Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-10502460-20190109235250/@comment-10502460-20190110022759

I am referring to a crackdown by Fandom itself on wikis that host non-CC content.

Fair use, to my knowledge, has never been interpreted by anyone whose opinion on the subject actually matters in the legal sense as allowing people to remix and publish copyrighted works. Remixing a copyrighted work to create your own goes beyond the bounds of criticism, review, or parody, which is what the Fair Use doctrine is intended to protect. A lot of people throw around "Fair Use" to claim protection of stuff that isn't actually protected under fair use.

One of the things that allows fan fiction to survive in most places is that it's not for profit, and thus more of a legal grey area, but since a CC license explicitly allows people to monetize a work, I can't see how that would be compatible with copyright.

Granted, in the case of fan fiction, for certain stuff like a really well made dark fic that completely subverts and diverges from the tone of the original material, you could probably make a convincing case that such work is sufficiently transformative as to have its own identify and thus be covered under Fair Use, but I don't think that argument would hold up for the vast majority of fan works which just take a copyrighted franchise and use the exact same style, universe, and tone to make their own plot.

Also, "unless the copyright holder explicitly prohibits" is a legal fallacy. A copyright is permissive, not restrictive, meaning if you want to do something with the work that isn't covered under Fair Use, there has to be explicit permission in some form by the rights holder, not the other way around.