Sometimes, you read four or five chapters of some old story, and even you just want to know where exactly you had planned to go with it.

And yes, that is an indication that this will never be finished because I have no recollection of where I intended the story to go. Just browsing through old backups here. Written maybe 1997ish?

( When Tomorrow Comes (X-Files) )

Sequel to the last post. Yes, MORE 15-year-old crack!fic. We didn't call it crack!fic back then. People just smiled at you kindly and carefully edged away.

( The Truth of the Matter )

Tags: fanfic, x-files

Don't say the subject line isn't warning enough.

( The File on the X-files (or Truth is Stranger than Fiction) )

Tags: fanfic, x-files

Yes, I watch the brain rotting television show otherwise known as Glee.

This season, I've become quite the Kurt/Blaine fangirl, because Kurt's storyline over the course of the season was the strongest and most interesting storyline over the course of a season which has run otherwise fairly cold. Since the majority of the Dalton storyline took place away from New Directions/McKinley, this is kind of a sad commentary on the McKinley aspects of the season so far.

Usually, I can go along with the onscreen romantic stylings of a television show, even when they don't match up with my preferred pairings. But the Finn/Rachel/Quinn triangle either makes me want to throw things at the television or simply fast-forward past those parts.

Having gotten my hands on the releases of Jar of Hearts and Rolling in the Deep from the upcoming episode, I now can say exactly why. The Rachel/Jesse relationship was the strongest, most real (most fucked up) heterosexual relationship they've ever written for this show. I just can't see why she's still screwing around with her crush on Finn after she was in something like that.

In some ways, I can't believe that more than 15 years after the first evidence that the Internet can be eternal, we're still fighting this fight.

Publication, whether you publish online or in print, is publication. When you publish, copyright applies. Yet copyright is about more than the rights granted to the author.

In the US, the Constitutional Clause which even permits copyright to exist is:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

And in the 1976 revamp of US Copyright law, publication is defined as:

"Publication" is the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. The offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display constitutes publication. A public performance or display of a work does not of itself constitute publication.

(bolding mine)

Until the 1970s, copyright itself required that you place the document on deposit with the Library of Congress, so that the document would continue to exist beyond the limits of copyright, to eventually be entered into the public domain. Even if you chose to withdraw the document from publication, it still existed and still would eventually be a part of the public domain.

(Edited, 4/20/2011: the above is wrong, prior to the 1970s, notice was required for copyright but not registration and deposit. Although from what I have found, registration and deposit was still required for doing much of anything about infringements, as it is today: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl109.html).

Nowadays--while that requirement has been lifted--if you do not register your copyright, your ability to do anything when your copyright is violated is still limited, in particular ways which deeply affect copyright infringements of free publications.

• Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U. S. origin.
  
• If registration is made within three months after publication of the work or prior to an infringement of the work, statutory damages and attorney’s fees will be available to the copyright owner in court actions. Otherwise, only an award of actual damages and profits is available to the copyright owner.

Also, once you've published, you have started the countdown to the document eventually being a part of the public domain. That is the flip side of copyright--you are granted copyright on your published document in return for it eventually NOT being under copyright and freely available to the public without restriction.

So, I am starting from this basis.

1. Under US copyright law, posting a fan fiction story publicly to a service which allows distribution to other fans constitutes publication as defined.

2. Thus, all aspects of copyright law and case law apply, both the author's rights to restrict future new distribution and the rights which copyright/case law has granted over time to the end user's ownership of their personal copy of that document.

---

Over the past year, I've gotten into another online community which also deeply struggles with the reality of copyright on electronic files, and what it means legally. In the case of this particular community, there are not quite the gray areas which we sometimes associate with copyright on fan fiction. In fact, what copyright allows to the creator and end user have been fought through the courts over the past century and there is case law which is directly applicable to the community. And to my surprise, the way the rights permitted to the end user have been interpreted and are implemented are far more liberal than you'd expect.

For example, there are free documents available for download (there are also documents available for purchase). When I chose to "download" a freely-offered file on the major site for this community (over a million users), I can either select to download that file to my computer, or save it into my electronic library on the site.

Should the author of that free document chose to remove it from the site and I've "downloaded" it only into my electronic library on the site, it is still available to me. In the way that copyright law has been interpreted here, I now own a particular copy of that document whether I downloaded it to my computer desktop or only to my electronic space on the site.

For years, I've played with an evolving design for a new fan fiction archive, and this idea was certainly something that never occurred to me. Once a reader saves a file into their own electronic bookshelf, they forever own a particular copy of that file--whether they've downloaded it to their physical computer or not. The fan fiction community would explode. But it is a legally valid interpretation of how copyright functions in combination with electronic bits.

