The past months have produced a rash of discussions on fanfic ranging from the critical to the deeply personal. The Telegraph kicked this off with a complaint about derivative works. "To take entirely against fan fiction is pointless, not least because it’s clearly here to stay...Nor is being derivative necessarily a sin – after all, the writer who tries to create work from inside an influence-free vacuum would probably never type a single word." However, using someone else's building blocks and using only those blocks are "the difference between writing that pays homage to another’s work, and writing that robs that work wholesale of plot, theme and characters."

Posting on Mondaq, a legal, regulatory and financial commentary site, law firm Duane Morris offered advice to people about paying more attention to Terms of Service language at the sites where they post. "Smash Pictures produced a porn/adult movie entitled Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation. A predictable result was a lawsuit by Fifty Shades Limited and Universal City Studios, who own rights to the book franchise and movies respectively...the defendants raised an intriguing argument in Counterclaim, namely that the copyrights in the Fifty Shades of Grey books are invalid -- and free for everyone to use -- because 'as much as 89% of the content of the allegedly copyrighted materials grew out of a multi-part series of fan fiction called Masters of the Universe based on Stephanie Myer's Twilight novels'...So a distinctive point in the case was the role of the fan fiction site's user terms of service."

A thesis written about the AO3's tagging system "attempts to begin exploring the question of what kind of environment the site's particular blend of open social tagging and some behind-the-scenes vocabulary control, plus hierarchical linking, creates for the users who search through it for fiction." The study, conducted in 2012, had a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods and the survey was completed by 116 people. "The current online information glut calls for some sort of subject labeling to facilitate efficiency in searching, but the volume of information is well beyond a size that could ever be dealt with by information professionals. “Social tagging” is an approach to this problem that lets non-professionals attempt to organize online information via tagging, for their own and one another's use. But social tagging is a new and rapidly evolving field, and so no consensus has yet been reached on its overall usefulness, or on what best practices might be."

Peter Guttierez wrote in School Library Journal that "[T]here’s probably no single better way to teach online citizenship to young people than through their participation in organized fandom." To him this involved a behavior checklist because "fans must take into account not just the short-term value of making a point or having the last word, but their long-term relationships with their fellow fans." Some of them include "Am I “adding value” through this interaction, either to an individual or to the wider community? Or am I making this online conversation almost entirely about myself?" and "Am I considerate of others’ privacy and safety?"