Fanlib.com

[Distracted]

If you have an account on Fanlib.com, you probably know it's shutting down August 4th. There's an unsubtantiated rumor going around the site forum that Disney's bought the site, though, and that anything left when things shut down belongs to them. I don't know if it's true or not, but I deleted all 36 of my stories posted there and then deleted my account today. I just thought I should pass on the rumor, just in case.

[CX]

Yeah, it sounds just like Disney to steal the work of others and claim it as their own.

Nevermind, I found my account and deleted my stuff.

[Drogna]

I deleted everything of mine off this site ages ago after I read the terms and conditions properly. Not really in the spirit of an open fan community.

[thecursor]

I've never been a fan of Fanlib, the whole site just rubbed me the wrong way.

[Linda]

Fanlib.com is no relation to Fanfiction.com, right? Just checking but I think I never went to that site. I guess you should always read the fine print. But I would think the copyright laws would protect works that were not officially copyrighted. Of course, with a few minor plot changes and some style and wording changes, a stolen work of fiction might be able to be made to look like an original work. And if you are a big organization with the money to hire skilled lawyers, you can get away with quite a lot.

[Linda]

Just googled fanlib.com and it is already closed. Guess those who have not already removed their stuff are out of luck getting it back. That was the site that those contests to win episode scripts were on, right?

[Distracted]

No. The contests to win scripts were on myfandoms.com. That site is where all the fanlib people seem to be going. Fanlib.com was where they did Kirk vs. Picard last year, a script-based contest hosted by George Takei and Wil Wheaton (Sulu and Wesley). Eventually, though, it basically turned into a chat room for teenaged anime fans. I'm not sure why it shut down, but I think at least partially it was due to plagiarism issues and legal risk. Almost all the kids who "friended" me were posting other people's vids and things that they hadn't actually written, like song lyrics, or stories and poems unrelated to any fandom, just because they liked them and wanted their friends to see them, like you can do on MySpace to dress up your page, and they were getting their accounts deleted right and left for copyright violations. I don't think a lot of them even understood the difference between fanlib and a site like MySpace or FaceBook. At the end there I had 34 "friends" with names like sasukekun and yaoilove, all the result of me posting a random comment on one kid's artwork and then getting sucked into these massive multi-person pm threads they'd set up with like fifty people in them. It was an odd situation. I talked one kid through a threatened suicide attempt.

[Linda]

Wow, Distracted, you have had some wild experiences on the internet! That kid was lucky you were around. Thanks for the info on fanlib.com. I was a member of one site that shut down due to copyright violations - Dean Wesley Smith's writer's board. That was a shame because he had a lot of good advice for writers, especially those just starting out. He was the editor of the Strange New Worlds contest. His lawyer told him that as host of the site he could be in legal trouble for copyright violations on his site.