neadods | Copyright Lititgation Dawning, I Mean, Russet Moon

For the 3 people on the flist that haven't already seen the gathering wank, some bint with the not-at-all-pretentious penname of "Lady Sybilla" has decided to write an unauthorized sequel to the Twilight series called Russet Moon. Which would be fine if she kept it on the net or underground. But no! She's found a publisher (herself) and appears to think that Stephanie Meyer won't turn her burgeoning authorial/printing career into a radioactive chalk outline.

Her basic justification, as quoted on the "publisher's: website, under factual information about copyrights:
When fictional characters become such an intricate part of the popular psyche, as is the case with the Twilight Saga, legal boundaries become blurred, and copyright laws become increasingly difficult to define. [Not really, no. Copyright laws are becoming more and more defined as moronic fanfic authors think they can get away with making money from someone else's work. Old style print fandom was underground for damned good reason, and *they* were just recouping printing costs. You might want to have a word with Ms. Rowling.] [A]ctual cities like Forks and Volterra are used as the novel's settings. Such settings are not copyrightable [True.] I'm going to skip over the bit about vampire and werewolf legends not being copyrightable - debatable depending on use of myth or someone else's copyrighted fictional work, and hit the really "What were you SMOKING?" portion of the proceedings: Copyright laws protect writers from unauthorized reproductions of their work, but such reproductions only include verbatim copying. Characters are only copyrightable if their creator draws them or hires an artist to draw them.

This is so far off reality, I can't imagine what chemical cocktail her source is. It certainly isn't the United States Copyright Office, which covers both Twilight and this LA-based "publisher." That office blows that bullshit right out of the water with the second answer in their Frequently Asked Questions.

Y'know, if you want to plagiarize, you've got to hide it better than that, as Kaavya Viswanathan could tell you.

Apparently "Lady Sybille" thinks no publicity is bad publicity, and "controversy is the mother of popularity." I wonder how cheerful and popular she's going to feel when Meyer swats her like the gnat she is.