the moral rights of the creators. It doesn't do it well, but it's the tool we have. But this is a fandom that generations of children have grown up with, and there's a sense that, at this point, the moral rights of the characters are generally owned -- that these are characters who are part of, specifically, American culture.

At some point, if characters become so much part of a society that they help DEFINE that society, it seems that they have become something bigger than can be really dealt with in any simple manner. These characters are aspirational; they exist to define Right and Wrong in a specifically American sense, and to embody what America could be. They embody many things that, in reality, went wrong with America, but in ways that show how those things COULD have been done right, and still could be done today.

Which is why, while I am generally in favor of copyright, I find these particular characters to be a weird case. There is no one person that you can point to and say, "This person created these characters" -- they developed over generations. And, in a very real sense, they were developed by generations.

(no subject)

Date: 2010-09-01 02:19 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] xiphias.livejournal.com
In any case, regardless of the legal or moral status of fanfiction in general and this fanfiction in specific, I made sure to label it as fanfiction specifically to warn you away from it.

I feel that this is a distinct enough work that I could even make an argument that it's original and not even fanfic -- but it's close enough that you'd be deeply uncomfortable reading it, so I made sure to label it and LJ cut it so you could avoid it.

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