I have a completely unrelated question/suggestion that I'd love to see an explainer from the OTW Legal team about if you have time for more of these kinds of posts! I came across this reddit post today: https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/ozda4a/my_friend_copyrighted_my_book_can_i_still_query/ and it made me wonder about the problems inherent in using print-on-demand sites to get hard copies of fanfic. I've had a reader ask if I was planning on releasing a fic as a book, which isn't something I would do because *points at above explainer* fanfic is noncommercial, but I get that some people like to read in book format so I suggested that they use a site like Lulu to make a copy just for themselves if they wanted one. I've heard of lots of people doing that-- you can order just a single copy and don't need to "publish" the story to the website if you don't want to-- but it does assign each "book" an ISBN, so now I'm wondering if that legally assigns the copyright on that work to... well, whoever makes the book.
[Disclaimer: Not a lawyer or an OTW volunteer, though I work with copyright in my day job]
It shouldn't do. Under the Berne Convention (which virtually every country in the world is now a party to), copyright is automatically assigned to the creator on publication of a work. Publishing online counts, and so as soon as an author publishes their fic (e.g. on AO3), they are assigned copyright. And if you control the work on AO3, it makes it relatively easy for you to demonstrate that you did actually publish the work when you say you did! Someone else then printing a copy on Lulu or whatever doesn't give them a claim on the copyright. (Lulu probably asks them to sign something saying that they have the copyright owner's permission to print, but lying about who the copyright owner is doesn't actually have any effect on who the copyright owner actually is in reality, so even if they tick a box saying "I own the copyright" it doesn't mean they actually do). The case in the reddit post is slightly more complicated because the OP hadn't published before. If your work is unpublished, someone else publishing it (and claiming authorship) then potentially puts you in the position of needing to prove that you were indeed the author and therefore true copyright owner, but the whole point of copyright is protecting the rights of the author. I can say that I'm the copyright owner over someone else's works until I'm blue in the face, but that's no more legally significant than me saying that I own a majority of Amazon stock - me just saying it doesn't make it true.
It's in most print-on-demand services TOS that you can't print fanfic/fanworks using their platform. They will remove the work from their site and close the associated account when they catch it.
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