Fanfiction: When Copyright Violation Benefits Brands

We investigate fanfiction (i.e., original fiction adopting elements of pre-existing media), as a copyright-violating phenomenon and show it can benefit brands. Our work first identifies two benefits of fanfiction: 1) reading fanfiction increases purchase intent for brand content, 2) and fanfiction production rates can be used to generate more accurate estimates of next-week TV viewership. Next, we identify that brands can grow their fanfiction communities by waiving copyright protection, thus removing a barrier to publication faced by many fanfiction authors. We demonstrate these results using two real-world datasets representing billions of words of fanfiction content, and one lab study (N=600).