Apparently I am just a despicable thief

So I have just come back from my parents for a lunch to celebrate my brother’s birthday, and once again I am left with the undeniable feeling that he finds me totally and entirely contemptible in every single way possible.

But after giving it a little thought, I am have started to realise that it is not just me he finds contemptible – it is anything he doesn’t understand.

This runs from computer related stuff – he thinks the IT department at his job is a bunch of muppets, so naturally that extends to anyone who uses computers for a living (and by uses I mean programs/manages etc, rather than uses for things such as word and power point). He knows full well I write computer programs for a living, but because he really has no concept of what goes in to that, he thinks that it is simple, and that if the people doing it can’t do what HE wants when HE wants it, they must be twats.

I have spent a fair portion of my life supporting IT infrastructure in customer settings, and sometimes we have to insist on doing something that they don’t want – or we can’t do exactly what they want – because it is either impossible, or the cost would be so ludicrously prohibitive that it would bankrupt our company.

I get that – in theory – the customer is always right – but I challenge anyone, ANYWHERE, running a company to say they would do something for a customer that would cost them (the company) around £5,000 to £10,000 and not pass ANY of that on to the customer when billing them. And if the customer refused to pay, I challenge anyone to go ahead and do it anyway.

Today was no different – 

I write fanfiction. I am actually quite good at it, based on the reviews I get from various web sites. 

And, like every fanfiction writer, I am loathe plagiarism with a passion. 

I wrote a story called Into The Black (a crossover of Stephen King’s ITnd Harry Potter), and – at an estimate – I would say I put about a year, maybe 18 months of my life in to writing it. Not all at once – it was spread out over around two years (which okay, is not that spread out) – but still – 18 months of my life to write a series of three stories that told the tale of how Harry and his friends fared against one of the most terrifying creatures I have ever heard of. 

Now – in all fairness – I didn’t create that creature. Nor did I create Harry, Hermione, Neville or the majority of the other characters I used. I did create some – there are various characters in the stories who we know almost nothing about because they feature so very rarely. So if I create their relations (mothers/fathers/siblings etc) then are they my creation, or am I just using what JK Rowling created? (I would say they are mine, because if they are not in the books, and if I haven’t read any of the "ghost plots" or "arc work" around the books, then they did come from my imagination, albeit with some help from JK Rowling). 

But – either way – it is undeniable that the story is not all my own work – using characters, buildings and bits of back story that were created by JKR (and Stephen King in this instance) – the fact is the vast majority of the plot is my own work. I thought it through, I plotted it all out, I created it from my imagination.

So you can imagine how utterly and completely pissed off I would be if someone went to my story, did a select all, copy, paste and then posted it elsewhere as their own work.

And I suspect anyone else in that situation would be equally pissed off – and rightly so.

Now – to give them their due – every fanfiction site I have seen has VERY STRICT rules on this subject. If you are found guilty of stealing, plagiarising or otherwise using someone else’s work and passing it off as your own, your account is shut down and you are booted for life. No second chances, no other choice. 

But if you ask my baby brother, he says that fanfiction writers are being incredibly hypocritical and "uppity" if we want protection for our work from plagiarism and theft, because essentially we are just stealing other people’s work and making it our own. 

Despite all the original plots we add, despite all the dialog we write, the characters we create, the situations we build – we basically just take the work of JK Rowling, rearrange a few words and publish it as our own.

Which – to me – shows he has never read any fanfiction, because it doesn’t interest him. And because it doesn’t interest him, he thinks it is entirely contemptible.

Now there are some fanfictions out there that do pretty much fall in to that category. I read one that seemed to just have cut and pasted from Philosopher’s Stone and replaced "Harry" with "Neville" and "Neville" with "Harry" because there were no other plot changes. 

And while it might sound hypocrtical, I do find those kind of stories annoying, because my main reason for reading fanfiction is to see what other ideas people have for how the stories could have fallen out. But since that is just my opinion, I don’t think those type of stories should be banned.

But for me – when I am writing stories – I have to write them with at least 70-80% my own work (by which I mean even if I follow the canon plot, I have to  create enough to make it different enough). And that takes time and effort to do – it is just not a case of sitting down and banging it out in a night. 

Into The Black took around 2 1/2 years. The Silent Trio Saga took nigh on eight. The Girl In The Cellar is something I’ve been writing since mid August and I am only 4 chapters in.

And while I can speak to specifics, I guess most other fanfic writers have the same timescales. We put a lot of time and effort writing original stories in a pre-existing universe, and because those stories are original, they are ours.

And they are certainly not a case of just "shuffling a few things around" – which is how baby brother described it.

Which is why he thinks that anyone who complains about plagiarism is just being uppity and really should just shut the frak up.

Which is why – even though I had no respect for his opinion before, I have even less respect now.

Anyway – that was the birthday dinner. Doesn’t it sound fun?