Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5070188-20151226234449/@comment-24155515-20160105173226

Dessamator wrote: Actually, Fan fiction itself is illegal, unless it is made with the consent of its authors or the work it is based on is in the public domain (or has a permissive license). So by saying you created it, you've possibly just admitted to breaking the the law.

The only reason wikia allows it is because the authors generally don't care enough to hunt down each and every fan-fiction out there to sue them. It would be a losing battle anyway, considering that most web users use usernames that aren't their names, most ips are dynamic or shared, and the fact that one can actually write a bot to generate fan-fiction and post it everywhere.

It seems that you're simply upset that you don't have control over the content you created and posted probably without permission from the authors.

Suggested reading :


 * http://www.business2community.com/entertainment/copyright-myths-from-the-world-of-fan-fiction-0588594#RPykkgIoxIs3TlCL.97

As a tranformative work, fair use can be claimed on it. Of course, fair use isn't so much a defense as a thing that might protect you if a judge chooses to honor it.

(I also wonder if it's ethical (or even possible, from a licensing standpoint), considering Wikia's content licensure, for fanfiction to be posted here, since as a derivative of a copyrighted work, it's unlikely to properly fit under a CC-BY license...)

Pinkgirl234 wrote: Is deleting content in your wiki legal if you can' blank your own wiki? How about in the case of renaming content?

This is a different question than the wider thread topic, so it probably would have benefited from its own thread. But yes, it's entirely legal to blank and delete content on a wiki you founded. It's also okay to move pages (the same thing as renaming, from a technical standpoint). However, note that if you have a lot of other people than yourself working on the wiki, it's not really "your" wiki anymore (all founding a wiki really means is that you have extra tools so that you can take care of the wiki--you're like the wiki's mom or dad) and that the wiki's community might not want a lot of blanking and deleting so you should run it by them or they have the right to try to hold a discussion to, say, remove you as an administrator/bureaucrat.