ALERT: Fanart and fanfic theft!

[krait]

Thanks to allzugern for alerting me to this:

Ebay user doctor_beth2000 appears to be selling "fanzines" (stories she has printed out and bound, including stories that have never been printed in a 'zine) for profit... without the consent of the artists and writers used.

One of the works listed for sale was discovered by the artist and has now been pulled, but there are 450 listings for this person's account, and I bet that there's more stolen stuff than just that one "fanzine"...

If you're an artist or writer in Smallville, Star Trek, Stargate, Due South, or and inform other Fen to go to this ebay page and also check to see if their work is being sold at her store: doctor_beth2000. There are 744 Zines offered there. 744!

There is fiction being offered from an astounding variety of fandoms. In five pages of browsing, the list of fandoms on offer contained:


Beauty and the Beast
Sentinel
Man from UNCLE
Riptide
Airwolf Scarecrow
Battlestar Galactica
Blake's 7
Buffy
Dead Zone
Doctor Who
Due South
Equalizer
Forever Knight
Garrison's Gorillas
Highlander
Horatio Hornblower
Indiana Jones
LotR
MacGuyver
Magnificent 7
Magnum PI
MASH
Miami Vice
Power Rangers
Professionals
Rat Patrol
Real Ghostbusters
Red Dwarf
Russ Logan
Seaquest
Simon and Simon
Smallville
Stargate (SG1 at least)
Star Trek (TOS, Voyager, DS8 at least)
Starsky & Hutch
Star Wars
The A Team
The Bourne Identity
The Mummy
TJ Hooker
Twin Peaks
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Wild Wild West
Without a Trace
X-Files
Young Guns

Keep in mind this is a partial list -- I read only one-third of the auction titles and perhaps three actual listings!

I also see at least one original work, "Solace" by Alexa C -- anyone know this person, and whether this is an authorised production?

Some of the zines look authentic -- one gave a publication date of 1996 and had some water damage. However, many had no date at all, which makes me very suspicious. Artists and writers, please, no matter how obscure your fandom, do a title+description search for your fandom within this seller's items. (I've noticed a lot are listed only by acronym, so search "MFU" as well as "Man from Uncle", etc.)


I don't know what a word would be worth from me, since I am not a writer, but at least one author has submitted a complaint to Ebay (I think; and I know allzugern has), so let's see what we can do, folks!

Comments

[iibnf.livejournal.com]

All of those zines look authentic to me. If they are hers, then she has the right to sell them, same as any other second hand book. You don't need permission of authors/artists to sell a second hand book.

The only problem would be if she was making pirate copies, and they don't look like pirates to me, just like she's selling her old collection. Some really nice zines there, too!

[fer-de-lance.livejournal.com]

Apparently she was -- had printed up a bunch of fic and some fanart, stuck it in a binder, and was calling it a "fanzine", completely without the permission of the authors.

Check out allzugern's post here (http://allzugern.livejournal.com/107592.html), for a bit more background.

[fer-de-lance.livejournal.com]

Now I'm wondering, if most of the 'zines are legit, whether perhaps some unscrupulous 'zine editor, rather than the seller, is behind the problem...

[iibnf.livejournal.com]

I looked at the entire page of listings, and I can't see any problem at all.

If there were any fake zines, they've been pulled. Everything she has looks legit to me - I own a huge chunk of those myself, and they all look like originals.

I'm stunned at the prices, though. If she can get $200 for K/S Greater California then I'm sticking my copy up pronto!

[allzugern.livejournal.com]

She's already had to pull one fic because fanfic author ran across it and told her to take it down. She had never made a zine and certainly had never authorized anyone to make money from her fic. The seller may not be aware? Possibly, but it doesn't change the fact that there are free fanworks being sold for profit without the knowledge of the authors. I've e-mailed both e-bay and the couple of authors I'm pretty sure don't have a clue that their work is being sold. I'll be interested to see what happens.

[iibnf.livejournal.com]

I didn't see anything that wasn't legit, but her prices are pretty surprising. I wonder if she manages to sell many? I have a lot of those zines - if she can make $200 for an old K/S zine, I'm putting mine up, too!

She's selling some of the zines I produced back in the 90s for a hell of a huge mark up. Good luck to her if she can get it - but I still have old stock I'd like to get rid of. At a third of her price.

