#we cant afford to forget
*cackling*
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.I think you’ve misunderstood:
AO3 was built by a bunch of us with our free donated labor for the purpose of being a space free from commercial spam.
It’s not a public service. It was built by us to house the type of fandom culture weliked.
People who want to do fandom differently, including making money, are welcome to go build their own site with their own money or their own donated labor.
AO3 does not forbid commercial links because they think fans making money from fanworks is immoral but them making money (to run the damn site) is fine.
AO3 forbids commercial links because they are making a very specific claim about the legality of fanworks, and that claim is about noncommercial fanworks.
They’re not saying that commercialized fanworks are against the law. They’re just not prepared to host them–nor defend them in court.
In case people missed it: The OTW will not honor DMCA takedown orders that are basically, “I own X work and that’s a fanfic of it, and that’s copyright infringement so make it go away.”
The OTW says, lolnope, we don’t think that’s copyright infringement. If you disagree, sue us.
The OTW says: Disney - we will not remove explicit Mandalorian fanfic. Rowling, Warner Bros - we will not remove trans Harry Potter fanfic. Gabaldon - we are not removing Outlander fanfic no matter how much you think it’s illegal or a personal violation. Yarbro, if someone puts “The Adventure of the Gentleman in Black” on AO3, you will need to actually take it to trial to (try to) get it removed; none of this C&D order followed by fans caving because they can’t afford a lawyer.
…So far, nobody has sued them. (This is, in my mind, the strongest proof we have that fanfic is not copyright infringement. In 13 years, not a single person or company has scrounged up a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against AO3/the OTW for hosting fanworks.)
But they’re not willing to put themselves on the line for commercial works. Those get considered differently in copyright law. They’re not always infringing - there’s a whole history of parody books & songs to prove that - but the OTW is not dealing with them.
The OTW does not care if fans are making money. The OTW cares if fans making money interfere with its legal defense of its archive.
If you are not a copyright lawyer, your opinion about the situation is not going to be considered.
Also, it wasn’t just Anne Rice coming after fandom in the 90s as though this is some relic holdover terror from ancient history.
Events like Strikethrough and Boldthrough happened in the early to mid-2000s. It felt like you’d wake up every day in 2007 and find another fandom group on LJ gone. (And not just fandom groups either, important community groups for education and trauma survival were also wiped out in those purges as well.)
And while not exactly the same, Yahoo Groups–and yes Yahoo Groups was a major online fandom hub at one point–were deleted as late as 2019 with very little warning, leaving a lot of older fandom groups scrambling to back up decades worth of content.
I might be projecting, but Fanfic.net seems to be wobbling too. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they go under in the next few years despite performing similar purges of adult content in 2012 and allowing for obnoxious ads, which made the site unusable on mobile unless you wanted to see an ad what felt like every couple of paragraphs. (It might be better now, I haven’t checked in a while.)
It has only been in very recent memory that fandom has gained any sort of foothold that isn’t poised directly over a precarious faultline that could at any moment open up and swallow entire communities whole, and a huge part of that is the volunteers at Ao3 who decided to play chicken with the likes of Anne Rice and won.
Ao3 at its core was and is built by fandom. Some people don’t like it and that’s fine, but to even suggest that the volunteers are lounging around eating peeled grapes and lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills making bank through fraud while fanfic authors are left out in the cold is beyond the scope of laughable.
#when you look at the actual breakdown of vosts#even if you assume the overflow money is only paying like 4 or 5 people’s salaries#they’re making like. 80k a year.#which is obviously good money but it’s also not like… buy a yacht rich#it’s vomfortable money#(“oh but ao3 is all volunteer–” okay yes the tagwranglers &c. are volunteers but there have to be a few core staff who get paid)#I do think there are valid critiques of how ao3 is run but some of y'all are so deeply stupid
No.
There probably ought to be for long-term stability, but there are not.
80k/year is well below what developers earn for comparable projects. AO3 does not have the money for paid staff.
for the kids out there, 80k a year is like… 2 salaries at best for a comfortable middle class job, and if everyone was being paid minimum wage or below it’d be 5ish salaries.
AO3 has a couple of major issues that need to be addressed, but a lot of the criticism seems to stem from a lack of understanding about its basic framework as well as how much things actually cost.
As an archive, it’s stayed fairly stable in ways most sites hosting fandom have not. Every other fandom site has had some sort of content purge or other problem on a grand scale.
AO3 isn’t perfect and needs to make some changes, but people who want it to be destroyed or have some other weird hate boner for it beyond that are basically just missing the point of what an archive is, and want to do a book burning in a way they perceive to be socially acceptable.
This. this. THIS.
I hate to sound like an old gramma but children: WE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF USING OTHER PEOPLE’S IPS!
Selling fanart? ILLEGAL. (there are certain exceptions to this. Namely, I can sell you a commission of any given characters neither of us own as long as I am charging you for my WORK, and you are paying me for my STYLE/WORK. If I am copying the original style line by line? Illegal. If it is CLEARLY my style and you paid me materials/time because no one else could do it the way I do? Legal)
Selling fanfic? ILLEGAL. (And oh boy, I don’t miss the fights between fanart-sellers and fanfic-sellers and why is bad to ask for tips for fanfic when fanartists become rich and blah blah blah. I will not start that fight again, the point is, it’s illegal)
Now, HOSTING fanart/fanfic that is NOT for sale, but only done as part of a work of love for the series? THAT is completely legal and fine. Unfortunately, it is also expensive so A03 NEEDS money to run. But the thing is that in order to remain legal? they need to make sure NO ONE is asking for money OFF the IPs they host. At least not on the site. And A03 is the ONE SITE that will NOT bow to Cease and desist threats just for existing. So yeah, they need money to run that and they need to keep their necks above water re: the law.
