Authorship Presentation

authorship

I think authorship is an important subject. Authorship is what it sounds like, authoring.

According to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/authorship, authorship is “2: the source (as the author) of a piece of writing, music, or art.”

In my project, I’m concentrating on the written form of authorship. Traditionally, the author of a work writes the piece, and then has total control over all aspects of it, including characters and settings.

With new media (or multimedia writing), the idea of authorship takes on a whole new set of hats, so to say. For example, in fanfiction many people author stories based on already created characters and settings. Is this negatively affecting the authorship of the original creator? I posit that fanfiction is a positive example of art, even though it is based on someone else’s work. I feel that, even though there seems to be a bit of contention about the legality of such practices, new art based on old art should be considered a compliment. I don’t feel that the authorship of new fanfiction is false, but, rather, a process that should be celebrated.

Research Proposal

A trend that is becoming more and more popular over the Internet is fanfiction (also known as fan fiction, fanfic, FF, fic, etc.). This is a context in which fans take settings and/or characters that have already been created by a professional author (in the case of books or other written works) and make the stories as they would like to see them played out. For the most part, authors are okay with this, or at least turn a ‘blind eye’ to it. There are a few who prefer not to have their stories tweaked.
One would think this was a copyright infringement problem. However, it doesn’t seem to be. There is enough of a difference concerning the projects. Plus, the fans are not writing for money. They are just making their own stories out of already existing characters. However, there have been some lawsuits about fans writing about certain characters for money. Where does the line get drawn for intellectual property?
What I also want to do is look at the issue of authorship and the idea of different modes of multimedia writing that this practice uses. These different modes can be blogs or other websites built especially for fanfiction writing. For instance, there are many different sites out there on the Internet that can cater to this sort of thing. One of the first ones was LiveJournal.com which was created in 1999. People also use other blogging sites, such as BlogSpot and Xanga.com. Not only do fans use blogging sites to write their stories, but they also have specific websites like FanFiction.Net that are all about fan fiction, as the name implies.
Another option is to look at all of the fanfiction lingo. I found a wiki site dedicated to just this and found it very fascinating.

"Fan Fiction." Wikipedia.org. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_fiction. September 10, 2009.

FanFiction.Net http://www.fanfiction.net/ September 11, 2009.

"Glossary of fan fiction terms." Wikipedia.org. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_fiction_terminology. September 10, 2009.

"Harry Potter Fan Fiction" http://www.harrypotterfanfiction.com/ September 14, 2009.