Before the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey burned up bestseller lists and made author E.L. James the fastest-selling author in history, a large numb

Gift Logic: Labors of love flourish online under fandom’s social norms

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2021-05-22 03:28:32

Before the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey burned up bestseller lists and made author E.L. James the fastest-selling author in history, a large number of people had already read the novel for free. The only difference was that in the original version, main characters Ana Steele and Christian Grey were named “Bella Swann” and “Edward Cullen”—characters from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels.

Master of the Universe, originally published online by James under a pseudonym, was a work of alternate universe Twilight fanfiction. Fanfiction is a type of transformative work—that is, a new creative work that is transformative of some original media. Imagine a story about the continuing adventures of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, though in the case of alternate universe fanfiction, perhaps Kirk is a barista and Spock is a veterinarian. And fanfiction (along with other fanworks, like fan art) is the basis of a huge, thriving, and long-standing online community (fandom) that has actually existed since long before it moved online. Master of the Universe was part of this community—until it wasn’t.

As Bethan Jones describes in an analysis of fandom debates around “pulling to publish” fanfiction commercially, criticism of Fifty Shades of Grey focused in part on the violation of a strong community norm against profiting from fanfiction. This norm stems in part from a desire to protect the status of transformative works as fair use rather than illegal copyright infringement. The “four factor” test to determine whether a use of copyrighted material is “fair use” considers the effects of the transformative work on the marketplace for the original work—by avoiding selling fanfiction, fans have hoped to cement their transformations firmly as fair use. In the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, the book is so far removed from any elements of Twilight that copyright is almost certainly not an issue (though there are more recent, fascinating cases of this particular deep legal question).