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This is in French, but it is about a debate on fanfiction, in which authors hold varying views on this phemonemon.

In my opinion, they haven't launched a debate so much as joined other commercially published authors such as Anne Rice and Lee Goldberg in endlessly repeating the same extremely wobbly arguments against amateur writing. They misunderstand intellectual property and the creative process in a variety of ways -e.g. by assuming that somebody using a character they created is the same as somebody stealing a physical object, and by labeling their creations 'original' while dismissing fanfic writers as people unable to come up with good ideas of their own. Not impressive at all, but unfortunately, big-name authors decrying the defilement of their creations by supposed thieving amateur pornographers make good media copy :P This post does a rather good rebuttal of the arguments usually raised against fanfic by enumerating commercial works that are just as "derivative" as fic: http://bookshop.dreamwidth.org/999259.html

To tell the truth, I'm not very knowledgeable in this field of copyrights issues. I'm just starting and need to read more. So, when I was tipped about these blog posts by people on Facebook, I thought it might be interesting for you and others. But apparently, from what you're saying, they are just going over and over the same old arguments. I'll check your link and we'll keep it for later thinking. ;-)

It is an excellent post! I love the section about Virgile being a fanboy from Homer! I had to translate and learn Chant 6 of the Aeneid for my final high school exam! She could have added that Dante Alighieri is a huge fanboy of Virgile (he actually considers him as his spiritual master, despite the fact that more than 1000 years separates them both).

Oh, it's a very interesting topic -my favourite ;) I'm doing a lot of research on the position of fanworks in cultural production at the moment. IMHO, published authors who rail against fanfic seem to be rather hung-up on an author-as-God idea that is terribly outdated today, has never had much basis in reality in the first place, and does nothing at all to promote creativity. Also, the arguments about the supposed harm fanfic inflicts are just plain silly. There certainly isn't any economic harm (ficcers are your biggest fans and very likely to buy your products and attract new readers), and somebody using your character is not the same as stealing your car because your character remains intact and available to you no matter how many fics are written (or how sexually explicit these fics are). Er, I'm going to stop before I go on a five-page rant. Have some more links: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007464.html is good and short, as is http://www.kristinabusse.com/cv/research/ip09.html (and many other articles on that site). http://www.tushnet.com/legalfictions.pdf talks about fanfic and copyright in more detail.

Thank you for all these links. I'm keeping them as well!

No prob! I'll send more if you're interested (Gabaldon generated a huge amount of intelligent rebuttal posts in the last couple of days), but let me know, I don't want to bury you in readings just because it's my personal favourite ranting topic ;)

Well, that would be with pleasure. I might not be able to read everything through and through immediately, but I'll keep the urls in my Diigo and return to it later. But I'm definitely interested in those issues. I also have a colleague who's into this as well, so I'll forward these resources to her. And she is supposed to write a dissertation about Shakespeare, but she doesn't know what! She feels that everything that could be written about him has been written. Maybe, there would be something for her to dig in these.