[allzugern.livejournal.com]

She already pulled the fic by mistressace, and it *is* possible that this seller has no idea that some of the fic wasn't authorized to be sold as a zine. I figure ebay will look into it, and if word gets out to enough fanfic writers, they can police what she is selling themselves. The problem is fanfic writers often have no clue that this is happening.

I was pretty shocked at the prices she was asking as well, but it looks like she's selling quite a bit - maybe she's getting much less than she's asking though. I'm not a zine collector or fan, but it's stuff like this that ends up spoiling the milk for everyone.

[iibnf.livejournal.com]

I have no problem with people selling second hand books, but it should be watched if she's selling downloaded stuff as fake zines. At least she took down the dodgy ones - like you said, she may not have known. I have a few thousand zines, including a lot of the ones she's selling, and they all look pretty legit to me - the ones I recognise, anyway.

Back when I first started collecting zines, er, 70s? there were a lot that were pirates around and I had no way of knowing it. The only zine importer in Australia was a guy who would buy one copy then photocopy them to sell out of his shop at huge mark ups. I wouldn't have bought them had I known, but that was the only option available at the time. Not worth crap now, couldn't resell them even if I wanted to.

[fer-de-lance.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the $200 made me blink a few times! Wish I had some of those lying around!

[allzugern.livejournal.com]

It's a mixed bag. Some of it is legit, some of it not. She did pull down a fanfic when the author contacted her, but how many more fanfic writers stuff is up there without permission? I've tried to contact two that I'm certain never gave permission to have their stuff copied and sold, but they've been out of fandom for a couple of years and I don't know if they will even get the messages.

[iibnf.livejournal.com]

Which ones do you think are not legit?

[allzugern.livejournal.com]

Definitely the Smallville story by Joyfulgirl41. I've e-mailed her, but she hasn't been around for a couple of years. That story is at the SSA, easy for someone to copy and sell. This seller may not even be aware of it - maybe she bought it herself and is re-selling. But I'm very skeptical.

[iibnf.livejournal.com]

Which one's that? I saw Blue and Big Girls... and a couple of others, but they are legit, but I didn't see the author's names. I know a few of them were released as zines then put online a while afterwards.

I'd like to purchase the Big Girl's zine but I know M.Fae Glasgow's writing is often very depressing and the major story is a cross over :(

[allzugern.livejournal.com]

'The Road Not Taken' it's a Clark/Lex story that's archived at the SSA.

[morgandawn.livejournal.com]

So far, there are only 3 out of 700 (all Smallville) we know may be fan fic printed without permission. But do keep checking.

With respect to the legit copies, only the fanzines dealers can tell if she's selling photocopies of their originals. We should be focusing on the fan stories that were printed off the net and sold without permission (the unauthorized fanzines).

My advice is to contact the publishers and writers to verify before pulling in copyright police. We don’t want to put the fan writers and publishers who genuinely published their work into the cross-hairs. The broad approach has scared on fan away from thinking of publishing her own fan fic. She’s afraid that people will report her. Which is not what you're trying to accomplish.

ps ender wiggen has a great list of authorized smallville fanzines. Use that as a starting point of sorting out the fan fic.

For other fandoms, we have lists of 'genuine’ fanzines
http://morgandawn.dreamwidth.org/995000.html

I just finished a list of Supernatural fanzines in print, so fanzines for newer fandoms and fan sitting in archives not always ‘stolen’. Publishers release fan fic after one year or sometimes they reporting online fan fic (with the author’s permission).

[iibnf.livejournal.com]

Ha, she has some of my Due South zines for sale, too, at more than triple the price I'm selling them as new!

[ride_4ever]

TYK for posting about this...and doctor beth2000 is still at it in 2016 with over 200 zines on eBay. I absolutely don't believe that after this many years and with selling so many copies over so many years that these could be legit personal purchases that she bought for herself, read, and then wanted to pass on. Furthermore, my own feeling about zines is that good fandom etiquette is to share them for free if done with them (which is what I myself do) or swap them for other zines.

[krait]

Yeah, that's very suspicious! Unless, I guess, she happened into a very large collection somehow (perhaps a convention or fan group decided to get rid of all its paper zines, or she happened into a lucky garage sale find, or a former zine editor in the family bequeathed her all of her editor's comp copies) and is taking her time about dispersing them.

