These are all examples of fanfics being sold commercially in a perfectly lawful fashion. "Beowulf" (the canon) is way out of copyright, and the authors aren't - one hopes! - basing their fanfics on recent media (except in the one case listed there of an authorized novelization).
I'm not saying that you need to permit SquidgeWorld creators to link to their lawful, commercially sold fanworks. I'm just saying that, when you say in your Terms of Service, "Fanfiction and other fan works are guaranteed under the 'Fair Use' clause, and are protected as long as the person posting it makes no money off of the work," that's not true for all fanworks. It's true for most fanworks, but not for all of them. In some cases (like the Beowulf novels), the right to create and distribute fanworks is protected, period, regardless as to whether the person makes money off their fanwork, because the canon is either public domain or is licensed for commercial derivative works.
There's a lot of confusion about this among fans, simply because, when professional authors write fanfic, their publishers don't usually label it as fanfic. But there's no content difference whatsoever between professional author writing a Beowulf novel that's published by a Big Press, and a fan uploading their own Beowulf novel to SquidgeWorld. And now that professional authors are getting a lot more candid in public about the origins of their novels and stories ("I wrote this as a challengefic in a fanfic contest!"), it's becoming much more obvious to everyone that some professional novels are simply fanfic that can be legally published and sold.
So that's why I was suggesting that, instead of that sentence about Fair Use, you simply say that you want to keep the fanworks portions of SquidgeWorld noncommercial. I don't think you need to elaborate upon the very complex legal nature of fanworks. I think it would take a savvy lawyer to do that!
(I hope I'm not making you bleery-eyed with all this. I didn't mean to spend so much of your time!)
no subject
"I need to move it (and a couple other equivalent items) to 'Other Media'."
Thank you for your help with that!
"Can you give me an example so I can understand better?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_Beowulf#Novels_based_on_Beowulf
These are all examples of fanfics being sold commercially in a perfectly lawful fashion. "Beowulf" (the canon) is way out of copyright, and the authors aren't - one hopes! - basing their fanfics on recent media (except in the one case listed there of an authorized novelization).
I'm not saying that you need to permit SquidgeWorld creators to link to their lawful, commercially sold fanworks. I'm just saying that, when you say in your Terms of Service, "Fanfiction and other fan works are guaranteed under the 'Fair Use' clause, and are protected as long as the person posting it makes no money off of the work," that's not true for all fanworks. It's true for most fanworks, but not for all of them. In some cases (like the Beowulf novels), the right to create and distribute fanworks is protected, period, regardless as to whether the person makes money off their fanwork, because the canon is either public domain or is licensed for commercial derivative works.
There's a lot of confusion about this among fans, simply because, when professional authors write fanfic, their publishers don't usually label it as fanfic. But there's no content difference whatsoever between professional author writing a Beowulf novel that's published by a Big Press, and a fan uploading their own Beowulf novel to SquidgeWorld. And now that professional authors are getting a lot more candid in public about the origins of their novels and stories ("I wrote this as a challengefic in a fanfic contest!"), it's becoming much more obvious to everyone that some professional novels are simply fanfic that can be legally published and sold.
So that's why I was suggesting that, instead of that sentence about Fair Use, you simply say that you want to keep the fanworks portions of SquidgeWorld noncommercial. I don't think you need to elaborate upon the very complex legal nature of fanworks. I think it would take a savvy lawyer to do that!
(I hope I'm not making you bleery-eyed with all this. I didn't mean to spend so much of your time!)