The fact that you are the creator of a work gives you no special rights over how that work is handled on this wiki. The fic / song / video / comic / whatever is yours, but the articles here are ours. When you published your work, you released it into the world to be read, remarked on, and analysed. Just as you are free to claim ownership on your fiction, we are claiming ownership on our analysis of your story.
Because they are our articles, you do not have the right to remove examples of tropes that we found in your story. You do not have the right to add tropes that you intended to occur in the story, until those examples actually happen in the published work. You do not have any right to expect that our editors will submit their edits to you for pre-approval or demand edits on your behalf from your fans.
Please do not even request that we cut a page on your work. Just because you wish to disown your work or you changed your mind about publishing, it does not give you the right to throw away our efforts at cataloguing examples of tropes, especially if the work is still publicly accessible.
This policy applies to any type of work, not just fanfics. For guidance on how to make an article about a specific creator, see Creator Page Guidelines.
What, you're still reading? Okay, let's go over specific do's and don'ts for creators. First, some definitions.
- By "yourself", we mean your public identity as a writer, actor, producer, artist, musician, developer, etc.
- By "your work", we mean art, words, music, video, code, etc. that you produced, created, participated in creating, acted, or are otherwise credited in.
Intellectual Property and Copyright
You may hold intellectual property rights to your work, including copyright. The articles on TV Tropes are our intellectual property: the original writing of our own users. You do not own the words on the page, because you did not write them.
In some cases we may reproduce portions of your work: images, video, and text. These are typically covered under Fair Use. We have a strict policy for copyright and plagiarism. If we aren't holding up our end, such as by reproducing large portions of your work or by failing to attribute your work, please let us know via our contact form
. Legal claims should follow our DMCA policy or they may be rejected.
A reminder: Copying your own original writing and using it on TV Tropes is not permitted. See "self-plagiarism" in the copyright policy linked earlier.
Creator Rights on TV Tropes
As a creator, you have the following rights on TV Tropes.
- You may create and edit an article about yourself or your work, so long as it follows our guidelines about what constitutes a tropable work and you only add publicly accessible, objective information.
- If your work is not yet published, you may make a single article in Darth Wiki, indexed in Unpublished Works. This article may not have crosswicks or subpages.
- You may engage in discussion about your work on our forums, so long as you do not use our forums for advertisement or adopt a privileged position. (See The Troping Code.)
- You may contest factual information and either make the changes or ask others to change it for you, as long as you are polite and respect consensus.
- You may inform us that your work has been removed and made permanently inaccessible to the public, in which case we may consider deleting our article(s). This requires agreement from the troper body.
- You may request removal of content that you believe is hostile or defamatory towards yourself or your work, but we hold final discretion as to what falls into those categories.
Creator Restrictions on TV Tropes
Here's what you may not do with respect to yourself or your work. See also Auto-Erotic Troping.
- You may not request or demand that other people create or edit articles about you or your work, except as noted above.
- You may not add any examples marked as subjective, including YMMV, Audience Reactions, Awesome Moments, etc.
- You may not add any examples marked as Trivia that contain information not known to the general public.
- You may not remove content from our articles on the basis that you disagree with it or do not like it.
- You may not add or comment on reviews for your work. You may not add recommendations for your work except in designated portions of our forums.
- You may not advertise or promote your work, link to any store or donation page for your work, or create forum threads specifically about your work without permission from a moderator.
- You may not delete, attempt to delete, or ask to be deleted an article about yourself or your work on any grounds other than violations of our policies (see above).
Violations of this policy may cause your account to be suspended or permanently banned.
Original Characters, Original Writing
As a corollary to this policy, you may not use TV Tropes to catalog original characters or any other content that is not associated with a published (or in-progress) work. The sole exception is that you may use your personal Tropers article for whatever you wish as long as it doesn't violate any other rules.
You may also not use TV Tropes to host your original writing. We are not a hosting site or a scratch-pad. If you are interested in getting advice about writing or engaging with other authors, our Writer's Block forum may be of interest.
Identifying Yourself as a Creator
TV Tropes accounts are generally anonymous. Even if you identify yourself as a creator, we have no way of verifying that you are telling the truth. Generally, we believe people, but where the law is concerned, we have to treat identity a bit more seriously. This is why we may request that you follow the DMCA procedure for any complaints or claims that carry legal weight.
