User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-1506468-20190827123101/@comment-6032121-20190827140214

From Tardis Wiki, the free Doctor Who reference

Thank you very much!

Though I still don't quite see why Amorkuz linked to T:NOT rather than T:VS, all else being equal.

At any rate, I find Amorkuz's implication that something being published on a blog makes it fanfiction by definition. It's not that I don't vaguely see where he's coming from, but in what tangible way does it differ from any other short story released on the web? So the text is embedded directly into a webpage rather than being a pdf up for download. Big deal.

In fact, here's a precedent pointing the other way for you: Martha Jone's MySpace blog was obviously released in the form of, er, a blog. Online. Yet a debate on the Panopticon specifically ruled it valid. So as long as it's licensed, and the people licensing it are presenting it as a story they're releasing, we already do cover stories released via blogs.

User:Nikisketches states above that “the Who elements in his stories (online novellas, upcoming print stuff etc.) are all used with explicit permission from their owners (Lance Parkin, Andy Lane, Simon Bucher-Jones, Andrew Hickey, Stuart Douglas and so on)”. Why would James Wylder have bothered to acquire such permissions if he deemed that what he was writing was "fanfiction"?

There are cases of prominent DWU authors writing fanfiction on the side, most notably Paul Magrs, as referenced and linked-to on the page of Towers of Canonicity and Likelihood concerning his assertion in such a fanfiction story that the Tower of Canonicity was where the Doctor was tried in The War Games. But there, the reason he published this as a fanfic is obviously that at this point he didn't have a license to use Gallifrey or the Second Doctor, even if he did have the license to Panda. If he'd bothered to ask for the BBC's permission to use the Towers, the mind boggles as to why he'd then use this shiny new permission to publish it as part of an Internet genre defined by its lack of licensing.

Of course, this is all reliant on Nikisketches' claim that Wylder did get full permission from the relevant authors, so a source for that statement would have to be procured. But if the statement is right, I don't see how it's fanfiction, whether it's released in print, on a blog or via a carrier-piegon mailing list.