Who Owns a Thought?: The Issue of Intellectual Property
When a piece of work becomes popular enough, it is bound to have cemented itself in the minds of captivated readers all across the world. As an author, you have to ability to mold the worlds borne from your imagination into any form of your choosing, to either the dismay or the excitement of your readers. Your writing has the ability to spur on their imaginations in turn, using the world you’ve made as a foundation. From that foundation, comes fanfiction which is good, it means your writing was good enough that your readers still want to explore that world. In the case of Anne Rice, however, she was less enthused.
In 2001, following the release of her very popular series of novels, The Vampire Chronicles, Rice posted a message to her website making it abundantly clear that fanfiction of her characters would no longer be tolerated, legally or otherwise. In her wake, websites like fanfiction.net were purged of any mention of the author’s works, and the authors of the fan creations were quickly threatened with legal action.
As a direct consequence of the loss of such a chunk of internet history at once, despite what others may think, this mass deletion eventually led to the rise of Archive of Our Own, a non-profit, and one of the largest repositories for fanworks to date, dedicated to preventing such an event for occurring ever again.