Copyright for Creatives

2.5 Characters

There's an interesting phenomenon when we're interacting with media. When we love a franchise, we'll re-read it, re-watch it, re-play it until it's a part of our identity. But when we want to interact with it through fancraft and adaptation, we tend to want to play with the characters and locations. So many of these projects easily start with the question, "What if this element from Franchise A blended with this other element from Story B?" (or something similar).

Consider the question: "What if fairy tale characters have kids, and those kids go to boarding school together?" This one question fuels Monster High, Ever After High, and the Descendants series (both the movies and their companion books).

This is fine for the first two series, as the adult characters are in the Public Domain and the main characters were created by the series staff. Descendants, on the other hand, gets away with their adult characters because they are basing them on Disney's own versions of those characters. If the other two series had tried to present any adult character based on the Disney version, there would have been some legal complications.

Again: a character from a Public Domain property is also in the Public Domain. An adaptation of that character in a copyrighted property belongs to the rightsholder of that copyright. At no time does a character in the Public Domain entirely belong to the rightsholder of a specific adaptation simply because they created an adaptation of that character. (There are certain media companies who struggle to understand this differentiation.)

The real test case for this, interestingly enough, was Sherlock Holmes, widely accepted as the first confirmed fandom. For a lot of reasons, Conan Doyle's work had a turbulent trek into the Public Domain, during which time various groups were writing fan fiction, producing movies as the format came into popular use, and eventually building television series and literary series around everyone's favorite detective and his medical doctor companion. By the time the BBC Sherlock was released, the entire Sherlock Holmes collection was coming into the Public Domain on court order, and there was a brief fight over whether or not that included Holmes and Watson themselves. (Spoiler Alert: It did.)

This isn't to say all characters fall under this. Some creators and rightsholders enjoy watching fans interact with their characters. Make sure you know how the rightsholder feels about it for their property before you do anything else.

While it really is better to create your own characters, playing with established characters can be an enlightening practice. Just be mindful of whether or not a familiar character is legally available to be included in your work, under what conditions they are available, and color inside those lines like your credibility depends on it. Take your risks elsewhere.