Stealing fanfiction to sell as your own?

[thecarrottree]

Hello, all.

This probably sounds a bit silly, but I'd appreciate views as I'm autistic and very bad at this sort of thing.

About 12 years ago, my dad died and I wrote two very long fanfictions from a well-known wizarding tale, to help me cope. One had an unusual name and an unusual plot, straying reasonably far from the original stories. It was well-received and I was happy.

I left it on the site, life moved on, but recently I saw someone had taken the title, entire plot idea and even some phrases I used (it is distinctive and it is definitely taken from my story) , changed them around and is selling the books and idea as their own.

What would you do? Should I do anything, or can I? I feel upset that someone did this. It doesn't seem right.

Thanks

Hi, I’d imagine that’s illegal but I may be wrong, would speak to the site it’s published on perhaps

The site that I put my story on, Swami? The person is selling the books for money :(

Yeah, I meant the site you originally posted on. It’s so annoying that that’s happened to you, surely it’s blatant plagiarism and illegal?

If it uses copyright material from the original author then alert them/their agent/their publisher and watch the copyright lawyers swoop in.

I don't know if it does...I know it uses some of the concepts...but the blatant plagiarism of the actual storyline is of my stuff :(

I would need to read the whole thing, and am a bit cross at the moment...from what I have read it is self-published and not well done, but still.

Oh that is so infuriating!

I would imagine it's illegal as they're going to be making money from it and if your original one is still up you'll be able to prove that you came up with it first. As suggested by PP I would go to whoever is publishing it/selling it and see what they say.

I understand how upsetting this must be as I know how much work can go into writing fan fiction.

Yep, my story is still up, with the date! They have seemingly self-published via amazon, so I'm not sure what the protocol is for that.

thanks, incendio. It was a bit personal, too - just writing to cope with the awful time.

Ah, that is so difficult. I've had a look online and from what I've seen there is a big problem with people selling plagiarised books on amazon and the only way of dealing with it seems to be to involve a lawyer.

Could you try contacting the seller? Although I'm sure if they're the type to do something so brazen they would just ignore you but it's worth a shot. They might get a fright if you let them know you're aware of what they're doing and suggest that you'll be seeking legal advice if they don't take it down.

I totally get that, even as an adult if I'm going through a bit of a tough time I often write a bit of fan fiction as a distraction. It's the comfort of doing something I enjoyed back in a more innocent time I think. I would be so upset if this happened to me.

carrot - fellow fanfic writer here! Sadly this isn't unusual (in fact there are automated bots which trawl fanfiction.net and A03 and mirror everything on there to sites in the Far East which try to monetise them). I believe there are online pro-forma "take down" legal notices you can download and send to organisations like Amazon. In particular since your work is clearly fanfiction, it is in a legally grey area anyway (AO3 has a legal fund for authors) such that the only way writers of fanfic get away with it is because it's not for profit. So if you write to Amazon saying this was originally fanfiction, someone is trying to monetize it by plagiarising it, then Amazon should take it down pretty quickly to cover their own arses, because they don't want to be on the receiving end of a lawsuit from the author of the original material (and if it's who I think it is, she has plenty of cash to pay for shit hot lawyers!) You're not in trouble, because your stuff wasn't written for profit, but the plagiarist could be.

As for stuff on Amazon, I've seen similar done before and reported it to Amazon who took it down.

In my case, a group of friends on a writers' group were joking about an absolutely terrible "self-published" book on Amazon. I read the "look inside" bit and thought "well, it's terrible, but it's also 19th century prose- not pastiche 19th century prose, but the real deal". So I reverse-searched an extract on Amazon and discovered it was in fact a genuine 19th century novel (thus out of copyright) which someone was passing off as their own. I reported it, and Amazon took it down for plagiarism (obviously in this instance not breach of copyright - but I would imagine clearly covered by copyright in your case).

It was actually quite a clever scam. When you self-publish on Amazon, you can either opt for a higher rate with "sales only", or a lower rate of return with "sales plus free lending via Amazon prime, with % of purchase price for every 'borrow' on Amazon prime." The book in question was retailing at something ridiculous like £200 a time for purchase. Obviously no-one was buying it - but it only took a handful of the "author's" mates with Amazon prime membership to "borrow" it and suddenly Amazon was paying the author a tidy sum. I actually rather admired the guy's ingenuity (it may also have explained why Amazon took it down so quickly!) (In fact it was the high purchase price that led to the original discussion on my writers' group - everyone was going "WTAF - can you believe this guy is trying to sell this crap for £200 a time?"

If this helps - this is an AO3 article on copyright and fanfiction:
archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/9918

If they've published via Amazon, I'd try contacting Amazon in the first instance. I think self published authors have to say that they have the right to publish the naterial, and Amazon do remove books that they believe to be in breach of their terms & conditions.