At 06:17 PM 5/6/97 -0500, Zen wrote:

However, if you had asked for permission, but were denied, but you STILL

went

ahead to write the fanfic using the author's works, then the author, if

they

value their copyright and works, will be forced to sue the person in court.

If the original author did not, then he/she would lose rights to the
copyright. Legally, that is. ;)

       I think this also means that if an author wants any single fanfic
       removed from the internet, they must ask that _all_ fanfics are
       remomoved from _all_ sites in order to protect their copyright.

No.  As long as they can maintain some measure of plausible deniability,
they can ignore them or not, as they choose.  It is when it can be
documented that the creator has failed to protect a copyright that they
have a risk.

If nothing calls specific attention to a fic, then they can do whatever
they want - prosecute or not - but the *requirement* to prosecute is not
present.

   Are you sure you're not confusing copyright with trademark?  Trademark
must be protected, but I don't think copyright has the same 'guard it or
lose it' quality. 

   What falls under copyright is not easy to define.  Almost any story that
has a boy who changes sex when hit with water will probably fall within the
Ranma copyright.  OTOH, it would be much harder to say that a story about a
high school girl who taken to magical planet/plane/universe and finds that
she has mystical powers violates any copyright just by having this plot
line.  Would any story about a high school student who was an esper and had
two girlfriends be a violation of KOR's copyright?  What if he had three
girlfriends? What if he was gay and had two boyfriends?  Because we
explicitly label the stories as Ranma or MKR or whatever, using the same
names and building on plots from anime or manga, it is very likely, but by
no means certain that a fanfic automatically violates copyright.  A story
such as Ranma Narrabundah could be considered a satire which affords
greater free speech protection under American law (how is it in Australia?).  

  Additionally, although a Usenet newsgroup would be considered a public
forum, the limited precedents suggest that mailing lists are not considered
such, so they would gain some protection (at least in the US) for fanfic
stories exchanged within the ML from being considered as violation of
copyright. 

  Despite the Berne convention (which I dislike for several reasons),
copyright law as it applies to computer networks is far from settled.

                                                                 dml