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Wattpad and Copyright

What is Wattpad? Wattpad is a digital-based entertainment company for storytelling for both fanfiction and original works of fiction. At the same time, Wattpad is both a website for people to publish their stories while also being a place where people can read novels. It’s also a place where people from around the world to share their creativity with readers. The website has original work and fanfiction. That ranges from horror to romance to fantasy to supernatural to anything from a person’s imagination. Wattpad is beneficial to both the reader and the authors by providing a safe place to upload stories and reading them.  Some writers can have their stories published by Wattpad or other publishing companies or self-publish their works through digital publication. Wattpad believes in protecting all users from plagiarism by coming up with a way to preserve all stories uploaded. Many people believe that Wattpad is only for fanfiction, stories written by fans of different books, tv shows, and movies; it’s much more than that. While in the effort of gaining their users’ trust and protecting them as best as legally possible.

Wattpad has made it easy for authors to protect their stories from plagiarism by taking copyright and DMCA very seriously. A person can not post a story they have copy onto the site, not without some consequences on their part from Wattpad’s legal team. If an author’s work is upload from another website to Wattpad without their consent, the author can report the uploader for copyright infringement. The author of the original work would have to fill out a form by pervading personal information. Wattpad has a link to the form need, or the author could go to the DMCA website to fill out a DMCA takedown form. The author can also ensure that their novel is protected by copyrighting the language in the advanced setting when they upload it. There have been some cases regarding fanfiction that have gotten some companies in legal trouble. However, Wattpad has been careful by having a fanfiction genre on the website and opinion for an author to use when they publish. Wattpad made it possible for their website users to be comfortable and protected as both readers and authors.

              Wattpad does have a way to protect authors on their website. One of those ways is by disabling the copy and paste function. The disabled copy feature stops other users from copying an author’s story on another account or website like Fanfiction.net, Archiveofown.org, or a third-party website. The disabled paste feature is to prevent users from pasting another author’s work to the Wattpad website. If the stories are of the fanfiction variety, the author can reserve some of the rights to the books, tv shows, or movies. The fanfiction part is in a different genre on Wattpad. There have been some cases of copyright on the fanfiction side of Wattpad with various fandoms. When a story is uploaded to Wattpad, there are three standard opinions a writer must check before the novel is published all right reserved, no rights reserved, and creative commons. All right reserved give the writers complete control of their story while other users can write reviews about the novel or recommend someone else to read. No right reserve allows other users to use the author’s story in any way the user wants. Most if not all writers would not use this function when they upload their stories to Wattpad. The last one creative common give the author some rights to their novel while giving the public some rights to the author’s novel. That right could be translated into another language or a movie with the author’s permission and helpful input. Wattpad has made its website safe with the different levels of protection for both itself and the authors. Because without the functions that it has now, Wattpad would have had as much legal trouble as Fanfiction.net.