Fan fic is really something entirely different than what you were doing - fan fic is original writing in an existing fictional world/storyline and with existing fictional characters (although of course novel characters and plot elements can and are introduced in fan fic). Mark is absolutely correct that legal precedent has allowed fan fic authors to use copyrighted characters and to write in a fictional universe that they did not create, but this is totally different than re-publishing an author's previously published work without permission.

Anyone who tries to tell you they know the legal ins and outs of publishing someone else's copyrighted material here on Steem blockchain is either lying to you or doesn't understand the issues - there is literally no legal precedent for this. There hasn't ever been anything like Steem blockchain before. Some thoughts though - legal precedent in the past has come down strongly on the side of allowing pretty extensive use of copyrighted material when the usage was non-commercial - in this case though it would be extremely difficult to argue that you were not trying to profit from the copyrighted material you were publishing here. There is in fact a mechanism that you can use if you want to publish a post on Steem blockchain without earning rewards for it, you just decline payout on the post. You didn't do this obviously so whether or not this was your intent, you did actually profit from publishing the prior installments on your blog. Next, it is extremely hard to say what damages would be found if (more likely when) a copyright holder does take someone to court for earning rewards for copyright infringement on Steem blockchain. If a post has passed the 7 day payout window there is no way to remove that post from the blockchain. It is there, permanently and publicly and uncensorably. A copyright holder can't just file a DMCA takedown notice - or rather, they could - but there is no mechanism in place to actually take down this copyrighted material after 7 days has passed from it being published. I think it is possible if not probable that damages could be found to be significantly more than just the rewards received for posting copyrighted material, considering that the copyrighted material is going to be publicly available now with no recourse to the original copyright holder.

None of this is why I mentioned this to you in the first place, and I think it is beyond unlikely that you would yourself ever see legal action taken against you for this. As I stated above I would like to see more original content on Steem blockchain and less plagiarization / copyright theft. I want this purely for selfish interests - I want to see Steem succeed and grow. The more material that is posted on Steem that has been posted elsewhere online first, the lower results from Steem will occur in search results and it is even possible that Google will eventually stop displaying results from Steem entirely if the algorithm determines that content on Steem is most likely plagiarized. You can actually already see this happening now. I spend a lot of time curating (I am a curator for @curie) and part of this process involves checking posts that I find for plagiarization by searching for paragraphs of the text. Steemit.com already appears to be mostly blacklisted from Google search results. When I do see the Steem blog post I am looking at appear in the search results, it is almost always now one of the 3rd party front ends like busy.org or mspwaves.com - I VERY rarely see a steemit.com result turn up even if I am searching for paragraphs of text that were in fact originally published on steemit.com. This is a real thing that is going on right now - it is absolutely a real battle in the trenches to keep plagiarization off blockchain and find it and flag it down before the 7 days pass and it is too late. The only reason I didn't just report you to steemcleaners in the first place is that it was pretty obvious to me you were coming at this from a place of love for Hunter S. Thompson. Cheers - Carl