You know, I get the whole idea about wanting to respect people's wishes. And I think if someone explicitly states that they want their fanfic to go away, then so be it. (And I TOTALLY get the idea that authors might want to take down or change fic where they've used their real name. I think as a community it should be good manners to comply in that case.)

But I think if there's an author who is so freaked out over posting fanfic, and they want rigid control over it? The internet is NOT the place for them. Even just emailing fic to friends or creating their own zine is going to take some control out of their hands. But, yeah, once the fic is out there it's out there. And unless some disclaimer is pasted on that conveys the author's wishes, I think it's sort of shareware.

It's freaky to think of your fic out there like that. And eventually it'll probably disappear as archives go down and fans lose interest or grow older.

I actually kind of grow wistful when I think of all the fanfic that's been lost over the years. If I love an author and I can tell they're sort of on their way out of doing the fannish thing, I sometimes ask for permission to save and distribute their fic as I see fit, with credit always attached of course, and they usually say yes.

Maybe a good point of advice for new fanfic authors who might be worried about this one day is to only allow fic on archives where you have to upload it yourself, and you retain control over edits and removal. Most archives are going that way these days, so it would be pretty easy to keep that rule.

It doesn't help you now, but it might help them.

I think if someone has taken it down, that's their right. And then, if someone has a copy, then they have a copy, and there's nothing wrong with that UNLESS they offer it up for grabs to whoever comes by. If someone specifically asks for the copy, then a private sharing is fine as well in my opinion.

Wow, you're making me think. How dare you.

For some reason, I had the foresight to do all my fanficcing under the name 'Courser' since Day 1. I've known several people who began posting under their own names, thinking it wouldn't matter to them and later, it does.

To add to the tension, I read today that a lot of companies hiring college kids have begun searching the 'networking' sites, like Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I have a profile on LinkedIn, but it's strictly professional stuff - nothing personal.

I tend not to judge people if they decide to withdraw their stories from the web. I figure that they have their reasons (which don't include just having a snit - that strikes me as petty).

For the record, the website where my early fic was housed is down and has been for a while now. It'll come back, but I really need to archive my first few Come to Grief stories on LJ. The rest? I'm not so sure. Maybe one or two that people seem to like

About the "paranoia about what if a future employer Googles me?" thing -- how uncommon is your name?

I do a google-search on my real name every once in a while. There was an article in some American papers recently about how often people tended to search for their own names, and the article wanted to make that out to be vanity -- but from my perspective, it's part curiosity and part... I don't want to say "damage control", but in this day and age, it's... wanting to be forewarned? To see if there *IS* something unexpected out there that really is About You?

Anyway, what I've discovered is that my name is not in the Robert Smith category, but, perhaps as is to be expected, I am not the only person with my first and last name in this country. Plenty of "*My Name*"'s come up when I put it in Google.

Some of them I KNOW are me -- because yeah, from an early age I posted all my fic and fanart under my real name, (I still do today, for certain fandoms), and there are still Blake's 7 things from 1987 that are kicking around out there (or... well, I'm not sure if they ARE out there, or if the only thing out there is just the typed-in indices of the paper 'zines those things are in; I haven't looked that far), along with the recent stuff. Anyway, my point is that actually the vast majority of my fannish works are out there under my real name; I've only put a few things out there under this LJ-name; mostly the pr0n, as it happens. ;-)

And this is the thing -- say some prospective employer decides to Google your Real Name. Say that on page three or four or fifteen (if they get that far), one of the hits that comes up is this fanfic for Whatever Fandom that's a decade or more old.

How could your employer possibly know that was you?

Your friends and family could probably guess it was yours, if they do already know that you write fanfic, and if they know that you were interested in That Show (or Book) back in the day. Knowing that you write fanfic, it wouldn't be a leap for them to guess that old fanfic might be yours, because what are the odds of there being *another* person with the same name as you who also writes fanfic? (As I say, it depends what your name is -- if it's Katie Brown, or something equally popular in both given and surnames, actually, the odds are good that there are others out there in fandom with that name too.)

But if your employer Googles your name, and if they don't know that you have this hobby or interest, then really, they would have no grounds on which to assume that that fanfic is yours, any more than this other hit on your Real Name belonging to someone in a softball league in Deering, Michigan is you. Right?

I just Googled my Real Name. I get: "a 20 year music business veteran, having held A&R Executive positions at Capitol Records and Atlantic Records in Los Angeles"; "is found on the Go BIG Network, the World's BIGGEST Community of Startup Companies"; "is the managing partner and in vitro fertilization (IVF) coordinator at the Reproductive Health Center in Tucson, Arizona"; and of course, the obligatory softball team lineup from somewhere; etc. I had to go to the bottom of the second page of hits before I found one that is actually *ME* and that's related to fanfic.

