Questions about releasing a Star Wars Game

I have never heard of anyone getting sued over writing fanfiction. You know how many websites for fanfiction and how many thousands of fanfiction stories there actually are? You know how many of them are crossovers between licences who probably wouldn’t actively work together? Or fiction romantically attaching characters who aren’t usually because someone likes them together?

Fanfilms are a different beast because they involve making money and rivaling the style of shows or movies, so in some cases those have seen issues, in particular the Paramount Prelude to Axar stuff. But fanfic - which this is - never gets to that. Most people even state who actually owns the rights before they post them.

Trust me, if they have any sense of wanting to avoid pissing off fans in droves for liking their brand and daring to do something honoring said creativity, they wouldn’t bother. Not everyone wants to write crap like Fifty Shades instead.

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@derekmetaltron - dude, I’m not sure if you intended to, but A) you came off really rude and aggressive and B) are incorrect.

Just from a quick google search (literally 30 seconds or less) : " Perhaps the most famous case, however, is Dmitri Yemets’ Tanya Grotter book series, a “cultural response” to Harry Potter, which provoked a lawsuit from J. K. Rowling."

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. Salinger v. Colting, 607 F.3d 68 (2d Cir. 2010)

“This case probably presents the closest analogue to run-of-the-mill fan fiction. A Swedish author wrote an unauthorized sequel to the Catcher in the Rye, called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, which told the story of what happened to Holden Caulfield decades after the events in the original Salinger novel. The sequel had its own words and plot, but it borrowed the main characters from the original. This case illustrates why a great deal of fan fiction will not qualify for the fair use defense in most courts: A fair use is expected to criticize, analyze or parody the original work. The sequel author here wished to glory in and join the work of Salinger, not to critique it. This distinction caused the Court to find that the sequel was not a fair use”

  1. Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin, 268 F.3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001)
    "We have the notoriously litigious estate of Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, to thank for an excellent lesson about the difference between parody and homage. Mitchell’s estate brought a copyright infringement action against the author and publisher of The Wind Done Gone. Like the Catcher in the Rye sequel, The Wind Done Gone borrowed characters and the semi-fictional universe from Gone with the Wind, and mixed them up into a new story, in which the same events are related through the eyes of one of Scarlett O’Hara’s enslaved women. But here, the Court ruled that it was a fair use. The critical difference was the purpose of The Wind Done Gone, which was to shift the narrative perspective of the original in order to create a savage rebuke of the original’s assumptions about race. This was quintessential fair use.

Compare that with the very different outcome of another lawsuit brought by the Mitchell estate, this one against the producers of a musical stage version of Gone with the Wind called Scarlett Fever. Although Scarlett Fever was different from the original, including because it added jokes and musical numbers, it told the story from the same basic perspective and was a tribute to Mitchell’s work, not a critique of it."

Anderson v. Stallone, 1989 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 11109 (C.D. Cal. 1989)
“Say you draft a fan fiction story with the characters from your favorite television show, and then you send it to the producer of the show? If the producer then uses parts of your story without permission, who is infringing whom? In this case, a screenwriter saw the first three Rocky movies and decided to propose a fourth one to Sylvester Stallone, in which Rocky fights an East German boxer in the shadow of the Berlin wall. When Stallone’s Rocky IV included an allegedly similar but not identical iron curtain theme (starring Dolph Lundgren as Russian boxer Ivan Drago), the plaintiff sued. The Court held that the plaintiff’s work was an unauthorized derivative of the original Stallone movies, and thus did not deserve copyright protection. Moreover, the Court found that, even if Stallone had copied elements from the plaintiff’s script to create Rocky IV (and there was no evidence he had done that), most of what Stallone would have been copying consisted of Stallone’s own characters as infringed by the plaintiff. Put another way, you can’t infringe something that infringed you first.”

There are plenty more. Here’s a link.

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Sorry if I came over as being a tad aggressive about it, I’m just sick of this constant feeling by some fans with anything like this that you have no chance because you will get sued majorly. :unamused:

That being said, the core difference between those and most fanfiction written online is that those were actively published or staged, yes? If I wrote a version of Gone With The Wind and tried to sell it off as original I’d probably expect issues. As stated since I imagine the guy isn’t going to publish this Star Wars idea or intend it for profit, it really should be fine. General rule of thumb is simply to put at the start that you don’t own this thing and it’s all being done for fun and love. :slight_smile:

EDIT: First random example I found and what virtually every fanfiction writer does at the top. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12429246/1/Our-Differences

You’re making an assumption here that I dislike fanworks. Nowhere did I say that – however, it is a thin line that is easy to cross. Just putting a disclaimer at the top of a work isn’t enough. If you go morally against what the creator is for (EG: making a sexually explicit Harry Potter fanfic), you can get sued.

Or, as George Lucas so kindly said in the 80s – he was okay with fanfiction, but he doesn’t like sexually explicit works – particularly those involving gay men. He was ready to sue the pants off of anyone who made his characters gay.

In addition, several people misunderstand what fair use and derivative works actually are. Fair use is for analysis, criticism, or parody. Derivative works are works that never directly quote the original works (unless it’s an abridgement or translation – however, those aren’t fanfiction) or use plotline from the original work. So, sorry, your fanfiction that is a self-insert based in Supernatural 2.8 is not covered and could get you sued.

I’m not saying don’t write this stuff – I’m saying cover your ass, because nobody else is going to do it for you, and you could lose a lot of money and be made a ridicule of.

No I didn’t think you disliked fanfiction or anything, I was just tired that it means like no one is allowed to imagine or craft their own idea on what their fandom means to them. And yes, some writers take issue with certain kinds of fanfic, which I can respect (though there is no way you can stop people thinking of certain fandoms or characters sexually so yeah). And given I can imagine there is plenty of Star Wars slash out there - hell there’s a whole section of fandom banking on Finn and Poe being gay and writing just that - I think that was always going to be a losing battle if it was today. And Lucas even encouraged fan films on Star Wars with competitions for them for years.

I think in theory the majority of fan fiction could get sued, but most organisations and groups owning said fandoms know the shitstorm they would release from fandom if they did. I’ll be stating as best as possible in my own idea that Marvel doesn’t belong to me, but it’s not going to stop me from writing, any more than the many other fanfics I have wrote in the past.

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