Some of my students are talking about it.
</shudder>
Three, actually. I think you can buy them in a boxed set.
Does the box set come with a collectible plastic fist that one might shove up their ass while reading the books?
Moved to Cafe Society from GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Humm - I guess I should check - may as well get a jump on Christmas shopping…
Oh please.
I can only hope that you teach college or at least high school. If you’re a kindergarten teacher, I’m going home to hide under the bed.
Ahem. “50 Shades of Grey”= “Let’s Test the Absolute Limits of U.S. Copyright Law.”
That having been said, I really think that it falls under fair use. The precedent goes all the way back to Baker vs. Selden (1879). Baker invented a new system of bookkeeping, but he didn’t know how to promote it, and he apparently wrote a very boring set of books about it. Selden wrote and successfully promoted a new bookkeeping system that… wow… sure did look an AWFUL lot like the one in Baker’s books. Not only that, though. It came out in court that Selden almost certainly got the original ideas from Baker, and that he may have even done nothing more than change the names of certain concepts.
But that’s the case that (as far as I can find out) set the precedent that ideas cannot be copied, only the extremely specific expression of the ideas. Another relevant case was sometime in the 80’s. The producers of *The Greatest American Hero" (awful show, really,) were sued by… I don’t know… whoever holds the copyright to Superman. The argument was basically “Look, we all KNOW that they ripped off the idea from Superman! Come on!” But that’s not enough to make for copyright violation.
From that POV, at least FS did not actually copy the ideas. So if it ever did come to court, I don’t think it could possibly be considered anything but fair use. It would be interesting to know what everyone else thinks about this, though.
Wait, so the title is a pun referring to a main character’s name? My opinion of this work (which I have admittedly never read) has dropped even farther, something I didn’t think was possible.
I haven’t read 50 Shades of Grey and probably never will, but I did read as much of the first Twilight book as I could take and from what I hear 50 Shades has changed the names and ages of the main characters, changed the setting from a small town in WA to Seattle, changed the male lead from a vampire to not a vampire, eliminated all other supernatural elements, and added a lot of explicit BDSM sex scenes while Twilight has nothing racier than kissing.
I assume the original fanfic version of 50 Shades was closer to the source material, but it sounds like the author changed enough that she wouldn’t even need a fair use defense. Unless I’ve been greatly misled about the content of 50 Shades, it doesn’t even sound like any of the ideas of Twilight were “stolen” (and as you say, ideas aren’t protected by copyright anyway) beyond the very broad one of it being a heterosexual romance set in Washington.
No, I don’t think they were stolen. But it’s a fascinating legal question: what’s the situation when there is proof that the original version of a given work would absolutely have been a copyright violation of another work? I don’t know if there has ever been a legal precedent for this. With Baker vs. Selden, it was probably true, but it couldn’t be proven.
Over at fanfiction.net, there are a few threads where everybody is all discombobulated about how they’re afraid this will get the whole site shut down. THAT, I know.
Not that I’ve read the fanfic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the original fanfic had all the explicit BDSM sex scenes. Fanfiction does that to people. Honestly, the sexual deviancy and violence written about by the fanbase for a given franchise is more or less directly proportional to the innocence of the original work.
I think correct usage is to use the plastic fist to assist in shoving the books up ones ass.
Oh, I have no doubt about that, but the fanfic version presumably at least called the main characters by the same names as were used in Twilight and I’m guessing kept the vampire element as well. The sex scenes themselves wouldn’t be a violation of Twilight author Stephenie Meyer’s copyright either way, but the use of her characters and specific details of her fictional world (e.g. sparkly vampires) likely would be considered a copyright violation if Meyer chose to go to court over it.
I don’t think this would make any difference unless the content of the published novel 50 Shades is itself close enough to Twilight to be considered a copyright violation. If the 50 Shades author attempted to defend herself by claiming that any resemblance to Twilight was mere coincidence and that she’d never even read Twilight then the existence of an earlier, Twilight fanfic version of her novel would be problematic for her. But if the published version of 50 Shades does not contain copyright-violating content then I don’t think the existence of an earlier draft should have any impact on the published novel’s status.
If the fanfic version violated Meyer’s copyright or trademarks (IIRC the title/characters in a series can be trademarked) then Meyer could bring a case against the author over that, but I don’t see how she’d be allowed to claim that the published novel violated her copyright if the copyright-violating content did not even appear in the published novel.
Hey… hey… HEY!!! I’ve been writing NC-17 Harry Potter fanfic for nine and a half years! So be sweet. 
And yes, the original did indeed.
When I read the synopsis, I was more creeped out by the idea that he wanted her to sign a contract detailing exactly what he was going to do, than all the bondage stuff. Am I the only one?
(Tampon sex? WTF???)
Well, imagine how it would sell with a male author. It would come across as creepy and misogynistic. Same goes for some parts of Twilight.
And while some people may have an inner freak, usually you don’t go from virgin to anal fisting. Usually there are some intermediate steps over several years of more vanilla things. Like you don’t break out your psychoses and parole experiences on the first date, nor do you force a sex contract on someone on the first.
I guess I’m the only one who really didn’t see this book series as being worse than a historical romance? Maybe slightly more graphic…but not that much more. It really is a romance with “graphic” sex scenes…yes, I was disappointed. Lol
I actually came to FS perversely hoping that I would find something to like in it… or at least to not hate. I could not believe that it was as bad as everyone said it was. But I was genuinely, seriously shocked at how bad the writing is. It’s easy to say that Commercial Success A,B,C, etc., contains bad writing-- but not like this. In fact, you’ll wish you never said that ANYTHING was written badly, because the overwhelming majority of everything that has ever been published by a major publisher is better than this.
I read a bit of it when it was MOTU (the fanfic.) I generally don’t read Twilight fanfics, but I’d heard a lot about it. I didn’t even get through the first ten pages, and my first reaction was “Well, at least it isn’t filled with spelling and punctuation errors, but it really isn’t good at all.” (And I’ve read some bad, BAD fanfic.) It is literally exactly the same book as MOTU. Names were changed, tiny identifying details were changed, and that’s about it. And that means that it’s just as bad. That’s NOT the book that I’m going to write.
My mom is reading it too. She’s 76.
“I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”