How does copyright work for copyright infringers? If someone tries to infringe the copyright of a copyright infringer (e.g. the example of copying a chapter of fanfiction) what happens?
This one’s a little easier to answer! The starting point is clear: even if your fanfic infringes another author’s copyright, your fanfic will still be protected by copyright (at least in the UK, US, and where I’m from-Singapore). But of course, if we just stopped there, we could find ourselves in some very silly situations. For example, I could just copy everyone ever’s fanfics, and they can sue me if they want, but I still own the copyrights to the copied works. So the law has a very complicated concept to deal with this: the “ex turpi causa” maxim. Basically, what it means is, if you get rights by doing something illegal (or morally nasty), you will not be allowed to to enforce those rights in court. This maxim gets more complicated the more we talk about it, but it is still nice to know that it exists.
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How does copyright work for copyright infringers? If someone tries to infringe the copyright of a copyright infringer (e.g. the example of copying a chapter of fanfiction) what happens?
This one’s a little easier to answer! The starting point is clear: even if your fanfic infringes another author’s copyright, your fanfic will still be protected by copyright (at least in the UK, US, and where I’m from-Singapore).
But of course, if we just stopped there, we could find ourselves in some very silly situations. For example, I could just copy everyone ever’s fanfics, and they can sue me if they want, but I still own the copyrights to the copied works. So the law has a very complicated concept to deal with this: the “ex turpi causa” maxim.
Basically, what it means is, if you get rights by doing something illegal (or morally nasty), you will not be allowed to to enforce those rights in court. This maxim gets more complicated the more we talk about it, but it is still nice to know that it exists.