Jonathan Kieran

Some person named Demetrious Polychron published a “fan fiction” sequel to J. R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings earlier this year and—thank the Lady of Lorien—the Tolkien estate body-slammed the guy for copyright infringement, demanding rightfully that the book be destroyed both physically and digitally down to the last copy.

To my thinking, this sort of thing is equivalent to the eager beaver who burnt down the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus just to guarantee that his name would “become spoken on the lips of men” but it’s actually an even more dastardly crime. Intellectual theft can be an infringement upon the very soul and cultural contribution spawned by an enduring work like LOTR.

For those not quite “in the know,” fan-fiction is essentially the hack-ish continuation of stories by secondary “writers” who utilize characters and plot-lines created by original authors. This can be done for a secondary writer’s private and personal amusement, which is fairly harmless, one supposes, but according to international copyright law, such ramblings and bumblings can never be published in any way, shape, or form. This sort of thing is, in a word, theft.

Publishing has seen cases like this before, to say nothing about countless examples of outright plagiarism manifested in public realms from academia to entertainment. Fan fiction has become a particularly explosive phenomenon since the advent of the Internets, where the etiquette of shared information and concepts like originality have become blurred to the point of invisible gas rising from an open sewer. Healthy understandings of propriety and proprietary privilege have been dashed upon the jagged rocks of human narcissism and animalistic greed generated by the common brain’s access to cyberspace.

All such issues can be avoided, however, by summing things up in this manner: approximately half of humans in existence at any given time are fairly useless, and creative individuals need to generate their own ideas without consciously and covetously stealing the work of others, especially for personal profit.

Merry Christmas!

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[A scintillating new shocker-of-a-novel by Jonathan Kieran is slated for major release in Spring 2024 so clear your calendars, book lovers. This one is built for speed. Stay tuned for more … ]

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