Creating something out of nothing, is the virtual basis for humaity. Making new life, putting up a skyscraper, designing an aqueduct, playing music, writing a story, telling a story, are all part of the creative process enjoyed by people. For many people, this process is keyed by the imagination, in order to invoate, or invent that which hasn't been done. Since humanity has been around a long time however, this process often also occurs because someone was inspired by someone else's previous work. The problem becomes though, where does the fine line lie between actual inovation, and downright theft of an idea?
While creativity itself is a broad category, as evident by the act of destruction that in itself is unique for every event, the act we will focus on today, is the design of popular art, speficially fanfiction and fanart. The reason why this is our focus, lies in the inspiration of the author. First though, what is fanfiction (fanfic for short)? Fanfic is the art of taking popularized media, such as a favorite tv show, movie, story, or other artwork, and creating something new inside its universe. Usually such creation is a short story set in that magical universe, or a piece of art on the characters or things of said exsistence.
Fanfic itself, has been around for a long time, although the term and the genre as we know it, really came into itself just in the 60's and 70's at the height of liberalism and creationism. Prior to that, fanfic was mostly the retelling of popular stories from a parent to a child, where they change the story ever so slightly. Lifewise today's "fanfic" is still often a more personal form of creation, where one inserts themselves into the story. Thus many such pieces are never viewed beyond the artist's own hands.
However, starting in the 60's and especially in the 70's, fanfic began to rear its head into the daylight of society. Largely due to the popularity of expression, artists began to come together and promote magazines called Zines. Home made magazines, Zines were largely sold around conventions of fans. At the time, and even now, these conventions were also because of the popularity of science fiction.
These days with the advent of the internet, and cable tv, fanfic has literally expanded at light speed across the world. More and more people have learned how to become self-published, and in the process released their creative spark upon a world that might have shunned them from being to individualistic before. Herein lies the problem.
Prior to the advent of zines, and especially the internet, such fanfic was largely ignorant of other fanfic. People might write a story similar to another, all beacause they didn't know of each other. Now though that others know and often see each others works, the problem of orginality falls into a murky water of ethics and morality.
Actually, you could even go beyond that and say that fanfic itself is an immoral thing as it is artwork base off of someone else's creation, and largely done without their permission. However, in most cases the orginial creator sees this form of expression as a tribute to the popularity and acceptance of their own work. Frequently they also then ignore such fanfic, so as to not become inspired from the grey copyright complications that might arise from the fanfic. Unfortunately when they do pay attention, sometimes unforseen problems, such as disagreements, general dis-like, or the fanfic artists attempts to capitilize on the work, can cause said same legal issues to arise, but usually in reverse.
Either way, fanfic and fanart are a largely tolerated being, pandering more to the unseen consumer artist then the creator artist(s). Thus, ethically, unless the creator blantantly challenges the use of their material, and as long as no money is made off of the fanfic, ethically the fanartist is fine to do with the universe as he likes. Often this either means putting the characters into sexual situations for adult purposes, or the "Mary-Sue" style of sticking oneself into the storyline just for the purposes of playing the hero and or villain.
The real problem is, once you've accepted fanfic as imitation art off a popular art, whats to stop some imitating the imitation? And is it ehtical or moral for the 2nd party to feel wronged by the 3rd party?
Lets take an example, and why I brought this up today. Star Trek, a very popular sci-fi series, has spawned its own culture and huge volumes of fanart and fanfiction. Personally I have tried my hand at writing a new fan-series inside the large universe. As part of the process I invented my own ship, and crew, but attempted to keep myself within certain boundaries that I saw and accepted. Make the ship look real, don't override the accepted cannon of the universe, don't use any previous characters, and make it good enough that people might question why keeping it offscreen. So far, I'm 3 out 4, though the last will probably take me awhile as this writer block is hindering finishing not only one epsiode, but more to the series.
Anyways, as part of the process that lead to this fanseries, I designed a new ship, never before used in the universe. I designed based off three known designs, and one therotical design, thus making the ship possible within the universe I had envisioned. Since I like designing starships, and such I felt a little pride in what I had done within the boundaries that I had set. Such pride that I submitted the design to a fan run website
www.shipschematics.net about such designs. I considered my design to be better then 90% of the other designs there, and it made me feel good. Unfortunately, the site dropped offline not long afterwards and it dropped from my mind. A year and half later and I was doing some searching and found that the site had returned once more. At this time I was more actively considering writing the series to go along with the ship and did a search to check my spelling of the submitted craft.
Eventually I found the design, albeit slightly mispelled. Nothing major to worry about there, no need to even correct it. However I did find something that did worry me. Apparently someone else had seen the design, liked it, pulled it off the website, and then proceded to edit the design. I was shocked, not because it had been edited, but because when they did, they had just slapped a wierd pair of half nacelles (something not even inside the accepted universe), didn't even bother really matching it with the line, such that it looks out of place, and submitted it with their name attached.
Initially my first thoughts were, "How dare they!", however as I thought about it, and the whole morality of fanfic to begin with, I calmed down, and started to wonder, why my design? The first part of this was to determine how and when this had taken place, it was then I got my second shock. The person in question hadn't just done this with my design, they had done this with a couple of dozen designs. They had blantantly added some pieces of psuedo Star Trek stuff to each ship, sometimes the same items, sometimes something different, hadn't bothered to match the designs, the flow, or even the tech, and had submitted each and every design with their name attached. Thus they were now in the ship database where someone would almost invariably see their name, somewhere.
Unfortunately with no way to contact this artist, I can only begin to speculate why he did this. Most likely he is minor variant on what is called a "Troll", someone who does what they do, in order to get attention, usually by angering a 3rd party. Some consider themselves artists in how they go about doing this, others not as such. In this gentlemen's case though, I still feel a little wronged by what he has done to my design.
The final question though is; In this wierd, grey area of art, imitating art, imitating art, what is the ethical and moral right that I have, or anyone has, to a 3rd party changing my work, without my permission. Should I be allowed to feel angered, or sad, or should I just not care?