Personally, I'm on the fence - certainly I'd prefer to see them given away or traded, but I'm not sure there's much trade value to them anymore, and I'm always hesitant to judge other people's motives; maybe she really, really needs the money, I don't know.

(I am eternally grateful, however, for the old-school fan who gave me a big box of zines when she found out I was in fandom! I haven't even managed to read them all, yet, as I had to put them in storage, but when I have a place of my own I'm definitely going to work my way through them. And I have put some consideration into what to do with them after, including donating them to the OTW or another fan org that collects and preserves such things.)

[ride_4ever]

OTOH I, too, don't want to be too judgmental about other people's motives...OTOH I can't help but be disturbed when I see that zines I have carry the printed request to only distribute freely in fandom and especially to not sell on eBay and the like, and then I see those very zines being sold on eBay.

(BTW, I am still experiencing active free-sharing and free-trading of zines in my primary fandom -- dSC6D -- due South and Canadian Six Degrees.)

[challengerhk]

I don't want to hijack a thread, but I'd like to get some more information on some of the ideas posted just above.

I've been in and out of fandom for many, many years. At one point, during my BA and then my MA, I started doing academic work on fanfic. Long story short, with the exception of Ming Whatne (a lovely woman) I found no access to zines for my research at all. The fandom community was particularly not helpful; one collector with a large number of zines told me that I was not welcome to access her library. I think a lot of this reaction came about because many fans felt that they were improperly represented by academia.

That's not my point, though. I did buy a large number of zines for my research. Because I was focused on pre-80s material, and because I was on the open market, I paid a lot for them. I don't think I'll be needing them any longer, and that's the crux of my question. It sounds like I'll be violating some unwritten rules of etiquette by trying to sell them and minimize my monetary loss. These are not rules I've ever heard about (or, as I said above, experienced), so I'd like to get some guidance on what constitutes acceptable practice.

[ride_4ever]

Do the zines you own not carry the disclaimer about methods of secondary distribution? No one will actually interfere with you selling them to recover some of your original costs, but the etiquette is still as I originally stated it. If you would like to donate any of them to a permanent fandom library (I myself will be volunteering next month at the one maintained by Escapade) LMK.

Also, I'd like to know more about the academic work you did on fanfic.

[challengerhk]

Thanks for the response.

As far as I can recall, I've never seen a disclaimer about secondary distribution. To get some clarification: 1) is this something relatively new? (As I said, I've been working with pre-80s material.) Or, 2) is it something that goes on material circulated among fans by fans, but not in an organized, published zine? Some of these later acquisitions I skimmed, but I have a few zines that constitute my first published fiction, and since I was 16 at the time and excited as hell to get them I read these cover to cover. Definitely nothing about secondary distribution there. These I won't sell, and I may leave them to a library on my passing.

Thanks for the interest in the fanfic academic studies. More than anything, it was fun for me, as opposed to the vast majority of people in my field, who make these studies a soapbox for political statements. If you want to read a couple of my pieces go to the Internet Review of Science Fiction at irosf.com, click on the archives, and go to the first year of publication. I have one piece in the January issue and another in the March issue; the latter was part of my fanfic study. It addresses Mary Sue characters as a means of showing how producers were using fanfic to understand what their audience's interests were, blurring the line between producer and audience.

[ride_4ever]

I'm at work now, so have to keep this super-short, but wanted to let you know I read your reply right away and will get back to you tonight. (If you'd like for me to email you a pic of a disclaimer page from one of my zines -- most of which are 1990's or newer -- PM me an email addy.)

[ride_4ever]

Won't be home 'til after midnight -- will continue to respond at more length tomorrow.

[ride_4ever]

I can't answer the "old versus new" question because I didn't even find fandom community until 2011, and my primary fandom dates back to the 1990's.I'm not sure about your distinction between "among fans by fans" as opposed to "an organized, published zine" -- both the homegrown small zines that I know and the more professionally produced zines that I know are "among fans by fans".

I love love love your saying "...the fanfic academic studies. More than anything, it was fun for me, as opposed to the vast majority of people in my field, who make these studies a soapbox for political statements"...and I look forward to reading what you have in the Internet Review of Science Fiction.

I got your email addy and will send you some zine pics soon.