It still would be a violation of copyright for me to then take my copy of that file and e-mail it to another person. Unless of course, I did that AND deleted my personal copy of the file. But the other person, once they finished with the file, could e-mail it back to me.

Then we get into the murkier rights about copyright and time-shifting/use-shifting which are still being fought. In essence, as long as I do not USE my copy of that file while the other person has "borrowed" it from me, is it a violation under the spirit of copyright and the understandings granted by case law? So if the electronic site set up a "lending" relationship between users which allowed a user to "lend" the file for a limited amount of time and locked the file for the original user during that period, would that be legal? In my understanding, yes.

Beyond that, we get into the reality of what the original author of the document can actually do once their copyright has been violated:

1. If a creator/author really wants to take this to court, they must register their document and put it on deposit with the Library of Congress, thus ensuring that this document has been made immortal. Which doesn't seem like a good idea if the author has intentionally tried to suppress the document.

2. Unless the registration was made within a very limited amount of time and prior to the act of infringement, the creator/author can only sue for actual damages or profits. Which in the case of a freely downloaded document being passed between end users, amounts to probably nothing.

---

I'm not even going to get into the exceptions to copyright which the law grants to libraries and other forms of archival activities, because those are nowhere near settled in the case of electronic files and electronic lending. History shows that there's a chance of those being settled in the favor of the library/archive over authors, but we are possibly decades away from rulings on those. And nobody knows how technology will change in the meantime.

---

So, back to fandom, orphaned works, deleted works.

Recognize that before you publish (defined above), in return for your implicit copyright on your work, YOU ARE giving up something important. You are giving up the ability to make those words forever vanish from the face of the world. If some crazy real life library decided to start downloading, printing, and lending your fan fiction, that would be perfectly within their realm of rights and you couldn't make them stop even if you deleted the online version of your story. That paper copy would then exist as long as it existed.

If some academic downloads and quotes your story with your name attached in a modern day analysis of the crazy world of fandom, that is perfectly within his or her rights. If I back up my archive to CD and my great-great-great (however many greats) grandchild gives that CD to a publisher in 200 years, it doesn't matter whether your story was removed after the backup was burned. It's in the public domain, because you published it.

If that realization makes you not want to write or publish fan fiction--don't write or publish fan fiction.

Title: Crossroads

Author: Cschick

Author's note: I apologize to all those who are waiting on new chapters for Universal Forces. After a long creative drought over the past six months, I'm trying to write again. At the moment, I'm finishing up some short scenes and stories I've partly written over the past year or so.

This is a Cuddy introspective I wrote after the season finale last year.

Distribution: This story is released to public domain.
( Crossroads )

Tags: fan fiction, house

Ah, the weather is determined to mislead us. It got up to 75 degrees here today, after a 60ish degree yesterday.

When we arrived home from a birthday party early yesterday afternoon, we found all our neighbors using a rented power rake to dethatch their yards. If you've never put in sod, my recommendation now is to avoid it at all costs. Our 7-year-old sod is a pain in the behind. It keeps developing this thick layer of dead grass (we never, ever mow without the bag) which suffocates it. To keep that thatch under control, you use a machine called a power rake which pulls it all out and then rake it up and put it out as yard waste (or, if you're allowed to by local regulations, compost it).

Most of our neighbors do this yearly. Since we are lazy, we had a landscape crew do it once in the past 7 years ... and last summer our yard suffocated itself. Thus, we knew it had to be done, and when we arrived home to find all our neighbors chipping in on the rental for the the needed machine, we joined up and did it too.

And then, today was supposed to be warm but terribly rainy. The rain never appeared and temperature went up to 75 (65 predicted). Despite the fact that both my arms and back were already screaming at me, I went out and enlarged the big garden area (we're moving it one foot forward and putting pea gravel in the last foot against the house), planted another row of asparagus, then mixed in compost with the rest of the big garden and got the soil turned.

Then I went to work on the little veggie garden and found spinach! Beautiful, growing, great-looking spinach. I've never been quite successful in growing spinach, I presume this was from the seed that didn't even try to sprout last year. Perhaps I've been planting spinach too late? So, given that perhaps, I prepped the garden bed and put out spinach and snap peas today rather than a month from now. It's just seed, I can afford to lose it. Snap peas can survive just about anything. I've harvested them into mid December in Chicago.

I think that April 3rd is about the absolute earliest I've ever tried to plant anything outside around here.

So, this is what happens when fandom reaches out and grabs me by the collar again. All I'm looking for is some cute slash, thus I start reading my friendslist again, and fannish meta drags me right back in.

