A Creative Commons license might help other readers, but it doesn't offer any defense against copyright infringement. Not outside of social signaling to jurors, if they know about CC.
So the particular edge we're skirting on copyright law is that fanfiction is fundamentally built on other people's commercial work. There are a whole set of tests to determine whether something is infringing: Does it copy a significant proportion of another copyrighted work? Is the work sufficiently transformed from the another work -- is it significantly original? Is it being used for literary criticism? Does it reduce the ability to collect revenue, or otherwise divert revenue from the base work?
All of these are fundamentally continuums, and real results are based on the case law that has developed. But none of the tests relate to how it was distributed, i.e. the license. Selling the work is more likely to be infringing, but that's also orthogonal to a Creative Commons license. Nothing in the license prevents a creator from also selling his work. If you get sued for selling the fic, the license is irrelevant. If someone else gets sued for reselling your fic, the corporation does not bring the CC license into it at all because they want all the damages -- they won't want to give you any. It only makes a difference in asking others to play nice. I mean, you could sue for infringement of your fic, but like Peter Thiel says, "If you’re a single-digit millionaire ... , you have no effective access to our legal system."
Anyway, I'm kind of a fan of CC-BY. Attribution is all I care about. It's my default license when I get a choice, because then people can just do whatever as long as my name stays attached. I didn't have a choice on All The Tropes, because Eddie forced my hand into CC-BY-SA.
So the particular edge we're skirting on copyright law is that fanfiction is fundamentally built on other people's commercial work. There are a whole set of tests to determine whether something is infringing: Does it copy a significant proportion of another copyrighted work? Is the work sufficiently transformed from the another work -- is it significantly original? Is it being used for literary criticism? Does it reduce the ability to collect revenue, or otherwise divert revenue from the base work?
All of these are fundamentally continuums, and real results are based on the case law that has developed. But none of the tests relate to how it was distributed, i.e. the license. Selling the work is more likely to be infringing, but that's also orthogonal to a Creative Commons license. Nothing in the license prevents a creator from also selling his work. If you get sued for selling the fic, the license is irrelevant. If someone else gets sued for reselling your fic, the corporation does not bring the CC license into it at all because they want all the damages -- they won't want to give you any. It only makes a difference in asking others to play nice. I mean, you could sue for infringement of your fic, but like Peter Thiel says, "If you’re a single-digit millionaire ... , you have no effective access to our legal system."
Anyway, I'm kind of a fan of CC-BY. Attribution is all I care about. It's my default license when I get a choice, because then people can just do whatever as long as my name stays attached. I didn't have a choice on All The Tropes, because Eddie forced my hand into CC-BY-SA.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto