Licensing fanworks, "the nature of the copyrighted work," Fifty Shades of... No.

Today I read the AO3 admin post The Case Against Licensing Fanworks and its comments. I agree with the post and the points made, but the comments raised interesting points.

( commenters' issues and Stanford's guidelines )

Now, AO3's OP seems to interpret the nature of the copyrighted work as commercial vs. noncommercial. Stanford seems to interpret it as both fact vs. fiction and published vs. unpublished.

Obviously AO3 and Stanford interpretations intersect (i.e., published=commercial and unpublished=noncommercial). But here's my question:

What is considered "published" at present?

Are fanworks on web sites considered "published" works, or unpublished works? ( various possibile meanings of published and unpublished that pertain to fanworks )

Then someone mentioned in the comments to that AO3 fanwork licensing post that Fifty Shades of Gray started as a fanfic.

Now, I haven't read Fifty Shades. Correction: I tried to. Started it, couldn't get into it. ( explanation of Fifty Shades' meh-ness for me wrt Story of O and 9 & 1/2 Weeks novels )

Fifty Shades read like fanfic to me--fairly lame fanfic. I was unimpressed. After I attempted FS and gave up (at least I didn't buy it), I realized it was self-published or vanity published or whatever you want to call that gray area (no pun intended). Well, that was similar to what I had figured anyway. ( how the whole Fifty Shades phenomenon passed me by )

It wasn't until today that I found out -- in the comments to the AO3 admin post on licensing of fanworks -- that FSoG was originally a fanfic. Well, that explained a lot (like, how it read...) but I was curious in which fandom it had originated. So I Googled.

Twilight? AU Bella/Edward BDSM fanfic?

This explains so much. ( or maybe explains so much about me )