Regarding the supposed danger of blog comments, JMS noted that an episode of Babylon 5 had to be significantly rewritten due to such an issue. It does seem unlikely that such a case would be successful if it ever made it to court. One of the many objections to this is that in terms of spreading ideas a comment on the author’s blog is no better than an article written in the local paper of the author’s home town. Another is that if such broad interpretations of copyright were permitted then Isaac Asimov’s estate would essentially own all fiction related to robots. It will be interesting when someone sues Corey Doctorow about such an issue.

As for fan fiction and copyright, if a fan can claim credit for an idea taken from a fan-fiction work then surely the author has a greater claim to credit for the universe in which the fan-fiction work is set. In which case a license condition for writing fan-fiction could be the right for the original author to borrow ideas. It would be good if on occasion an author could bless a fan-fiction work and make it part of the canon.

I also think that it suits the traditional publishing industry to keep this illusion. There is considerable danger if some fan claims that their comments on the author’s blog have been used in a new book without any compensation – the obvious (traditional) solution is to carefully control all access to the author so that they never get ‘tainted’ by attributable ideas. The fact that authors themselves are freeing themselves from this straitjacket is wonderful. However, fandom also has to learn the lessons that the FOSS community has – that you can’t demand work of someone even if you theoretically pay their bills, that authors are normal people with normal ups and downs, and that being rude or obnoxious is a good way to drive work away rather than assist in its production.

And, most importantly, the publishing industry has to come up with suitable ways of acknowledging that their authors get their ideas from the real world. Traditionally, authors don’t want fan fiction because if a fan mentions an interesting idea and the author sees it, then if it ever turns up in a book that fan can (rightly) claim some contribution to that. This is the old proprietary way of writing software – patents and all – that has held the software industry back for so long. FOSS has two important parallels to draw on that situation. Firstly, getting a mention in the foreword (c.f. changelog) might be all the reward a contributor gets for their idea – establishing the monetary value of an idea is a hugely tricky thing to do and it’s usually not worth the effort. If people accept that, then the second parallel happens – authors can then start to acknowledge good ideas while still retaining the kudos for their own skills in writing. Writing books, like writing software, shouldn’t be a zero-sum game.