Disclaimer search uncovers fanfic frenzy
Disclaimer: This column may or may not represent the opinion of the author who reserves the right to change her mind as often as she likes!
Ah, the disclaimer - a statement which denies something, especially responsibility. The word ‘disclaimer’ comes from the Anglo-French ‘desclamer,’ to disavow or deny, and its first known use was in 1623. While I can’t tell you what prompted that one, I can tell you a little bit about why your favorite movie contains the disclaimer, “The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious...”
According to Quizzclub. com, this familiar movie disclaimer resulted from litigation against the 1932 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) film “Rasputin and the Empress,” which insinuated that the character Princess Natasha had been raped by Russian mystic Rasputin. The character of Natasha was supposedly intended to represent Princess Irina Alexandrovna of Russia, who sued MGM for libel. After seeing the film twice, the jury agreed that the princess had been defamed. Irina and her husband Felix Yusupov were reportedly awarded $127,373 in damages by the English Court of Appeal in 1934 (that’s $2,434,000 in 2019 dollars) and $1,000,000 (or $19,000,000 in 2019) in an out-of-court settlement with MGM. As a preventive measure against further lawsuits, the film was taken out of distribution for decades.
Continuing my research of disclaimers, I found the usual confidentiality, copyright, medical, views expressed, to name a few, along with email and YouTube disclaimers reflecting signs of the time. It was then I discovered a disclaimer related to something called Fan Fiction. I guess I should have known what Fan Fiction is but for those as out of touch as I was, Wikipedia describes fanfic or FF as it’s called, as “fictional writing written in an amateur capacity by fans, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction.”
Before you know it, I was sucked into the blogosphere and a nasty controversy involving author Anne Rice and her series, The Vampire Chronicles. I never read Vampire Chronicles but many did and loved her characters so much that they co-opted them to create their own work of fiction! And then these geniuses wondered why they received cease and desist letters? Bloggers had posted one snide comment after another denouncing Ms. Rice for wanting to protect her characters, the fruits of her own creative labors.
At the height of the controversy in 2000, Rice told an interviewer, “I’m very possessive of my characters. I think it would hurt me terribly to read anything with some of my characters. I hope you’ll be inspired to write your own stories with your own characters.”
Personally, I think fanfic is theft and I have to agree with the late Ms. Rice – come up with your own characters!
As the number of wannabee writers without an original thought grew, the website writingbeginner. com advised use of their own disclaimer “acknowledging that your story is an original work of fanfiction, stating that your story is intended for entertainment, and noting that you do not earn money from your story.”
Well, at least they weren’t profiting from Ms. Rice’s creative genius – not until Amazon found a way to make a buck from it. While fanfic is considered a copyright infringement making it difficult to sell, in 2013 Amazon began providing these coattail writers a platform, selling their fanfic work and paying them 35% of net sales. So much for the protection of intellectual property!
I think I feel another disclaimer coming on: The author takes no responsibility for the words herein. She isn’t sure when she wrote them, how she wrote them or if she wrote them at all! Perhaps, it’s just a piece of fanfiction!
The column represents the thoughts and opinions of Connie Clements. Opinion columns are NOT the opinion of the Navasota Examiner.
Clements is a freelance reporter for the Navasota Examiner and an award-winning columnist.