No matter how many times it's asserted in moral terms, fans do not own anything because they're fans of something, even if they feel entitled to that ownership. This is the same kind of ownership a three-year-old feels playing with another kid's toys while the moms sit and visit, combined perhaps with the lovely impulse of an angry drunk bellowing out the hit song's name from the audience when a band is playing their newest stuff and a sprinkle of one of those jerks writing an article that starts with them pulling into JD Salinger's driveway. Just stop.
linked from Steven Grant's Permanent Damage column over at the Comic Book Resources website, I knew that I had to put this quote and this article out for further consumption.
While, I don't think the "feud" that Spurgeon's post hits upon is really about this at its root...I think that this quote does cut to the chase of a lot of the overdeveloped feelings of entitlement that develop among fandoms, whether those of comics, movies, RPGs, novel series or whatever people might want to "fan" about. Basically I saw this quote and decided to spin it out into a mini opinion piece for this blog.
Fans do not own what they are fans of and they are also not "owed" anything by whomever owns and/or produces material that they are fans of. (I know, that is a horrible way to end a sentence but still...) Being a consumer, or being a fan, does not entitle you to anything more than further materials to consume and obsess about in various fora online.
In a response to the article above, this was written: "In the case of Superman, the character should have become the property of the public and the fans of the character already." (find the original article here) This is, really, nothing more than the usual misunderstanding of how copyright works among laymen bolstered by the above mentioned sense of entitlement. Being a fan of something does not give you any greater moral authority towards that something than anyone else, certainly not more so than the creators of the something (or their heirs in this case). To think otherwise is nothing but an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.
Sadly, this is something that is becoming more and more prevalent in the "geeky" communities (look around for comments being made about the announcement of a new Battlestar Galactica movie to be made by Bryan Singer). Fortunately, the more frothy and irrational that people act over these topics the easier it becomes to discount them.
Being a fan of something, anything, and producing whatever (web site, fan forums, print zine, fan fiction) over that something doesn't give you a piece of the ownership pie. It never has, and it isn't going to at any point in the future. Really, all that it does is make the rest of us dorks and geeks look bad by comparison.
On a last note for this posting, I want to remind people that this blog isn't a democracy, nor are you guaranteed freedom of speech. Just as you have the ability to post your opinions in comments to this post, so do I have the right to not publish your comments. And as this is my blog, my rights win out over yours.
