Fanfiction: When Copyright Violation Benefits Brands

In preparation for submission to Journal of Marketing
Author

Ethan Milne, Kirk Kristofferson, Miranda Goode

We investigate fanfiction (i.e., original fiction adopting elements of pre-existing media), as a copyright-violating phenomenon and demonstrate its benefits to brands. Our work suggests that reading fanfiction increases purchase intent and that fanfiction production rates can be used to predict next-week TV viewership. Additionally, we identify two means by which brands can grow their fanfiction communities by waiving copyright protection and through early encouragement of fanfiction authors. We demonstrate these results across one lab study (N=600), two real-world datasets representing billions of words of fanfiction content, and a field experiment testing the effect of AI-generated comments of fanfiction production (N=2,162).