Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-1506468-20190827123101/@comment-4285368-20190905174505

I will not be posting here further, aside from issues relating to Tardis:No personal attacks. This has been a deeply unpleasant experience, and I will be happy to leave it behind me. However, after seeing that no action has been taken towards Amorkuz for his accusatory statements towards me, while another user was swiftly blocked, I have decided that I must make a further statement.

Reading Nate’s comment about an assumption of ignorance, I will take this stance to explain why Amurkuz’s statement was a serious accusation towards me and my company. So let us assume that Amorkuz genuinely does not understand how his statements were serious allegations, and I hope that these statements will be informative towards any future interactions he has with publishers.

Fanfiction, as a legal issue, is not defined how Amorkuz has attempted to define it. In all the meaningful professional and legal senses, it could be quickly summarized as:

Fanfiction is a derivative work based on intellectual property that is created without a commercial license from the party who owns those intellectual property rights.

Amorkuz is correct in that there is legal fanfiction, but legal fanfiction must meet a variable set of qualifications, such as being sufficiently transformative, being free or for charity, etc. However, all fanfiction shares one thing in common: it is non commercial. The very aspect of a commercial release means that a work is either 1. Not fanfiction 2. In violation of the law. Being that I don’t think my three stories could be perceived by most people as a parody or satire, and were not intended as such, it must fall into categories 1 or 2. Fanfiction is not allowed to have a commercial release. While there are cases of companies allowing fanfiction to be sold for profit, these are companies who have explicitly allowed another party to violate their copyright without seeking to challenge it. This is a toleration of illegal copyright violation, and does not change the legal stance of it.

Let me restate this: There is no case where selling fanfiction for profit is legal.

It is publicly available information that Arcbeatle Press has sold copies of these three stories by mail and at conventions, as well as doing two of the stories as live for-profit performances in partnership with the Southgate Media Group.

By saying that works I have sold are fanfiction, Amorkuz has, perhaps unknowingly, accused myself and my company of illegal activity. Such accusations coming from a high-up member of a site that is widely used by a fandom whose members are the target audience for future publishing endeavors of Arcbeatle Press (for example, the upcoming “Sheffield Steel”, which I did not write) could be damaging towards my company, and it’s future business.

Amorkuz has also made many statements implying that Arcbeatle Press or myself are not reputable or real publishers who can be trusted to release material, or trusted to tell the truth about the nature of the books and stories we release. As a publisher, our reputation for fairness and honesty pays our bills. Consumer trust is important to us, and sowing doubt about that (including adding asides that we only “promise” to release the future releases that our supporters have entrusted over $600 dollars into to receive from us) could negatively impact the reputation we have worked hard to achieve.

Considering that Amorkuz is in a position where these sort of interactions may come up again, I feel he should be aware that his post was much more serious than he understood it to be.

Amorkuz also made several other incorrect statements, but let us focus on these two:

-Amurkuz states that Arcbeatle Press’ work is self-publishing, a factually incorrect statement as I have published several works by or featuring other authors: “The Greater Good and Echoes”, “10,000 Dawns: Poor Man’s Iliad”, my reprint of “Dracula”, the out of print “Tales from the 10,000 Dawns” and the digital only “The Black Mass”, “A 10,000 Dawns Christmas”, and “A Lady Aesc Christmas Duet”. Not to mention “An Eloquence of Time and Space” which features extra content from two other authors. Arcbeatle Press has published, and will publish more work that I have written by myself, but all of that work has also employed proofreaders, editors, and artists who are not me. -Amurkuz misquoted me, distorting a statement in a tweet to mean something completely different than it’s clear intention.

I am hoping that Amorkuz understands the problems with his statements, and while I do hope for an apology/correction, unless there are further developments this likely ends my interactions with this site for the near future, if ever. It has been stated that Tardis:No personal attacks.will be enforced. I hope that this is true. While I certainly hope that future interactions with other publishers go better here, for now this has not been worth the time and stress it caused myself and the other folks at Arcbeatle Press. This situation has left me troubled in ways I never expected to be, and I can only hope that it perhaps leads to a kinder future. I thank all of you for your time. -James