Fictional Characters in the Eighteenth-Century Literary Commons

Abstract

The final chapter shows that fan fiction was treated as raising legal issues separate from piracy. This chapter argues that, because authors were newly vested with the legal capacity to hold rights in their literary creations, literary characters were not free to be appropriated however readers wished. Rather, literary characters constituted a distinctive form of communal property, the use of which was subject to conditions. Chapter 6 thus redefines the “literary commons” of eighteenth-century Germany, providing a new perspective on the rise of intellectual property rights. This chapter proposes a reevaluation of the concept of literary property, the history of moral rights, and the tradition of free culture.