From: Isobel Hamilton isobel19@hotmail.com
I have a B7 fanfic question. I've been browsing about a bit reading fics here and there, and I was wondering. If you were to read a fic on a site, then find another fic on another site that was *extremely* similar to the first one you read, just with tiny changes, posted by a different author, would you do anything about it? And if you did what would you do?
Well, if the stories in question were about (a) playing hide-and-seek on an overweight shuttle, (b) acting very badly in an antique wine cellar, or (c) a chestful of plasma in an underground base in the middle of a Forestry Commission plantation, then I'd go at least fifty-fifty on it being not plagiarism but mere coincidence.
There have been cases in the past of fanfic being repackaged by unscrupulous dealers - Horizon suffered it about ten years ago - but that was paper zines being bootlegged for profit. There's not much profit in online bootlegging, so I can't see why anyone should want to do such a thing. What's the point?
Neil