Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Lucrative Fandom: Recognizing the Economic Power of Fanworks and Reimagining Fair Use in Copyright

Stacey Lantagne
2014 Social Science Research Network  
Fan culture, in the form of fan-created works like fanfiction, fanart, and fanvids, is often associated with the Internet. However, fandom has existed for as long as stories have been told. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories inspired a passionate fandom long before the age of the Internet. Despite their persistence, fanworks have long existed in a gray area of copyright law. Determining if any given fanwork is infringing requires a fair use analysis. Although these analyses pay
more » ... service to a requirement of aesthetic neutrality, they tend to become bogged down by unarticulated artistic judgments that hinge on a court's personal interpretations of the work in question. One outcome of this emphasis on aesthetic value has been a de-emphasis of the market harm factor of fair use, the examination of which has come to be subsumed by courts' aesthetic judgments.
doi:10.2139/ssrn.2402951 fatcat:seuaq4rh5fduzikh6cviyw3f2i