InsaneJournal

Distribution of fics
I've been thinking about this problem we have where people are archiving or distributing fics without the authors' permission. Like I said in celandineb's post, it's sad because it seems to me that a lot of these people don't know that what they're doing is wrong. They think they're doing people a favour by helping them find fics and by making the fics more accessible to them.

Most of these people are probably new to the fandom. They've just started reading and they're excited about it and want to share that excitement with other people. I know that when I started I first thought that fics could only be found on one archive (FA) and on authors' sites. I had no idea that people had LJs, and that there were dozens of other archives. And I admit that I didn't realise there were so many archives until I started with my rec list. So I think that some of these people probably don't know that the fics can be read in more places than one. They just want to help, but what they do is annoy people. And that's sad. :(

Maybe we could make this occur less frequently by making sure that more people know the "rules". The archives could put some information on what's allowed to do with the fic found there, and what isn't. The same goes with communities where people post their fic. They could put information about that in their profiles. Just something that would say that you shouldn't distribute the fic without the author's permission. I know that this wouldn't stop everyone from doing it, but maybe it would stop at least a few. :) (I don't really know, but maybe most archives and communities already do this... I haven't checked. :P)

I admit that I have every single one of the fics on my rec list saved on my computer. I save them in case the archives are down sometimes and I want to reread the story. And it also makes the categorisation so much easier when I have the fic in one file. But would I distribute them? No way. Not if I could find a working link for the fic. If somebody asked me and I couldn't find a link for the fic, I'd tell the person to ask the author for the fic. Usually they're nice enough to send you the fic themselves, or at least give you permission to ask somebody else to send you the fic (from what I've seen, at least). You just have to ask. Nicely. :P

AND since we're talking about distributing fics, I've found another journal where the fics are posted without the authors' permission. They posted stories by authors who have already left fandom, so I'm not going to write the name of the journal here (at least not now). I have written a comment there myself though, asking them to remove the stories. I hope they won't be all offended like the last time I asked somebody to do that... And I was incredibly nice that time. :(