Seeking Ferret

Yeah, I talked a bunch about that apparent contradiction. At one point I said something like "If the idea is that you don't need to ask authors because they're not part of our community, but you do need to ask fic writers, because they're part of our community, then if you want to write Temeraire fic do you need to go "Hey Naomi, can I write fic?" since she is in fact part of our community?" And someone in the audience said something like "Of course not, because she might be the copyright holder but the derivative rights to the books are all tied up in her contracts with her publishers, even if she wanted to authorize your fanfic she couldn't do it without a bunch of legal wrangling." That's also part of why I find the 'implicit license' theory so interesting, who exactly are they imagining is the entity that is deciding not to sue them?