Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellectual Property Protection

As long as there have been fans, there has been fan fiction. There seems to be a fundamental human need to tell additional stories about the characters after the book, series, play or movie is over. But developments in information technology and copyright law have put these fan stories at risk of collision with the content owners’ intellectual property rights.

Fan fiction has long been a nearly invisible form of outsider art, but over the past decade it has grown exponentially in volume and ...