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