Story authors

There’s probably a billion ways you could do this, but you don’t own the rights to any of those stories, you just have a copy of them. It might be unlikely, but if either the original author or Dimensions wanted you to take them down it would be a hassle for you and the new hosting site.

The other issue, as far as I’m aware, is that Dimensions stopped hosting those old stories because there were so many underage characters.

Yeesh. That's certainly a big problem.

There is often a reason why many stories are deleted and never resurrected.
You can preserve them on your disk, but you don't have the rights to host them. That's what copyright means - the right to copy - and that belongs to the author, even if the author doesn't care about the stories anymore.
The best I can suggest is that if anybody is searching for a particular story, you can privately fulfill that request. Otherwise, deleted stories are just that - a memory in time. Perhaps they never existed in the first place and it's just a figment of our imagination. Maybe we don't exist either.

Now you’re speaking my language

From what I remember, it wasn’t that there were underage characters in explicit situations necessarily, just that they changed their rules to have a hard zero tolerance at some point. I think pretty much everywhere online did the same thing, which makes sense. But rather than go back and one-by-one remove the stories that had issues, they let them all go.

IANAL, but...

Technically, I think privately sharing--or even preserving for your own use--a copyrighted work is still copyright infringement at its core, unless first sale doctrine applies and you are an actual owner of the work. That's why I can't legally just screenrecord a movie on Netflix and share it with a friend.

For a digital work? I think it would depend on the original license those works were uploaded under. My Netflix example above is flawed because I'm *sure* their terms of use covers that case somehow, and goes beyond default "all rights reserved" copyright anyway.

If you uploaded a story to something like Dimensions Magazine right now, their terms go like this:


So I guess, in theory, Dimensions could create that archive, but only for stories that were uploaded to it.

As an aside, I can't find anything in FF's Terms that addresses what rights you grant FF regarding content you upload, just that you still own the copyright to your work.

IANAL, but...

Technically, I think privately sharing--or even preserving for your own use--a copyrighted work is still copyright infringement at its core, unless first sale doctrine applies and you are an actual owner of the work. That's why I can't legally just screenrecord a movie on Netflix and share it with a friend.

For a digital work? I think it would depend on the original license those works were uploaded under. My Netflix example above is flawed because I'm *sure* their terms of use covers that case somehow, and goes beyond default "all rights reserved" copyright anyway.

If you uploaded a story to something like Dimensions Magazine right now, their terms go like this:


That’s the major reason I post my writing here and not on Dimensions. It’s mine, I wrote it, I can change it or destroy it if I want to.