It has come to my attention through another forum that fanfic writers might be coming under the gun by publishing companies in the near future. ShoPro, the company who owns the rights to the Naruto anime, and who is going to merge with Viz, holder of the license to the manga, in the near future, has been sending out emails to fafic writers asking them to remove any Naruto content they have on their site, or face legal charges. One writer,
Jeffery "Oneshot" Wong has decided to fight back, and has posted the emails from Shopro and his responses on his site (Scroll down to the March 26 rant to see where this all started). While it seems like he might just get away with it, if you look at today's (March 31) update, he is in contact with one of the higher-ups over at fanfiction.net, which is currently host to well over 10,000 Naruto stories. The site has also recieved notice from ShoPro to cease and desist the posting of Naruto stories, and might begin such a policy as early as this Saturday (April 2). As far as I know, asking that no fanfics be written a rarity, though some authors do ask this, and ff.net even has a list of authors who have asked them not to post the stories. This is certainly a first for an anime though, and it is especially disconcerting that it was not the original author, or even anyone in Japan who started this, but an
American company.
As a fanfiction writer and reader, I am very displeased at this turn of events. I hope that after the merger, Viz/ShoPro don't go after authors of fics based on other manga/anime ("Ranma 1/2" specifically since it's my favourite, but any would be bad), but things are not lookng good here.