The  basic  ideas  behind  fandom’s  treatment  of  copyright  may
track  to  fair  use  and  basic  copyright  law,  but  it  tracks  even  more closely  to  something  else. Consider  three  key  pieces together:  the freedom  to  create  derivative  works,  the  requirement  that  the  new work  be  not-for-profit,  and  the  requirement  that  the  work  be attributed to the appropriate sources.  This could be a description of the  most  frequently  adopted  type  of  Creative  Commons  license: Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike. (…) The  terms  of  a  CC  license  might  seem  intuitively  familiar  to fan  fiction  writers,  as  the  restrictions  are  the  same  ones  that  they apply to their own work.

Fiesler, Casey. 2007. “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Fandom: How Existing Social Norms Can Help Shape the next Generation of User-Generated Content.” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law 10: 729–62.

I love the connection made between fanwork-related norms and CC licenses here.

By the way, it’s really interesting how you can tell when an article is “older” (in this case, a mere 10 years old) just by the way it describes the norms of English-language media fandom. Just like Scott’s work from 2009, this article was written at a time when involving money in fanworks exchange was much more controversial than it is today. Things evolve fast.

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