Threads: The Island Sequel. Please help! :(

[SimonDoom]

It does seem interesting how much it can vary, where the line falls for different people. Empathy is clearly a big factor. Tolkien can't care anymore, and his family is presumably unlikely to be confronted with an erotic parody on a porn site, so it's not insensitive to them. Distance, both in terms of fame status and age, shifts the ethical perceptions so much.

What fascinates me the most is how frequently we collectively fictionalize actual people in stories, as long as they're from a time far removed from ours. People have made Leonardo Da Vinci and Nostradamus minor characters in historical fiction, appropriating a person's actual identity for their storytelling purposes, and it's fairly normalized.

It's probably a good thing to promote more care in respecting the intellectual property and identity of living people, but it does make me ponder how the people we shamelessly fictionalize would feel about it, if they did see it.

Life is for the living. The dead cannot be incentivized, nor is it likely that the living will be incentivized by thoughts of how they will be treated 400 years after they're dead.

There's a difference, too, between writing a story about a living person and writing a story about a living person's fictional hero. The former is more acceptable under the law than the latter. You are free to write all the porn stories about Sarah Palin and Joe Biden that you want. But you are not free to rip off their porn stories (if it turned out they wrote any).

 

[Damoiselle]

Life is for the living. The dead cannot be incentivized, nor is it likely that the living will be incentivized by thoughts of how they will be treated 400 years after they're dead.

There's a difference, too, between writing a story about a living person and writing a story about a living person's fictional hero. The former is more acceptable under the law than the latter. You are free to write all the porn stories about Sarah Palin and Joe Biden that you want. But you are not free to rip off their porn stories (if it turned out they wrote any).

Ah, but as you noted, I am technically free to write *fanfic* about their porn stories. The only thing that would stop me would be lack of interest and the potential social stigma.

And if Joe Biden passed away tomorrow, the social reaction to my writing a fix fic of his erotic novel the next day would be theoretically very different than the reaction to my writing the same thing in 20 years.

It would also definitely depend on how he died.