When watching any movie or show, we do not really think about whose “property” it is or who owns the rights to what were watching, we just watch it and get sucked into it. Janet Wasko talks about copyright laws, and how in Disney, they have everything copyrighted, so if anyone, and I do mean anyone, were to use the likeness, or name of one of their characters, then they are probably going to get sued.
Now how do vampires factor into this whole copyrighted mess you ask? Vampires are very very popular creatures used in well everything. Right now you have the twilight sparkly vampires, the Vampire Diaries emo vampires and of course the True Blood sex crazed vampires. And when on said movie or TV show, the fans do not like the storyline, or the character pairing, or sometimes just because they feel like they can do a better job of writing the show/movie themselves, they turn to fan fiction.
Fan fiction is just what it sounds like, stories written by fans of any given show/movie/ or even real life people. If people have heard about it, somewhere on the internet, someone has written a story about it. Now it may seem like I am just talking randomly about some things, but I can relate fan fiction back to vampires and copyright laws.
Anne Rice. Writer of such books as: “Interview with a Vampire”, “The Vampire Lestat” and “Queen of the Damned”. Also a very well known hater of fan fiction. Anne Rice does not like it when people write stories based on her books or characters. She is so against it, that in 2000 she released a statement saying just that and prohibiting (yes prohibiting) the writing of such things. With the release of her statement, thousands of stories that had already been written were removed from the popular site, fanfiction.net. Sure, she is not the only one who has done this since then, but she is probably one of the more influential writers to do so.
Personal opinion time. I really do not get why she would prohibit people from writing stories based on characters she created. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. If I was an author and people wrote stories based on my characters, I would be happy and think, yes I am big enough to where people want to write about something I created. Not everyone is like that though, and for now and the foreseeable future, Lestat, Louis, Akasha and any other characters she’s created cannot be used in any story considered fan fiction.
