Jenn's World

Last post for the day. Time to go do something semi-useful.

A fan tribute to the Lord of the Rings movies was released on Sunday. It's 40 minutes long and entitled the "Hunt for Gollum." You can read about it here.

The question is, how legal is it to use another author's/moviemaker's characters/world in a not-for-profit way? It's probably not something worth suing over, but it's definitely in the gray area, unless it's a parody.

I have mixed feelings about fan fiction. So often, it's just plain poorly written, that it's hard to feel overly threatened by it. (And sometimes, fun results: see "badfic," definitely not all work safe). As an author, I think I'll be more amused than anything if my characters end up in strange, non-healthy relationships on the back of someone's web site. I mean, heck, at least someone's reading and caring about those characters, right? And I seem to remember writing a Raistlin fanfic in my angst-changed pre-teen days, so it's not like I have much right to preach (although I never showed it to anybody, thank god. The mortification would have been deadly).

But on the other hand, I wouldn't want some fan fictionist who happens to guess the way my plot is going to sue me for plagiarizing his/her idea. Well, I doubt that would happen, since they were plagiarizing my idea in the first place, but you never know.

I would probably implement a don't ask, don't tell policy and avoid it until all my books were done. Then, I might invite the really good fan fiction writers over to my house for tea.

Here's the preview for Hunt for Gollum. It looks extremely well made in terms of cinematography, though I'm kind of sick of pretty women with pointy ears. I'll pull up some popcorn and watch it this week.

Other amusing fanfic here. Good night moon mixed with the Bourne Supremacy. Hilarious!