<
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140821/21532628289/whats-so-bad-about-making-money-off-fan-fiction.shtml>
"For-profit fan creativity is a huge opportunity, but creators are
letting it go to waste because they're so anxious to protect their
copyrights. It may seem counterintuitive, but letting other people make
money from your intellectual property can add far more value than it
costs—in some cases millions of dollars. How does this work?"
I've been saying this for a while now. Thankfully some rightsholders
have been relatively supportive of their fans - George Lucas, for
example, has permitted and apparently personally enjoyed fan creations
like Hardware Wars and Troops over the years.
The really interesting recent example is Hasbro though. They've been
extraordinarily accommodating with the new My Little Pony: Friendship is
Magic series, licensing companies like Hot Topic and We Love Fine to use
their trademarked characters on apparel using popular fan art,
authorising some of the best of the fan animations, and licensing
fan-created 3D models for 3D printing - which they may soon extend to
some of their other properties such as Transformers.
Everyone has also been surprised that so far the BBC, which normally
takes a fairly strong stance on their properties and especially Dr. Who,
has not complained about the Dr. Whooves fan crossover with My Little
Pony - Hasbro originally gave the character the official name Time
Turner to avoid trouble, but seems to have surrendered to the fans since
recent merchandise now uses the name Dr. Whooves. It may have something
to do with the fact that IDW Comics has a license to both the official
MLP comics and the official Who comics so they can cross over if they want.
IDW also have the official Star Trek license and have therefore been
able to make Trek references in the Pony comics - hardly surprising,
since the MLP character Discord was written based on the Trek character
"Q" and is voiced by the same actor, John de Lancie. Of course there
are Who/Trek, Trek/Pony and Who/Pony fanfics and fanart, but there is
also Fallout Equestria, a very popular crossover between MLP and the
Fallout video game series - and it seems quite a few people in the video
game industry are MLP fans, so nobody has objected to that yet either,
even when it's being sold in print.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
