Does Gender Influence Attitudes toward Copyright in the Filk Community?

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the filk community has expanded from a small group of science fiction convention-goers who occupied unused convention rooms during the late night hours to a community large enough to organize several dedicated filk conventions each year, a Hall of Fame, and an annual awards ceremony. While many filk songs are original lyrics set to original music, many more filk songs consist of lyrics written to existing music and/or lyrics based on characters/worlds created by other people. These practices potentially create problems in light of existing intellectual property law. In this paper, we explore those issues and whether a filker's gender influences his or her attitude towards intellectual property law. After setting out a basic explanation of filk and the intellectual property issues, the article details the various statistical results generated from the databases we built (one objective and one subjective) and draws some conclusions about gender and filk.