Matthew Schocke

What happened to Nightmares of Future's Past?

Added 2019-05-31 14:01:00 +0000 UTC

Before I post the next update to my original story, Viridian Awakening, I'd like to address something I've gotten a lot of questions about.

As most of you know, my fanfiction story Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past has disappeared from fanfiction.net. I got an email saying it was taken down for copyright violations involving song lyrics.

As most of you know, there are no song lyrics in the story. There is one sorting hat song that was written by my wife, Lindsey/Runsamok. This was mentioned in the author notes for that chapter.

Following the instructions on the email, I emailed support@fanfiction.net to explain the situation and hopefully get the story restored, (Which may or may not include the literally thousands of reviews.) I was instructed that I would receive a response within 2 weeks.

Well, 2 weeks has come and gone with no response, so it probably isn't restorable now.

As you can guess, I'm pretty furious about the whole thing. I can only assume from the email that person or persons filed a false complaint for reasons known only to themselves. And rather than investigate to see if the complaint was valid, the admins just destroyed years of work and thousand upon thousands of reviews from my fans that I can never get back.

That said, I'm not going to take this out on people that want to read my story. I still have the original files, and plan to repost the revised version in the coming months. Fanfiction.net is still where most of my fans read.

But I have no assurance that this won't happen again. Fanfiction.net has shown a startling lack of follow-through and displayed that they have an easily exploited process whereby anyone feeling envious or malicious can target popular stories for destruction like internet vandals. You-tube is going through a similar issue with fraudulent copyright strikes. You cannot have an automated enforcement process without adequate human oversight... Otherwise this is the disgusting result.

Sorry for the rant, but this has been extremely disheartening. Checking your email every day for a response to try and salvage years of work will do that to you.