Today I want to talk about the professional butt and how to keep it
safely covered from legal attacks. The other blog I’m on, Shapeshifter
Seductions (www.shapeshifterseductions.blogspot.com) is currently
undergoing minor content renovations. No, we’re not excising twincest or
stepdaughter stories or high school kids having sex. We don’t do that
over there. It’s sentient bestiality all the way. Our shapeshifters are
all consenting adults. They consent to hetero sex, gay sex, threesomes
and foursomes, BDSM and discipline with rulers. There’s plenty of
species intermingling and even a mixed marriage (carnivore/herbivore).
They’re quite the progressive bunch in Talbot’s Peak.
What some of them may also be is in violation of other creators’ copyrights.
It all started innocently. Serena posted an example of a newspaper in a
town taken over by shapeshifters, the Guts and Butts Gazette. The rest
of us (Savanna, Rebecca, Solara and me) ran with it with a vengeance.
Savanna brought in White Fang Kent, ace reporter and superpowered wolf
from an alien planet. I added his professional rival, Leona Lane, woman
reporter and werepanther. The paper needed a photographer, so we brought
in red wolf Jamie Olsen. The editor is werewolf Nick McMahon. (Either
Serena isn’t a comic book fan, or she’s smarter than the rest of us.)
From there things just kind of exploded. We named our Montana town
Talbot’s Peak (after Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man). Savanna felt we
needed a sexy cowboy character. Enter Brandon Wayne, millionaire
rancher, businessman, and bat shifter. (If she could have Superman, I
wanted Batman.) The Tiger Yakuza set up shop as the catch-all bad guys,
led by the evil Shere Khan. Our blog has since morphed into a home for
shapeshifter flash scenes featuring a cast larger than
The Simpsons’. Occasionally they even follow a plot.
As long as we stuck to the blog, providing five free reads a week,
everything was fine. However, we’re writers. You know how that goes. Our
characters evolved and developed and wanted their stories told, and not
at a pace of 1000 words at a time. We began writing stories and novels
involving the town and its people, and making plans to publish. Those
plans bore fruit when Savanna recently published
Her Midnight Stardust Cowboys, the first Talbot’s Peak novel. (I’m reading it on my laptop, and it’s
hawt.)
This is the point where I panicked.
Not over the idea of having to sit down and write a novel, daunting
though that is to lazy folk like me. It’s those character names.
Lighthearted homages to our favorite comics and TV shows are fine on
free blogs and fan fiction sites, but once you go pro and money starts
changing hands, people take serious notice. People like those who
initially created those characters you’re paying homage to, and the
corporations that own the copyrights.
I have to take the blame for a lot of this problem. I read tons of comic
books and watched tons of TV in my early years. Most of the iffy names
are attached to characters I created. I warned Savanna before she
published, so we caught most of the offenders, but we’re still left with
having to clean up our act.
Luckily the damage isn’t too extensive. We just need to change a few
names. The characters themselves long ago evolved beyond their
other-media origins. For instance, Jimmy and Jamie Olsen both started
life as redheaded photographers for their respective papers. However, I
don’t think Superman’s pal is a wolf shifter, or a repressed homosexual
edging his way out of the closet with the loving support of his partner,
a randy Latino snake shifter. Since red wolves are native to the
southern states, it was easy enough to make Jamie a Cajun boy named
Robineau. The other offending characters are undergoing similar identity
changes.
I thought maybe I was overreacting, foreseeing legal problems where there weren’t any. Last week’s episode of
Grimm made
me change my mind. The fairy tale bad guy of the week had a bizarre
name—Trinket Lipslums or something like that. He’d gone by similar
bizarre names in the past, all with the same letters. You know what else
those letters spell? Rumplestiltskin. So why not just call him that?
It’s a legitimate fairy tale name and in the public domain. Or it would
be, if not for ABC/Disney’s show
Once Upon a Time, which has
Rumplestiltskin as a recurring character. Obviously NBC’s legal
department didn’t want any trouble from ABC’s legal department, so they
changed the name and only dropped hints about the character’s true
identity.
If major networks are pussyfooting around over legal use of a name and
characters that may look a wee bit too similar to some company’s
trademarked cash cows, then we on the shapeshifter blog would do well to
distance our creations from their origins, even though it was all done
in innocent fun. Corporate lawyers don’t look at it that way. Especially
if our fun starts earning us profits, using someone else’s
well-established name.
(Like NBC and ABC have any right to complain. DC Comics/Vertigo shopped its comic book property
Fables around Hollywood in hopes of landing a production deal.
Fables
is about fairy tale beings living in the modern world. Both NBC and ABC
turned them down. Then both networks debuted TV shows about fairy tale
beings living in the modern world. Things that make you go hmmmm …)
In short, what we did in using those names wasn’t meant as stealing. It
was just a joke. That’s fine for free reads on a blog, or fan fiction.
Once we go pro with it, though, it starts edging into plagiarism and
piracy territory. It’s easier just to change the names and pretend it
never happened. Cover the buttsky. Better safe than sorry.
50 Shades of Grey doesn’t count. James changed the names before she published.
And now, back to my own TP story, which involves only original
characters. Except for Shere Khan, who’s already had a name change. And
Rick, who looks like Brendan Fraser and was named after his character in
The Mummy, but nobody will know that unless I tell them. Which I just did. Oops…
Originally posted at
TITLE MAGIC.
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