A *Very* Brief History of Beatles Fan Fiction...
Beatles fan fiction has been around just about as long as Beatle aficionados have existed on this planet. In a nutshell, fan fics are stories that creative fans have written, whether they are short stories or lengthy novels. With the advent of the Internet in the mid 1990s, the genre experienced a tremendous surge in popularity. Anyone with some computer savvy could put their stories on a website for all the world to see rather than to just relegate the manuscripts to a dark place in a filing cabinet. Of course, the problem that arose was that the stories vastly varied in quality--some were excellent, many were middle-of-the-road, and a few out there were absolutely awful! In the past few years the number of fan fics online have lessened--many authors have let their websites fade into the sunset. Online fan fic resource directories weren't updated, and FanFiction.net and other hosting sites shut down the "real people" divisions on their sites out of fear of lawsuits. (They're actually more likely to get slapped with a lawsuit for hosting fictional character fan fics, but that's another story).
Is Beatles fan fic legal?
Yes, Beatles fan fiction is legal to write and publish online, with a few general stipulations. Writers can't use any copyrighted characters to write a crossover fic (aka the Beatles meet Harry Potter, etc.) because those characters are the intellectual property of another author--and yes, said authors can and will send a cease and desist letter to any site that violates copyright laws. Also, any kind of slanderous fan fics could be considered defamation of character and the author would once again get a letter from Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe ordering the site to remove the offensive story.
And this stuff is legal to publish in print form?
It's legal to publish Beatles fan fic in book form. I've done it, and so have some other authors. Traditional publishers won't touch fan fics with a ten foot pole most of the time, so a writer's best option is to self-publish or do a print-on-demand run. Plan on doing a LOT of revision and self-editing before submitting the manuscript to a self-publisher or p.o.d. publisher; they don't provide any editing services. The service isn't cheap, either--you pay them to put out your book, not the other way around.
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