It’s interesting that the New York Times thinks that fanfiction is the only place where crowd-sourced shared universe ideas occur, but this is pretty baffling to me.

There are a ton of shared-universe ideas that populate our fiction. Fairy tales (from a variety of cultures) are effectively shared-universe fiction.

In something like historical romance, there is essentially shared-universe fiction—there are some historical norms that we all jointly include, and which people believe in even when those norms don’t have much overlap with actual reality.

The difference between something like Omegaverse shared-universe fiction, and something like “dragons lie on a pile of gold and flame adventurers who threaten their hoard,” is the recency of inception.

The NYT article feels a little weird to me because we have a very clear answer to the question of “who owns the copyright in a jointly created idea?“ in the US.

The answer is—easily—nobody. Copyright is not granted for ideas. It’s granted for expression of ideas.

And I know that sounds silly and I know people will quibble about how sometimes you can copy so much that it’s no longer just an idea but an expression, but ultimately, I don’t think the Omegaverse litigation is hard.

Even if Addison Cain invented the entirety of Omegaverse (AND SHE DID NOT), she still does not get to exclude anyone else from the world of humans with dog biology and the varieties of dubcon that result from that.

As an example of how shared universe fiction can sometimes generate an extraordinary number of fictional similarities, let’s take Harry Potter.

And let’s imagine another work that has a huge number of similarities.

(*) The main character’s parents died when he was young.
(*) The main character lived with his uncle as he was growing up.
(*) To celebrate the main character’s birthday, a wizard arrived.

(*) The main character was told that he would have to leave the home he knew.
(*) The main character was given, as a gift, an item that made him invisible.
(*) The main character started the journey alone but quickly acquired friends.

(*) The friends were smaller and less capable than many others in the magical world.
(*) The friends fought a troll together.
(*) One should not say the name of the ultimate villain
(*) The ultimate villain does not have a body

(*) The ultimate villain was vanquished a long time ago by people, some of whom are still around.
(*) There are many signs that the ultimate villain is beginning to return, but many people do not want to admit it.
(*) The ultimate villain has minions, some of whom are hidden.

... And I could go on and on, but at this point, people who are paying attention can figure out that the work that shares these similarities with Harry Potter is the Lord of the Rings.

Whatever you may think about the derivative nature of...quite a lot of fantasy since the Lord of the Rings, do you think that it should not exist? That it should not be *allowed*? That the Tolkien estate should be able to block all of that fiction until the copyright runs out?

That’s why I don’t think this is a hard question, or one that has not been presented to the courts.

It is very simple.

And it’s very, very fundamental to us as fiction writers.

We all play in someone else’s sandbox. Some people make more difficult and exciting castles; some people do things in that sandbox that we’ve never seen before. Some people bring in new sand, or make the box bigger.

Some people make sand castles that are very much like other sand castles we’ve seen, but hey, they made that sand castle themselves, they didn’t steal anyone else’s stuff, and it was well-made, even if it wasn’t super-original.

The only rule we have is that you have to make your own damned castle.

But the box is free, the sand is free, and if someone else makes the box bigger, there’s more room for us all to play.

The *entire point* behind the idea-expression dichotomy is that we get to crowd-source shared universes and nobody owns the result.

This is not new. It is the fundamental underpinning of the nature of copyright.

P.S. Shakespeare wrote fanfic. Pass it on.

P.P.S. Addison Cain repurposing her fanfic as original fic and making a shit-ton of money off of it but then asking her publisher to send take down notifications for series not yet published claiming infringement is.... Peak Lack of Self Awareness.