I was thinking about an author's rights over their work, and how that works with the internet. See, thirteen years ago (good god), I was posting my first fanfics to the interweb, and back then, I used my real name. It still comes up when I google myself, because it got archived on a website. Did I give permission? I can't recall, to be honest. I did email them, a couple of years back, to ask them to take it down, but they didn't, nor did they reply. The email I used to post it has long since been deactivated, so I don't know how I'd go about proving that I am the author.
(It's even more irksome because the formatting has disappeared--I didn't know that I needed to turn off SmartQuotes at the time, so all those apostrophes and speechmarks have vanished. That probably bugs me the most, to be honest. I don't want people thinking my grammar was bad! *g* It's probably contributed to the way I obsessively switch off of most of Word's bloody annoying automatic correction things on almost every computer that falls into my hands.)
Every now and then that fic makes me paranoid. What if potential employers do a search for my name? What if my work colleagues look me up? My friends and family mostly know and don't give a damn that I wrote and still write fanfic, so I'm not worried about them. Solutions to my particular story problem have occurred to me as I write--I may email them and ask them to just change the author name. If I can get into a dialogue with them, hopefully I can convince them that I am me. Hell, I may even offer them a properly formatted version. I'm happy for it to be up there, just not under my name.
So, when I was offering my saved copies of someone's fics, I felt a little guilty. I don't know the circumstances under which she decided to take the stuff down. Do I have the right to effectively act as an archivist? Then again, if someone has read her stuff and wants to re-read it, is there any point in them not having it? Clearly they already remember the author's name and something about their stories. And I'm forever remembering lines from books, or from fanfics, and having to trace them because I really want to remember the rest--losing this stuff permanently drives me bananas.
I'm mostly just rambling here, and really not trying to come up with a definitive answer--I'm sure it's different for everyone who puts work out there. Some people are savvy from the start, and always use an alias. Some people don't care if the world and its brother knows they wrote Mulder-and-Scully-as-kids fic. Some people are highly protective of where and how their work appears, and some people just send their work off into the ether with a pat on the back and their best wishes.
What do you guys think? When an author has clearly tried to wipe their work from the internet, is sharing it a bad thing? Under what circumstances is it bad--and when is it fine? Is anyone who tries to remove anything from the Net just kidding themselves that it'll ever disappear? Because, seriously--I never thought my story would still be around, thirteen years later.
On the other side of the fence, how would you feel if someone shared your stories with other people, even after you'd withdrawn it? Would you feel like they really loved your stuff, or would you be annoyed that people weren't respecting your boundaries? Is there anything you do--or wish you'd done, or would advise new fanfic writers to do--to make it clear how you feel about how your stories get distributed?
(It's even more irksome because the formatting has disappeared--I didn't know that I needed to turn off SmartQuotes at the time, so all those apostrophes and speechmarks have vanished. That probably bugs me the most, to be honest. I don't want people thinking my grammar was bad! *g* It's probably contributed to the way I obsessively switch off of most of Word's bloody annoying automatic correction things on almost every computer that falls into my hands.)
Every now and then that fic makes me paranoid. What if potential employers do a search for my name? What if my work colleagues look me up? My friends and family mostly know and don't give a damn that I wrote and still write fanfic, so I'm not worried about them. Solutions to my particular story problem have occurred to me as I write--I may email them and ask them to just change the author name. If I can get into a dialogue with them, hopefully I can convince them that I am me. Hell, I may even offer them a properly formatted version. I'm happy for it to be up there, just not under my name.
So, when I was offering my saved copies of someone's fics, I felt a little guilty. I don't know the circumstances under which she decided to take the stuff down. Do I have the right to effectively act as an archivist? Then again, if someone has read her stuff and wants to re-read it, is there any point in them not having it? Clearly they already remember the author's name and something about their stories. And I'm forever remembering lines from books, or from fanfics, and having to trace them because I really want to remember the rest--losing this stuff permanently drives me bananas.
I'm mostly just rambling here, and really not trying to come up with a definitive answer--I'm sure it's different for everyone who puts work out there. Some people are savvy from the start, and always use an alias. Some people don't care if the world and its brother knows they wrote Mulder-and-Scully-as-kids fic. Some people are highly protective of where and how their work appears, and some people just send their work off into the ether with a pat on the back and their best wishes.
What do you guys think? When an author has clearly tried to wipe their work from the internet, is sharing it a bad thing? Under what circumstances is it bad--and when is it fine? Is anyone who tries to remove anything from the Net just kidding themselves that it'll ever disappear? Because, seriously--I never thought my story would still be around, thirteen years later.
On the other side of the fence, how would you feel if someone shared your stories with other people, even after you'd withdrawn it? Would you feel like they really loved your stuff, or would you be annoyed that people weren't respecting your boundaries? Is there anything you do--or wish you'd done, or would advise new fanfic writers to do--to make it clear how you feel about how your stories get distributed?
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chasethestars
chasethestars
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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?
But yeah, for most people, that's not going to be an issue, I guess. I just need my family to have a sudden population explosion. *g*