So, fandom.

Someone decided to gather up all the fic she approved of in her new fandom, strip out the author's notes, edit it for spelling and grammar, and compile it into PDF and EPUB "books" for other people to download from her personal website.

... would you expect to be asked permission if one of your stories were included in such a compilation?

YES.

Yes.

But I'm not shocked. Appalled, not shocked.

They not only stripped out author's notes but EDITED? Was this supposed to be something backchannel? Because that is not cool.

I can see why you might do that for yourself (especially if you haven't discovered AO3's download function, or your fandom isn't well represented there), though personally I would stop short of removing notes. I probably wouldn't edit, though I can see that once you've got a story in a word processor or similar, the spellchecker might seem irresistible. I can even see that you might email it to your best friend when she said how cool it was. But once you're at public redistribution, you're redistributing, and fandom has rules about that, of which 'ask first' is the most important one.

But I'm not shocked. Appalled, not shocked.

Same. Also, something like this actually happened to me a few years back--except this prize specimen was using a POD service and charging people. It got shut down pretty quickly.

But even doing that for free strikes me as more than a little skeevy.

When challenged, she claimed that it was okay because she kept the author's names with the stories (therefore not plagiarism) and encouraged readers to post feedback at the original site (FFN).

She's decided she's not in this fandom and therefore she doesn't have to care what the authors think. I think. Her logic is a bit shaky.

At least one of the writers whose work she has appropriated has an explicit author's note forbidding reposting. And, in an excess of hypocrisy, she has a statement on the site forbidding reposting any material from her site. MERF.

My god, is she *trying* to make people hate her? Because I'm a little fish, you know, and I don't fic that much anymore, but there are a lot of Law &Order drabbles and stuff that I'd be pissed if people treated like that.

My god, is she *trying* to make people hate her?

I think she's one of those people who consider themselves mavericks and thus not bound by the conventions/etiquette of the fannish community. She's got quite a lovely website, but she made the mistake of drawing a bunch of the stories from writers with a presence on LJ and long experience in fandom. If she'd stuck with the FFN crowd, I suspect nobody would ever have noticed.

She claims that the service she provides is for people who aren't fans and wouldn't know where to look for good stories, and now they can just download her PDFs. But in reality, what non-fans are going to look for fanfiction to begin with? There's no point to the exercise.

Man, fandom kills me.

This, for instance, is a Bad_penny report about Chuck Shurley, the writer from SPN, who became a ficwriter in Supernatural fandom, and then caused a wanksplosion.

It's SO AWESOME. It's not even really an SPN story, so much as it is a story about reality and writing and how the invisible people in our computers are actually real people too, even the ones we hate.

That story was flat-out amazing. I wanted to click every user name and link.