I reblogged that post about paying fan writers last night on my phone while I was falling asleep, but this morning it occurs to me that young fans not having been around for copyright wars is also why we have the discussion going around for underpaid artists.
Because artists could only slip through the legal loophole of “charging for materials, not profiting from the copyrighted IP” if they kept their prices lower. $20 for a piece of art at a fan convention could easily be proven as charging for the material it took to make the art, the cost of printing off several copies to sell, and the cost of renting a booth to sell it at. You start charging $75, $80 for a piece of art that isn’t using outrageously expensive materials (costumes, canvas paintings, framed & matted artwork), the companies are going to start getting suspicious about whether you’re profiting, and profits get into sticky copyright legal issues that could get your ass sued.
So then we come into the internet age. We come into the age of digital art, digital commissions. The age wherein copyright holders are confusing the hell out of veteran fans because they went from sending Cease & Desist letters to fan websites to holding contests for fanfic and fanart right in broad daylight. Like. What the everloving hell.
So you have people who grew up charging $20 for a printed-off piece of art because that was how they had to do things to stay under the radar, and suddenly you have these artists coming up who are charging a fair-trade price for their work because suddenly the threat of lawsuit is virtually gone. And you have a lot of pushback because people were used to fanart being cheap because we literally could not charge what it was worth before now. And that translates into paying digital artists for original art as well, because people don’t always grasp the separation between paying for commissioned art of your own intellectual property and paying for a piece of fanart that cannot (could not?) be accurately priced because of copyright issues.
So yeah. Fan artists undercharge and fan writers don’t charge at all because companies like Fox and Universal and the WB held the threat of legal action over us for years and years. And honestly, I’m still not sure I trust them, even with this “Yes! Give us free marketing by spreading your popular fan works around!” attitude. Fuck, they even made a movie out of a fanfic – given, the names were changed, but everyone knows it was a fanfic, and that’s… huge.
What is this brave new world that has such wonders in it.
In the pre-Internet days the cost for fan art was much higher than just materials. Most fan art was sold in person at conventions (selling prints by mail never took off). At conventions, originals and prints both sold for hundreds - if not thousands - of dollars at fan auctions. It left many fanzine publishers shaking their heads in wonder.
Fanzine prices did try to recoup the cost of materials - but that cost was vague and many fans argued over whether it should include the cost of renting a table at a convention to sell the zine or the cost of buying a comb-binding machine to assemble the zines. There are lots of discussions about Fandom and Profit on Fanlore: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_and_Profit
Most fanzine publishers argued that the limited print run - and the fact that there was limited profit - would insulate them from copyright claims. But even then they understood that, like today, “no or little profit” was not a complete defense against infringement. Instead they relied on keeping their sales down and used word of mouth advertising.
reblogging for von–gelmini’s tags
#i used to have a whole file of c&d letters #horrors of the b7 slash wars #as the publisher i could protect my writers somewhat by not passing along their names and such #but it meant i was constantly under attack and threat #the only thing that kept me laughing at them #is that i was pathetically poor #you wanna sue me? #go ahead! #get in line behind the medical bills i owe #the landlord who evicted me #the school loans #etc etc etc #sue the fuck outta me #one more judgement ain’t gonna affect my laughable credit rating #fandom history #dqueue