Bear with me for a couple paragraphs — despite appearances, this isn’t about me.

I’m a big fan of P.G. Wodehouse’s Wooster and Jeeves stories. Most of them involve Wooster bumbling into trouble and Jeeves rescuing him, but they often involve mistaken identity, so when a humorous case of mistaken identity came up at the dinner table the other day, I decided to write it up as a Jeeves story.

Of course I don’t own the copyright, so I can’t publish a Jeeves story for money, but I enjoy writing short stories, so I thought I’d have a go at it just for fun. That got me curious about what my publishing options might be.

The first option is to track down the owner of the copyright and ask for permission. That was a relatively simple matter on Google. Rogers Coleridge and White manage such things for the Wodehouse estate. Unfortunately, their contact form doesn’t work, they don’t publish an email and they don’t reply to tweets, so I’m going to have to resort to a letter.

The second option is the weird world of fan fiction, which skirts the edges of copyright law. (It’s also just kinda odd.)

Publishers and authors have different views on fan fiction. Some like it and encourage it, while others don’t. For more on the legal problems of fan fiction, the oracle of all knowledge is helpful.

Fanfiction is not infringing if it constitutes fair use of the underlying copyrighted work. In determining whether a particular use constitutes fair use, courts consider the following four factors:

1. “the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”

Here’s the worst of it: “fair use is assessed on a case-by-case basis.”

I would like to publish this story on the kindle, just for fun. Also, as a struggling wannabe writer, publishing something with the Jeeves name would get my name out there in the world of Amazon and such, which would be a good thing.

But that’s precisely the point of copyright. The Jeeves name draws attention because of the skill of P.G. Wodehouse, and it’s not right for me to try to piggyback on it. WIthout permission, anyway.