Although, I'm not sure I could have avoided fannish meta over the past couple of days. Even my knitting site seems to determined to drag me back to fandom. Fandom? Knitting? Why?

So, Castle tweaked the shippers on Monday. And suddenly, there's discussion everywhere about shippers. What shippers are, how shippers and shipping came to be called such.

See me standing here, my hand raised like a teacher's pet. Ohhhhh!! I know the answer to that one. Shippers were called relationshippers (obvious term) for several seasons in X-Files fandom. Eventually, the xf-romantics list was formed on the chaos mailing list server. In April-May 1996 (I believe) the romantics list and alt.tv.x-files (not alt.tv.x-files.creative) engaged in what came to be called the great shipper wars. During that flamefest, the xf-romantics list embraced the term shipper for themselves. I also think there was something to do with some song with lyrics related to a ship (yeah, actual boat type of ship).

Go over to Google groups and search on alt.tv.x-files, and you'll find references to relationshippers prior to May 1996, then 'shippers proceeding to shippers starting in May 1996. But, my recollection is that while atx may have provided some of the catalysis for the change, xf-romantics embraced the change. And xf-romantics has vanished into the ether, right?

Not really. Somewhere in this house, somewhere, there are cds with backup files of chaos. Somewhere in those backup files are message archives for most of the lists that chaos hosted over the years. I posed the question to C tonight, and he confirmed that xf-romantics was one of the lists archived from its first day of existence.

Now this post is going to go wandering off into a far different track--a question I've struggled with for years, and still struggle with. What is my responsibility to this data?

Another meta fannish discussion in the past 24 hours lead me here from a different direction. I don't think that people who are in fandom now process how small online fandom actually was during the mid to late 1990s. It was gigantic and active compared to what had existed before. It was teeny-tiny compared to what fandom has become today. Once upon a time there were four largish fandoms, with four largish archives (for their time). There was X-Files, with Gossamer. There was Star Trek, with the ASC Archive, now Trekiverse. There was Forever Knight, with their archive. And there was Babylon 5, with their division into the gen/non-adult archive, the adult mailing list, and a couple of large relationship archives.

All these fandoms were pretty contained across a couple of limited spaces. All these fandoms had crossovers (authors, readers, and those who discussed) with one another. All these fandoms affected one another in a way that was pretty direct and quick compared to today.

I look back and ask myself: why in hell didn't I download the John/Delenn ftp archive one of those many times I was there? Why did I delete my personal archive of unrestb5 that one day I was cleaning up my e-mail? Babylon 5 fan fiction, once a major fandom, has all but vanished off the face of the Internet. That was something that has hit home more than once over the years, like when I was chasing down the XF "author" who appeared to be plagiarizing most of her work from a personal copy of either John/Delenn or unrestb5. You have a personal copy of a missing fannish archive and you PLAGIARIZE from it? What kind of person are you? And I only caught you out because I KNEW those stories. I only tossed you on a technicality because I couldn't prove crap about your real plagiarism. I think I still have some plagiarized work from one of your identities on my archive and it pisses me the hell off, how ever many years later.

What responsibility do I have to those stories?

Many discussions which affected all fandoms, and in some ways shaped future fandoms, took place on the chaos lists. How much terminology originated on Fictalk? How much discussion about what fan fiction archives should be and should become took place on the archivists list? Maybe less than I remember, maybe more.

So little, and so much. So much fannish history I could have saved if I'd just thought about it. So much fannish history that should be gone, but doesn't necessarily have to be. But can we or should we make it public? The gaps in Google Groups are extreme, why are they there? Is it just really data that was missed, is it data that was removed by choice?

Hell, I'm in a foul mood.

Title: Too Meta
Author: Cschick
Fandom: Castle

Summary: Just a quick little missing scene from the episode Nikki Heat. How did Castle say no to Natalie?

( Too Meta )

Tags: castle, fan fiction

So, we have wooden floors through part of our first floor. A few years back my parents' large dog was running around our house like a 100-pound crazed fool, and a strange, round hole the size of a pencil eraser appeared in the middle of the hallway. I sighed and figured that he'd managed to pop out a knot. Mainly, I've ignored it since, although "fill in hole" has been on my mental to-do list since.

This morning I was cleaning up the Christmas mess and realized the hole had increased a bit in size. So, I ran down into the basement and finally got the wood putty and a putty knife. I put putty in the hole, and it disappeared.

Put more putty in the hole, and it disappeared.

Scooped a big wad of putty with my finger and pushed it into the hole, and it disappeared.

The little pencil-sized surface hole took at least several teaspoons full worth of putty before it backfilled to the surface.