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.