And consider this: How many times have you heard that etsy/redbubble/whatever has taken down a product because it infringes someone’s IP? When sometimes it really DOESN’T ? (As in, generic snake drawing with a wizard hat is flagged as HP content even if the snake in question is Red and Black, and the hat is definitely not a HP hat, for example) Because those sites? will not defend the fan. At all, But A03 does.
Don’t want to support a03, or post there? Fine, don’t.
But also don’t come back crying when whatever platform you’re in takes all your fic and decides “hey, cool, we’re making money out of this and you’re not because WE have the permission from the IP and you don’t!” or, worse, just deletes it one day without giving you any warning.
Also, ETA because I saw it on the tags: DO NOT post links to Patreon or Kofi or ANY money-making social media on A03, because THAT is using the site to promote making money out of someone else’s IPs. Link to your Tumblr, or to your twitter, or to your facebook. THEN on those, on THOSE you can link to your money-making social media. Because you give A03 the benefit of distance. They CAN’T control what you post on Tumbler, Twitter, Facebook or instangram. So yeah, if THERe you post your link to your Etsy store named “COPYRIGHT VIOLATIONS ALL DAY, COME HERE, GET YOUR COPYRIGHT VIOLATION”? A03 is not liable. BUT if you DO post the store link on A03? THEN they become accessories. So don’t do it. Don’t be a jerk.
Protect our safe space.
Post link
even if billie joe was straight (he’s not) teenagers getting offended he used the word faggot in american idiot 16 years after the fact would still be some of the goofiest discourse i have yet to see on this website. if you were young and gay in 2004 that shit rocked your world bc we were living through one of the most powerful resurgences of blind american patriotism and anti-gay evangelical bullshit of the last three decades. i dont think most of yall understand how radical that song, that album, and green day’s overall anti-bush pro-gay stance was for the time. even though we were at the cusp of bush becoming unpopular by the time it was released, american idiot saw a fairly mainstream rock band condemning not just him, but the bigoted, ignorant american culture which created him. to remove all of this context from the song and act like green day was just throwing around homophobic slurs for the hell of it is exactly why people joke nobody has reading comprehension on this website lmao. he’s not weaponizing the term; he’s using it to identify with an alternative american society.
The lyric is:
Well maybe I’m the faggot America
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda
I don’t know how to explain to kids these days what it was like to be young and queer in those days. People think I call myself queer because I’ve never lived in a small and homophobic town, never experienced violence or discrimination, don’t know what it’s like to have those words thrown at me with anger and hatred.
And it’s hard to reach through the pain of those memories and say: there were no words for us that weren’t slurs when I was your age.
I was 17 when this song came out. “Gay” was what the boys in my high school called anything they didn’t like. “Pop quiz? That’s so gay!” A (straight) girl in the drama club shaved her head for cancer and people started calling her a dyke. She didn’t deny it, so her car got egged in the school parking lot and the eggs stayed there long enough to wreck the paint but somehow “nobody saw”. The teachers and principal of my Catholic school didn’t do anything about that, or about the abuse my gay friend put up with in the halls and every class except drama, because intervening would be “endorsing homosexuality.” My gay friend got shipped off to conversion therapy by his family and I never saw him again. Conservative classmates tried to get the drama teacher fired, because she “wasn’t supportive of Catholic values.”
The only story I knew about gay people in a town like mine was The Laramie Project, about Matthew Sheppard’s murder for being gay in a small town in Wyoming. That was the year I started but couldn’t finish writing a play titled “The Lemon Tree” about two girls whose love for each other couldn’t survive the homophobia of a town like mine, the same way a lemon tree planted there would be killed stone dead by its harsh winters. It was the year I decided to convert to Catholicism, because I had sincere faith and yes the Church was homophobic but having a real relationship with a woman was never going to be possible for me anyway so it wasn’t like I was losing anything, right?
I didn’t have access to the gay community or gay media, except through online slash fandom. A year later I found a second depiction of gay people in a town like mine: Brokeback Mountain, about two men whose love was smothered by society’s homophobia until one of them was murdered for being gay.
(Now I know that kd lang and Tegan and Sara were openly gay in the 90s and come from my part of the world, although they all had to leave to be successful. Nobody mentioned kd lang’s sexuality, and Tegan and Sara didn’t get radio play here when I was young.)
And yes, “faggot” was worse than “gay”. “Gay” just meant, you know, “bad”, but “faggot” meant gay and soft and weak and about to get an ass-kicking.
So I remember those lines and when I first heard them all those years ago. I remember that I was cleaning my room and listening to the radio, and the DJ talked about Green Day’s anger at cable news and the war in Iraq and played the song, and those two lines hit me, so hard I was incredulous and couldn’t believe that for once somebody was on my side.
Green Day’s image was tough and angry and loud, and it’s an angry song—not unexpected, basically anyone left-leaning was angry about politics then—and them saying “maybe I’m the faggot” was them saying Come and get me. You can’t scare me. This thing you throw out as an insult and a threat? Yeah, I’ll own it, and I’ll use it to lure you into punching range. You’re wrong and I can fight you and win.
It was like a transmission from an alien planet. This was someone so much braver than I could ever imagine being. What that song said to me was that somebody was willing to stand up for me. I had viewed homophobia as an all-powerful cultural force I could either submit to or escape by hiding until I found a safe community, but pro-LGBT punk rock was what taught me that I also had the option to fight.
