If OTW weren’t around, this wouldn’t be “scaremongering”: It would be the inescapable status quo.
The people who believe this crap are the anti-vaxxers of fandom.
Oh god. They kind of are, aren’t they?
I’d go bigger and just say that they’re the conservatives/reactionaries of fandom–or, to frame it differently, this is how conservative and authoritarian ideologies express themselves in the context of Fandom.
my opinion on AO3 is that it’s an important asset but i still find it scummy that they’ll ask for money but when their users try to ask for money they slam them with their non-monetization rules.
Like Anne Rice is dead and this isn’t the 90s anymore, people are making money from fandom please catch up with the times.
It’s literally still illegal to make money off fanfic and OTW can be sued for allowing those fics to stay up.
Fanfiction is a violation of copywrite law regardless of if money is earned off of it.
Actually, that’s fuzzier. Transformative works are protected under fair use so long as there is sufficient changes from source material OR the transformative works do not take away from the profitability of the source material. In essence, the transformed work must not divert measurable amounts of money from the source material. Hence, why public domain works are fair game; there is no central profiteer.
Basically, it’s incredibly hard, if not impossible, for someone to be sued for creating fanfic that they make no money off of. Without loss of profit, the courts have no reason to care.
Asking for money for fanfic can be indicated as loss of profit for the IP holders. It might not be enough for successful suing on a one to one basis, but court fees can be used to bully small creators anyway, and it can be grounds for OTW being sued as a whole. Shit like this leads to strikethroughs and site-death.
OTW is allowed to exist because they are a non-profit. OTW is allowed to exist because no one is making money.
i’m always curious why the concept of monetizing fanfiction is always treated as so much more taboo than fanart and fan music which are both transformative medias themselves that have been successfully monetized for over a decade now with sites like DeviantArt supporting a diverse community of fan artists who frequently post and market commissions, Patreons, and Subscribestars.
Or hell, the whole genre of Youtube known as Let’s Plays which has been with us since the 2010s.
Also non-profit means that the corporate entity receives no profit not that no staff or users can receive financial benefit for their work.
It’s a really fascinating subject, yeah.
AO3 is built to house a particular type of oldschool fanfic fandom first and foremost. Our labor to build it, our rules. Commercial links on embedded fan art are also against the rules on AO3 for that reason.
Like… I hear you on culture changing, but AO3 isn’t simply a reflection of culture, nor is it full of corporate PR people trying to draw in young customers. More users are not a plus for it (in fact, they’re often a minus). It’s a site built by specific people for specific purposes. It’s retro on purpose because the people it was built for prefer that. Still. Now. In 2022.
If other people don’t like AO3′s noncommercial stance or any other aspect of its retro-ness, they can—and should—make another archive themselves.
Usually, when I say this, the next thing out of people’s mouths is “But that’s so much work”, but… it was the first time around too. I was there. I did a lot of that work along with dozens and hundreds and eventually thousands of others. And there were already other big, popular fic archives and still are, so AO3′s popularity does not preclude other big archives existing. FFN was started by one dude. Wattpad was always more of a commercial venture, but it too required effort to build and started small.
I wrote the AO3 terms of service with the content policy committee. I gave seven years to OTW. If other people who like hanging out in the clubhouse are mad that the club painted it red instead of blue… well… they didn’t build it, and the original club isn’t done with it yet, you know?
There are some legal reasons for the rules that others have outlined, but honestly, a big chunk of this just comes down to culture. You may think your fannish culture is more widespread than mine, and you might even be right! But it’s my fannish culture that built AO3, and we built it how we wanted it.
My feelings on AO3 rules discussions boil down to a combination of The Little Red Hen and Dr. Frank-n-Furter.
You know:
Anyway, on the broader meta topic: Fan art being something you can sell while fic is not is a longstanding double standard in fandom culture… kind of.
One thing to keep in mind is that lots of not-for-profit fic types always hated fan art being sold, but the art-centric and fic-centric communities were slightly different locations and sets of people and they had different norms.
Another aspect of this, historically, is that the money changing hands used to be for physical objects: art prints, zines. (And the zines in those days were primarily fic with only a little art.) Zines were nominally priced to break even, while art seems like it was not so much, but money was still changing hands for fic, just fic in physical form.
Differing perceptions of visual art and writing also contribute. Sure, it’s a lie that “anyone can write”, but it’s a lie lots of people believe.
Fic went digital faster and earlier than art did. I think both the pre-digital understanding of art sales and the fact that plenty of current artists sell limited edition prints and other physical objects contributes to many fans feeling like it’s okay to sell art but not fic.
Rights holders, however, do not agree. Fan art products are routinely tossed off of sales sites. There are crackdowns all the time. To the extent that art is safer, a lot of it is that some types of art have plausible deniability. Remove the words, and that elf is just a generic elf, not some particular franchise’s elf. Not so with writing! The names are all over every paragraph.
Of course, fans can and do sell writing with the names changed. Hell, this is what my first novel is. I was absolutely thinking of fandom characters as I came up with the plotbunny. But at that point, we just go sell our stuff on Amazon, the same as artists of generic fantasy art are free to sell it anywhere even if they were thinking of LOTR when they made it.
Discussions around fan art and profit go way, way back. There are a bunch of old-ass quotes on Fanlore here:
