The whole recent foofaraw about fanfiction (which apparently erupts with tiresome regularity every time a Big-Name Author opens his mouth about it and says something mildly non-fan-friendly) got me thinking about a project I had considered briefly a while back: creating a fanfiction-friendly "shared universe" project which anyone could contribute to.
The core of the idea is simple. I create a world, documented in a wiki or some other central location, which I also use as a source for my own fiction. Other people can do the same, under the caveat that the results have to be distributed in a non-commercial context. They would be free to contribute copies to the wiki I've created as well.
It sounds simple enough, but there's a part of me that thinks such things have a tendency to outrun their creators. One wrinkle is the relative lack of legal weight for things like the Creative Commons license — from what I can tell, it has never been tested in court, and essentially consists of a civil contract not to press legal action. (CC-BY-NC-SA would, I presume, be the exact license in question.)
Further complications include vagaries about what constitutes commercial use: "Whether or not a use is or is not commercial will depend on the specifics of the situation and the intentions of the user, as stated in the definition." So I'd probably have to draft my own notes about what I'd consider commercial use, and even then I'm not totally sure what applies and what doesn't. E.g.: if someone writes a one-off fanfiction for hire, is that "commercial use" in the same manner as selling multiple copies of a story for profit?
Gray areas, it seems, are par for the course.
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A couple of musings about this...
A few years back, Masamune Shirow had toyed with this idea, creating a "universe" where other creators could come in and create stories with the characters and situations that Shirow had put into that universe. It was to be called NEUROHARD, but I don't know if it ever came to fruition.
When I was in college, I did take part in something similar to this, involving the show ROBOTECH. Someone set up a main story and characters and those interested could come in and add to the story. I jumped at the chance, although admittedly my contributions were, to put it mildly, cribbing from Tom Clancy and Payne Harrison and Dale Brown and Craig Thomas (my techothriller years...oh well). Eventually, what you mentioned earlier about things outrunning the creator really did happen. Some writers took things in a different direction than the original creator wanted; some brought it back, but then issues with continuity came up, and things well, fell apart.
Granted, this was years ago, and I was more into writing fanfics for the web and short stories--some of them outright pastiches--for my college's literary magazine. Back then, I did not consider the problems and challenges you mentioned. Today, though...yeah, they would be front and center. Even if it could be done, you'd pretty much end up walking on eggshells most of the time.
Better, I suppose, to create your own universe and maintain it...by yourself.
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I remember "Neurohard" now. In fact, I strongly suspect Shirow's discussion of it lodged somewhere in a rearward synapse somewhere and got dislodged by all this recent nattering about Whose Story Is It, Anyway?
I still like the idea, but the more I think about it, the practical aspects of it are daunting. If it's kept as something cultivated with a small, hand-picked crew of people, it stands a better chance of flowering (and even producing fruit) than something where you just throw open all the doors at once and let everyone storm the studio.
Weren't the "INTRON DEPOT" books created as the components for the shared Shirow world?
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Totally agree about what could be done--keeping it small, and with a hand-picked crew, might work better. After all, "too many cooks" does do more harm than good.
As for INTRON DEPOT...hmmm...not sure if they were meant as such, but then again, I've always thought of them as straight-up artbooks (and damned fine ones at that!) showcasing Shirow's work over the years rather than being shared components. Still, it is an intriguing thought. Perhaps somewhere there exists a Toren Smith (who headed Studio Proteus, the translation house that pretty much handled the majority of Shirow's work back in the day) or Shirow interview that explains it all...I do know that there was an interview with Smith speaking to Shirow about his work, but this was some years ago. It's probably floating around somewhere in the vast sea of the 'net.
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