It just seems highly unlikely that any employer would look at that grab-bag of hits and assume that ANY of them was me. I guess given my age, I COULD be a 20-year veteran of the music industry... but I'm not. I do not now nor have I ever lived in Arizona. etc.

So unless your Real Name is truly unique, the odds of someone who doesn't know your hobby connecting your name to your past fanfic online seems pretty slim. (I do know one person -- Raqs, actually -- whose surname really is so unusual that if you Google her name, for the first 3 pages at least, the only hits are for her, and in lesser amounts, a woman who is a professional chef in New Zealand, and that's it.)

I don't know -- maybe in an interview or something, someone might say, "hey, we were doing a Google search on your name, and you won't believe the stuff that came up!" and mention the fanfic. And then you could gauge their attitude and decide whether to admit to it or not. Truly, though, how could they know it was yours?

I second the motion of not being too worried about the real name fanfic thing. Although I would contact the archivist and see if you can at least change the name/get a better version out there.

As far as sharing the stories...eh, I personally don't and wouldn't have a problem with it. I don't know why said person took them down, but...it's like copies of a really bad book. Some of them are going to pop up anyway, regardless of what you do.

(also, about that fic you are/aren't offering...)

;-)

((I feel like we're passing around drugs, here. *snerk*))

This is a very thinky topic, and having thought, and read, and thought some more, I find myself sitting smack-dab on the middle of the fence.

I am the daughter of a published poet/novelist, and have watched him fight long and hard to keep as full control over his oevre as he can possibly manage. He has nominated me as one of his literary executors in his will, and that is an expression of deep and soul-touching trust. It is trust on the same level as nominating someone to raise your children should you be unable to do so yourself. So I totally get the concept of the primacy of authorial control and I do feel that violating that should never be undertaken lightly.

But on the other hand I understand viscerally the deep frustration of having read and enjoyed something and not being able to have it right to hand. And I do feel that once one does publish, one surrenders forever a bit of control. A rung bell cannot be unheard and will always be present in the minds of the listeners. I have those fics on my hard drive, and ultimately I have decided that emailing them to folks that ask is acceptable. I would never post them publicly.

And not even responding to your request for a change to your own work, even if only to say "Over our dead bodies unless you can prove that you are you, and then we'll have to think about it!" is just rude.

Heigh-ho, Fence! Away!

Interesting thoughts. I had been wondering, yesterday, what this author would think, having pulled her stories, of so many of us being dismayed and trying to find them and the sharing going on.

And I concluded that though I think it would be wrong to actually archive an author's work somewhere if they were determined to delete them, nevertheless, since they had been out on the internet for some years, it's surely not wrong if people who were smart enough to download them, shared them with other fans who had previously read them, but had not saved them for themselves. So that's msy opinion.

Then after reading other comments here, I decided to google my own (pretty unusual) full name, and see what happened. I was somewhat surprised to find several, and they were all really me. A mixture: some fan stuff (I had apparently commented on a fic signing my full name, and I was quoted in some sort of overview of ST fandom which quoted part of a letter from me and a fan friend written to Interstat, a letterzine from Star Trek days, long before the internet made fan communication so quick and easy.), some real life, from when I quit my job (a library magazine said I was fired, along with a coworker for refusing to work Sundays on religious grounds. False--I quit because the new director was horrible and I decided Life's Too Short--but Connie did later get fired for that reason, sued the library and 3 years later, she won her case and was reinstated, so good for her), and some real space things I've supported. So googling yourself can be interesting.

Although one thing I did discover during the library debacle is that you should assume any email you ever write could be shown to the world at some point. I wrote an email to a coworker on her home account, but she answered it at the library computer and this nasty boss managed to print out every email written or received at that time, so 3 years later, during Connie's trial, it was shown to the world. Ack!

Melissa M.

I think there's a difference between owning stuff and being able to remove stuff. I mean, if you publish a book, you don't get to regret it 10 years later and remove every copy from the market.

Mostly, they'll have filtered into the libraries (of which, in my book, there should be more than just the Internet Archive for the Internet), and there'll usually be a lively trade in used books (which is pretty much comparable to sharing saved copies of stories).

So honestly... I don't think you should be allowed to take your fic down. You get - at most - to change the name it's saved under (because in this day and age, not everybody wants their potential employers to see they're writing fanfic), but the stories are saved in a central place.

To me, that's the ideal. Both as a reader - and as a writer... but probably mostly as a librarian. I hate the idea of information or stories being lost permanently. I can get all emotional about the loss of the great library in Alexandria at the thought of all that was lost in that fire. And I get totally annoyed, when I read a rec of a fic - and then find the author has taken it down and had every trace of it removed. And yes, a large part of that is that I don't have a great fannish network, and thus have no forum where I can call out and see if anyone has a copy saved.

