The concept of copyright and authorial ownership is very new. Historically, originality wasn't so closely guarded. J.S. Bach blatantly took melodies from other composers, myths being told over and over again differently, and medieval poetry retelling Greek myths is much closer to fanfiction than inspiration. You have to think about what is fanfiction (outside of personal feelings on its morality). What Fanfiction does is literally take the world and/or characters of a story and re-writes or re-imagines their stories or makes new ones outside of the original author's intent. When you retell a myth, changing one detail or another, or (I would argue) trying out a different theme, it's still closer to fanfiction than West Side Story is. White's version of Arthurian legend is also closer to fan fiction than West Side Story in my opinion. The setting is the same, the characters are the same, and are meant to be the same people, etc. It's just that they're meant to be what the writer thinks they should be. I actually don't like the "oh if the author's dead and ancient then it's fair game" leniency towards making derivative works because that strikes me as a tad hypocritical. So you want people to respect you, but you don't want to respect long dead or anonymous authors who you shamelessly pilfer from because that means you might not be able to steal from them? I can't side with that, personally. In fact, I really hate that manner of excusing oneself from responsibility. If say, Galbaldon was losing money from fanfiction or someone was selling it without her blessing, then I would say she has a legitimate complaint under law since the law does appear to seek to protect her economic gains on her intellectual property, but fans doing what a lot of authors and most likely what she has done in the past without realizing? Not so keen on that.
That's why I used Hamlet. Hamlet was pretty blatantly based on various sources like the Ur-Hamlet text among others. Even White's and Malory's Arthur stories draw heavily from prior stories in a non-inspirational sense. It's literally a re-telling, re-telling is more or less fanfiction in my view for these cases. While you can argue that West Side Story is inspired, I can't say the same about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which relies on the original play. Nor can I call Wide Sargasso Sea "inspired" by Jane Eyre. It was clearly engaging with the original and meant to be part of that fictional universe. In all these cases you're retelling a story that is essentially the same as or part of the original. It's really a very human thing to want to retell the story that you know, and in any case when you summarize or paraphrase a story for someone else you're essentially writing verbal fanfiction since most likely you're going to make up details that you don't remember clearly. To me, regardless of how you categorize it, human nature tends towards telling and re-telling the same stories, especially if its one that resonates with them. They share these stories with like-minded people, engage with the original and come to new ideas about the original, but it's still part of the original. That, in my view is part of fanfiction and part of human nature. It's creating a mythos by branching more stories onto the "main" story, which is something that Tolkien understood pretty well.
I say that suppressing fanfiction is bad business because regardless of the personal squick factor, what the author is doing is basically saying: you're not allowed to engage with my text. You have to passively take my story and enjoy it only one way and that's the way I tell you to. People don't do that and I think an author is doing a disservice to the fans by cutting them off from engaging with their text. But I do draw the line at fans making profit on a modern author's work at the author's expense.
Re: I really like categorising things, I think.
That's why I used Hamlet. Hamlet was pretty blatantly based on various sources like the Ur-Hamlet text among others. Even White's and Malory's Arthur stories draw heavily from prior stories in a non-inspirational sense. It's literally a re-telling, re-telling is more or less fanfiction in my view for these cases. While you can argue that West Side Story is inspired, I can't say the same about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which relies on the original play. Nor can I call Wide Sargasso Sea "inspired" by Jane Eyre. It was clearly engaging with the original and meant to be part of that fictional universe. In all these cases you're retelling a story that is essentially the same as or part of the original. It's really a very human thing to want to retell the story that you know, and in any case when you summarize or paraphrase a story for someone else you're essentially writing verbal fanfiction since most likely you're going to make up details that you don't remember clearly. To me, regardless of how you categorize it, human nature tends towards telling and re-telling the same stories, especially if its one that resonates with them. They share these stories with like-minded people, engage with the original and come to new ideas about the original, but it's still part of the original. That, in my view is part of fanfiction and part of human nature. It's creating a mythos by branching more stories onto the "main" story, which is something that Tolkien understood pretty well.
I say that suppressing fanfiction is bad business because regardless of the personal squick factor, what the author is doing is basically saying: you're not allowed to engage with my text. You have to passively take my story and enjoy it only one way and that's the way I tell you to. People don't do that and I think an author is doing a disservice to the fans by cutting them off from engaging with their text. But I do draw the line at fans making profit on a modern author's work at the author's expense.