Furry Writers' Guild Forum

Is it wrong to do this?

General Writing Discussion
#1

Two years or so ago I went delving through the internet looking for the furry stories posted online in the late 90s. The classics that everyone at that time had read. It was incredibly hard to find them; I had to go diving into Archive.org for some, and one or two were just gone.

Many are going to disappear when the ancient sites they’re one go kaput. I want to preserve them.

So what I want to do is this: post them on Sofurry. Not under my own name, not taking any credit - the authors’ names would be listed right beside the title. The whole point is to put them all in one place on a searchable database for people to find. To me it’d be like just another version of Mia’s.

Thing is, is it wrong to repost something period even if you give the author full credits?

I know one potential answer is going to be “ask the author”. Well, some of these guys have just flat out fallen off the planet. I tried contacting them back during my initial search.

#2

I think there are three ways to read your question, “Is it wrong?”

  1. Is it legal? No. It is illegal. (Unless the works were released into the public domain or under a creative commons license – which doesn’t sound like the case here.)

  2. Is it morally wrong? Ambiguous. Personally, I think it sounds morally very right, but there are probably people who would passionately disagree with me.

  3. Is it likely to get you in trouble? Hard to be sure… But, probably not? If you’ve tried contacting the authors, and you’re responsive to any potential requests to take the stories down, then it seems unlikely that you’d get in too much trouble.

So, I guess it comes down to a question of how passionately you feel about this and how much you’re willing to risk doing something illegal.

#3

Another question to consider would be, what’s SoFurry’s policy on something like that? I know most of the gallery sites, you have to be posting your own work or work you have permission to post (like a commission).

If you were to go ahead with it, I would make it very clear, wherever you post them, that you’ve made all reasonable attempts to contact the authors, and give an email address where you can be contacted if any of the authors turns up and wants their stories removed. (In other words, don’t make them sign up for a SoFurry account just to contact you.) Some of those authors may very well want their stories to disappear into the ether and not be revived, or they may not want them associated with SoFurry (or whatever site you’d choose).

#4

You might consider creating a web site specifically for this, perhaps on a low-cost web host with a good “one button” site builder or blog installer, or if you don’t want to be stuck with a monthly recurring fee however low it might be, something hosted at a platform unlikely to go away any time soon like Tumblr or Wordpress.org.

I think it’s a reasonably worthy idea, although I agree with all the caveats Ryffnah and Poetigress mentioned – it’s the fiction equivalent of hosting “abandonware,” but arguably more personal. There are almost certainly some writers in furry fandom’s past, back when it would never have occurred to most of us that writing under our real names might create raised eyebrows twenty years in the future, who might not want their stuff to really be that findable after all. (And of course there are some of us, like yours truly, who’d rather do it ourselves, but that’s a whole different matter…)

#5

Well I also want to put them where readers might actually FIND them too. :slight_smile: Placing them on a site with other furry stories increases the likelihood that someone might stumble across.

But yeah. Thanks for the comments guys.