I'm of two minds. On the one hand, I know it's frustrating to be unable to find fics because someone took them down. On the other hand, people may have good reasons to remove them! Some people don't think that later their fics may come back to haunt them; for those of us with unusual names, it could be a problem. Of course, the only fics under my real name were published in a print zine when I was in college, they're unobjectionable (except in the "oh, my gosh--she has no talent!") category, and I'm not really worried about people finding them. But people do publish online with real names, or identities that get revealed, and I can never entirely forget: there's a small chance we're all courting legal trouble by posting, folks. Just because we haven't been sued yet doesn't mean we can't!

Some of you know about the plagiarism I found a little while ago involving fics plagiarized from one fandom and posted in another, with the characters' names changed and, more importantly, authors' names changed! The person in question deleted her own LiveJournal after people more energetic than I demonstrated that she'd stolen not just two but a boatload of fics. Someone said, "Gee, now in a few weeks someone's going to be going, 'Where is so-and-so's site? I loved those fics!'"

I seriously don't want anyone reposting "her" fics, because as posted they weren't hers; they were rip-offs of other people's fics (which, in the two cases I found, worked better in the original fandom!). Now anyone who had friended this person, or finds links to her on archives, will have no clue to go to stop_plagiarism to look her up, no reason to think they weren't her fics. But I would be very, very cautious about reposting in any form in case they have even better reasons than potential future legal problems: maybe they ripped off another fan writer.

Most fanfic writers don't do that; I've given an extreme example. But it's an example that a couple of months ago would never have occurred to me. I wonder if there are other good reasons not to repost someone's fics?

Another possible reason is that someone may have started an idea in fanfic that she then decides to reuse in purely original fiction. She thinks the idea is pretty special, and she doesn't want it to interfere with her chance of selling books; she may even be afraid that, publishing under her real name, she'll be accused of plagiarizing from someone that she doesn't want to reveal is herself! If I ever hit it big (unlikely, since I don't write original fiction at this time!), I wouldn't be eager to reveal that some of my lesser fanfics are mine.

I too hate the idea of stories lost forever. But there are times when books are pulped: the two good reasons that come to mind right off are when
1. the pulped book plagiarizes another;
2. the author has been embarrassed by the publication and wants to redo it without having the bad old copies out there. This one recently arose in The Chronicle of Higher Education; I think but am not certain the press was Univ of Princeton P. They did such a horrible job of proofing a book they have withdrawn it to reissue with corrections, and they're pulping every copy they get back.
No one needs to have those copies. Get the original, non-plagiarized book in the first case, or the reissued one in the second.

Other than that, I'd say: keep it public! The problem is when we don't know why an author has withdrawn a work. Sometimes we do know: someone ran out of money or interest in maintaining a site. In that case, I see no problem in sharing privately, but I wouldn't repost on my own site.

Ooh, thinky thoughts! Good thing I'm off the percocet. :)

I was actually just thinking about this topic a couple weeks ago when I decided to revisit an old fandom and found my favorite author had taken down all her fic. But a bunch of other people had saved it and they had made a download available for everyone else to use to get copies. And I hesitated for a bit before using it because I wasn't sure if it was the right thing to do. The author had taken her fics down because she wanted to focus on her original works.

In the end I decided to go ahead and copy it, for two reasons. The first being that this is the internet, and no one who puts anything out there can reasonably expect to take it back later on. I mean, even if I closed down my sites and contacted the archives where my fic was saved and got them to take it down, I imagine there are at least one or two people who downloaded my stories and would probably be willing to share them. And you know what? I really don't have a problem with that. I'm not quite as comfortable with them actually reposting it on their sites, though. It's one thing to send it to individuals who request it. It's another to put it back out there for anyone to see. But I also accept that I don't really have control over that, either.

The other reason I downloaded that fic was that the author didn't use her real name. I know this because when I googled her to see if I could find the fic anywhere else, that's all I got. Nothing came up that would give me any indication of who she was in real life. Now, if this had been fic written under her real name, I probably wouldn't have taken it, or shared it with anyone else if I already had it.

And all that was my really long-winded way of saying that I don't have a definitive answer on the subject, either. :P

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially since in only the year I've been in SG-1 fandom I already have fics I bookmarked where the link no longer works and few things make me sadder. And I never remember to save fic to my harddrive.

I honestly don't have a problem with people distributing closed-down fic under the table. I don't think it should necessarily be posted publicly if the author took it all down on purpose, but the other way it's just...it's out there. It's not going to hurt anyone.

And I apparently don't have actual brain to be useful here.