Tolkien Estate

• The great success of Fifty Shades has turned publishers’ attention to the wealth of stories found in online fan fiction archives.
• Fan fiction uses the characters or world from an established, usually copyrighted work of fiction.
• Romance stories that pair up characters who are not romantically involved, like Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger in Manacled, are probably the best known type of fan fiction.

A legal grey area

• These laws determine who has the legal right to publish work using certain characters (such as Hermione), places (such as Hogwarts), objects (such as lightsabers) and other elements of a story.
• Fan fiction is written by people – fans – who don’t own the copyright for the stories they rework, and don’t have such a legal right.
• But because works of fan fiction are “transformative” works, that don’t simply reproduce the original but build on and alter it, they fall in a legal grey area.

A challenge to fan fiction’s “gift economy”

• The website Archive of Our Own, on which Manacled was originally published, is run and maintained by fan volunteers and donations from many such communities.
• The amateur, nonprofit and community-based nature of fan fiction had made fandom into what scholars of fandom such as Karen Hellekson call a gift economy.
• The practice of rewriting a fanfic to be published as an original, known in fan communities as “filing off the serial numbers”, is hotly debated.
• But as the trend demonstrated by Alchemised develops, it continues to challenge the cultures of fan and other amateur creative communities.

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Leora Hadas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.