This session is facilitated by Marsha Courneya
About this session
The session will be an interactive workshop that starts with a brief history of copyright in relation to the individual author and ends with a united effort to collectively originate a storyworld under a Creative Commons license. We will examine what, other than legal definitions, differentiate unauthorized works (fanfiction, fan wikis, etc.) created within a storyworld from their canonical counterparts. These unauthorized works enrich the value of the intellectual property immeasurably for the copyright holders, but copyright law centralizes this value in a way that supports income inequality.
Goals of this session
To discuss the question: What does it take to author a storyworld and who should own it? No single person can maintain a contemporary, complex storyworld without the contribution of others, but this challenges our historical view of the individual author as godlike creator. The openly-licensed storyworld represents a decentralized strategy that sidesteps the income inequality held up by modern copyright law. As a group, we will weigh the benefits of the six Creative Commons licenses in relation to a collectively-authored storyworld before we originate one under a randomly-generated collective artist’s name.