Faramir Fiction Archive

Raven22372, Geale – you’re very sweet, both of you! Thank you very much for your words of encouragement.

Everybody has their own choices to make, and I’m not berating anyone for their choices, I just want to make FaramirFiction’s stance clear. This isn’t anything new, the non-profit thing has always been in our Disclaimer & Credits — but I don’t think anyone has ever read those. To me it’s always been self-evident that you don’t profit from fan fiction – that seemed something so obvious that it didn’t occur to me it was something that needed to be publicly proclaimed.
But then again it has always been self-evident to me too that you don’t repost fics without permission, or distribute them once the author has chosen to withdraw them — and, to my utter surprise, I recently found out that’s not a value shared by everyone. So sometimes it’s good to state the obvious, because it might not be obvious to everyone.

Elektra121 — thank *you*!

Eora — glad to have you aboard!
To be honest, I wasn’t very shocked at all that someone would want to make money with fan fiction. I don’t think that’s a new phenomenon. Just look at the sites you mention: fanfiction.net is ad supported (I don’t know how much income that generates (ie, just enough to cover costs, or enough to turn a profit); I couldn’t be asked to read through all of their TOS since they’re in that American brand of legalese — which doesn’t come cheap so that in itself is a sign there’s a professional outfit running that site), and LiveJournal is shamelessly commercial, charging for the silliest little things and with ads everywhere if you don’t pay to have them removed and don’t have the wits to install an adblocker.
And yet, people have LJ accounts (I have!) and some even pay for them (I don’t!). As a blogging site, LJ is rubbish, there are far better services out there. But we go there because of the user generated content, so in effect, they’re making money (or trying to make money) off fan fiction. And everybody seems to be ok with that.

So I think it’s not so much the commercialism, but rather the change in conditions that has people upset. Everybody knows LJ is in it for the money when they sign up and post their fics there. But the sudden change from a non-profit to a profit site, without consultation or notice, is what has people protesting.
I think. I don’t know. I just know that’s not going to happen here.

Bell Witch – all I can say is that that won’t happen here. At FaramirFiction.com we only every archive material with the author/artist’s permission. We feel very strongly that the author/artist should always retain control over what happens with her work. From this standpoint, it logically follows that the author/artist always has the right to remove her work – of course we don’t want that to happen, but we would never go against the author/artist’s wishes.
I always thought that everybody I knew in fanfic believed that, and that those who think you can do as you wish with other people’s stories were, well other people: the types (usually teenagers who have never written anything in their life) that inhabit the shadowy underworld of fan fiction such as sites devoted to trashing and mocking stories, or swapping stories that were removed by the author (yes, those sites exist & they’re horrid!). But then recently I found out that some people quite close to this archive also thought there was nothing morally wrong with exchanging stories that the author doesn’t want to share any more, which I found very shocking and prompted us to do a post on site rules. _{(The other type of people in fanfic I don’t like are those who spend more time writing rules than writing stories, and get more pleasure out of administrating and ‘ruling over’ their domain than they get from the fan fic themselves, and all this makes me feel like I’m being forced into becoming one of them — so double horror there.)}

They cited copyright rules as justification for distributing stories against the author's wishes: because fanfic's legal status is dubious, the author has no copyright, and therefore the stories are owned by the public domain.

They're probably right, but only if the question is, 'will I get sued for posting stories against the author's wishes?' I for one like to hold myself to a higher standard than merely avoiding prosecution, and treat others as I'd like to be treated myself. I want to have control over where my stories are and aren't posted, therefore I'd never limit the control others have over their stories. Simple, right?

@suryallee—

Running an archive like this one costs both time and money. You can’t simply pay for the domain name and hosting for the next 10 years and leave the site to run itself: it needs constant maintenance and attention, or else you’ll get lots of spam and bitchy comments leading to irritated authors, and ultimately to authors withdrawing their work.
When Minx and I started this site nearly 8 years ago, I don’t think either of us expected it to still be running in 2012. Most people simply don’t stick to one fandom for that long, but move on to other subjects or abandon fan fiction altogether. So I really don’t blame any other site owners for losing interest or motivation: that is only natural.

And once you’ve decided you’re not going to invest your time and money in a site any longer, you can either hand it over into someone else’s care, or pull the plug altogether. I can very well understand that someone would find that first option the most desirable, after all, many hours went into creating the site, and it’d be a shame to destroy that. I suspect that when the time comes for me to make that choice about this site, there will be people who’d rather see it continue (albeit supported by advertising) than disappear altogether.