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?