Can You Copyright the Sun?

The Latest Author Attack of 2023

Anne Marble
7 min readDec 20, 2023

2023 refused to end without another author behaving badly. This new scandal involves copyright, but it’s really about targeting an innocent author.

The NASA title for this photo is “A corona mass ejection erupts from our sun on August 31, 2012.” This is a color photograph of our sun showing incredible detail and bright orange and yellow and dark red colors.
Our Sun. (Source: Photo by NASA on Unsplash.)

No! You can’t copyright the sun. Just as you can’t copyright the concept of characters powered by the sun. That should be obvious.

Question answered. Next!

TL;DR: The truly important thing to remember in this case is that Marvellous Michael Anson is completely innocent. She doesn’t deserve to be attacked. Subscribe to her newsletter using the form at the bottom of her About page. Buy her book, His Dark Reflection.

What Happened?

So what happened? An author named Lauren M. Davis accused another author of copyright infringement.

Wow. Oh, no! That sounds serious.

But wait. The targeted author — Marvellous Michael Anson — is innocent.

All Marvellous Michael Anson did was promote her upcoming book — an adult fantasy romance called Firstborn of the Sun. Like many acclaimed fantasies in recent years, this one is influenced by West African culture and magic. In this story, everyone is able to draw power from the sun. Except the heroine, Lọ́rẹ. She instead yields a shadow magic.

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Anne Marble
Anne Marble

Written by Anne Marble

I’m a writer and a copy editor with experience in editing science and engineering articles. Click Lists to find my most popular articles. And hidden gems.