Redneck Gaijin wrote:

This is something which I feel we as fanfic writers ought not to forget.

Whether or not we get sued for writing our works, we should keep in mind
that these characters, universes, etc. belong to someone else. At the least,
we owe the people who created these works which we love some measure of
respect.

YES!  I am passing familiar with copyright laws (a bowl of spaghetti is
slightly less complicated) and yes, there are no two ways about it, what
we are doing is blatantly illegal.

I am beginning to get annoyed with the generic "Usual disclaimers apply
here." or "I don't know who owns these characters, please don't sue
me."  In my mind this is laziness or even negligence, but it speaks of
very little respect for the original authors who created the characters
(whole universes actually).  It is my personal opinion (in other words,
if you disagree, don't flame the FFML about it) that if you can't bother
to at least credit the original author (by NAME) then you don't deserve
to be using their creations.

jallen9@idt.net