Fan fiction . . . possibly not legal under Canadian law

John Scalzi links to a discussion of fan fiction under Canadian law:

For all you fanficcers out there, an interesting take on fan fiction from the Canadian legal perspective, i.e., whether fan fic would be legal in Canada if it ever went to court there. The author suspects not and notes that in Canada (and much of the rest of the world outside the US) there's an additional layer of complication in that the author is assumed to have a "moral right" to a work which includes some strictures on how the work (and the characters within) is to be used. There is no moral right issue in US law, of course, because we in the US don't have morals. Or something.

Ah, but just what is "fan fiction" I pretend to hear you ask? Here's a good answer (from the LRC article):

This is fan fiction, and it's all over the web, at sites such as http://www.fanfiction.net, and http://www.sugarquill.com. Though its roots are in the science fiction book world, the phenomenon really took off with the TV series Star Trek. By the series' second season in 1967, fans were writing their own episodes and sharing them with like-minded friends. Drawing on Star Trek characters and settings — referred to as the canon — they placed the characters in narratives not contemplated by the show's writers, very often with subversive results. Most famously, these early fan writers perceived a repressed sexual passion between Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk and began writing stories exploring this relationship. Thus was started a roaring sub-culture of fan writing, largely by women and for women, about homoerotic relations between ostensibly heterosexual male characters. Stories of such relationships — known as slash from the "/" used to connote a pairing (such as Harry Potter/Severus Snape) — continue to make up a major proportion of fan fiction.

Social scientist Camille Bacon-Smith, in her book Enterprising Women, identifies a number of sub-genres beyond slash which give a good sense of fan fiction's diversity. Sub-genres include mpreg (where a man gets pregnant), deathfic (where a major character dies), curtainfic (where the characters, typically a gay male pairing, go domestic and engage in such comfortably bourgeois exercises as shopping for curtains together), and AU (alternative universe, where the characters are displaced into an entirely new fantasy setting). Sexually explicit sub-genres — often tagged as 'kink' or 'with plumbing' — include PWP (porn without plot or 'Plot? What plot?') and BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism). And universally deplored as the worst cliché in the genre is the Mary Sue story, in which the fan writer writes her thinly-veiled self into the plot. 'Infinite diversity in infinite combinations' is fandom's abiding motto.

Should you feel the need to read some bad fan fiction — of which there is an incredibly large and possibly endless supply — you can cut right to the chase by visiting http://www.godawful.net/, who claim they've "scoured the 'net since 1998 to bring you the foulest fan fiction available and we like to think that we're responsible for many a dry heave and sleepless night, but the truth of the matter is, we just showcase these abominations. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank those deluded souls actually writing Godawful Fan Fiction, without whom this site would never have been possible. Or necessary."