Study On The Fan Fictions’ Copyrights

In the age of information,the emergence of the network fan fictions has put forward anew topic to the modern intellectual property system. Judicial practice and national copyrightlegislation in most countries are clear that only works with the Originality could be protected.But most countries did not make specific regulations to fan fictions (Europe called "fictionfans," Japan called "doujinshi").As second creations, to decide the network fan fictions couldbe recognized by copyright law needs to determine whether they were original works,but alsoto analysis the limit of its right. So far, whether the network fan fictions should getrecognition and protection of the copyright law, Chinese scholars hasn’t reached a consensus,the legislation of fan fictions is also still blank. First, this paper describes the origin anddevelopment of fan fictions, then analysis the possibility of conflicts between fan fictions andearlier works protected by copyright law and make some recommendations about fan fictions.The purpose of this paper is to provide some references to the development and changes incopyrights, and new ideas and suggestions to tackle copyright conflicts.The paper is divided into three parts.The first part is an overview of fan fictions, mainly introduce the origin, status,characteristics and types of fan fictions.The concept of fan fictions earliest derived fromdonjinshi in Japan,it is the product of second creation based on the original works,the purposeof fan fictions’ authors is to share their feelings with other fans,not to access wealth.Thebehavior of using the original works make fan fictions have unique characteristics differ fromgeneral text works,because of this,fan fiction is suspected of infringing the original copyrightworksThe second part is to analysis variety of situations of copyright infringement that fanfictions may. Copyright holders enjoy the economic rights and moral rights of their works andat sometimes,they also have right on some classic roles in works.Because the creativemethods,purpose and the use patterns of fan fictions are not the same,the infringements to thecopyright of original works are not the same too.Fan fictions may infringe authors’ economicrights or moral rights,or use roles in works illegally.But,fan fictions don’t violate the copyrightlaw in all cases,if fan fictions’ author got permission from the original copyright holder beforeor fan fictions’ materials come from the public domain,copyright disputes can be avoided.The third part is to put forward some suggestions about copyrights issues that fan fictions faced. The fan fictions has also condensed the author’s labor and efforts,the copyright lawshould admit this creation and give them legal protections. Due to the particularity of fanfictions,the protection for fan fictions should first not to injure the original copyright holders’rights.To solve the infringements that fan fiction to the original works,we can use someproactive ideas instead of passive acceptance.The original copyright holders can adopt themethod that iCommons has published which called creative commons to limit the usage ontheir works or share their works with others conditionally.