The Stakes of Fan Fiction

Abstract

Chapter 2 analyzes the legal landscape within which books were printed and sold to show that existing laws could not regulate the rapidly expanding corpus of fan fiction. It provides a detailed look at the book trade and the ways in which authors were compensated. The chapter then investigates the range of arguments made to justify and condemn fan fiction, highlighting the competing personal, artistic, economic, and public interests in the production and dissemination of these works. Identifying the stakes of the debate exposes the complexity of the relationship between readers, authors, and publishers vis-à-vis literary characters, and reveals the difficulty of devising an intellectual property scheme that could effectively balance these competing interests.