Discusión

In preparation for hosting fanart on the AO3 (that is, you will soon be able to upload art directly to our servers and not just link it from elsewhere), we are revising the official Terms of Service and our FAQ!

As always, we actively seek and very much appreciate feedback on all archive policies. The coding for fanart is still underway, and there is time to make changes, so if there's anything in this draft that concerns you, please let us know.

Fanlore, the OTW's fan history wiki project, is looking for help organizing the anime and manga areas of the wiki in anticipation of trying to beef up the content. In particular, they want fans familiar with the material to weigh in on the underlying category structures: anime vs. manga vs. comics vs. cartoons vs. animation. As they sum up:

We’re hoping for a system that will accommodate many needs, including those of manhua, manhwa, and a variety of animation and comics fandoms from around the world. If you have knowledge in these areas, we definitely want to hear from you! We hope to find a few fans who are excited about the prospect of chronicling and preserving anime or manga fandoms and their histories, who can help us 1) figure out how best to structure this corner of the wiki and 2) reach out to anime and manga communities for more participation once we have a good structure in place.

If you have the knowledge to help, please comment on that post or contact the Wiki Committee through their contact form.

Edited to add: a revised proposal is now up at the Fanlore dreamwidth community. Please go by and weigh in!

From the business section of the Guardian this week: Google seeks to turn a profit from YouTube copyright clashes. The article's subtitle gives you the gist: "Group is working to persuade music and video companies to cash in rather than clamp down when their content is uploaded." In short, Google wants to use their content fingerprinting system to report uses--even transformed uses--to copyright holders and then to offer them the chance to put ads on user-generated content. There's lots wrong with that, but perhaps the wrongest is the idea that the companies have the right to take things down because "because the use does not fit the original's values." C'mon, Google! Don't be evil!

In brighter news, UK Will Urge EC To Legalise Mashups, Format-Shifting, Content Sharing. This "could include legalising more outright copying, the creation of sound/image mashups, format-shifting and sharing material with family and friends."

Relatedly, folks seem to be figuring out that the DVR isn't actually the death of commercial television and that so-called "music pirates" actually buy more music. While we've heard this song before, optimistically copyright holders will eventually figure out that they shouldn't be afraid of new technologies.

A few legal stories that might be of interest to followers of the OTW:

From publicknowledge.org: UGC is More Than Hamsters on a Piano is an essay by Michael Weinberg at publicknowledge.org, talking about the "assumption that the UGC is essentially commercially worthless – it is all first grade ballet recitals, dogs jumping up and down, or kids falling off of skateboards. The real action (and money) is around the "real" content. Since the money will only come from the professional content, the concerns of today’s professional content owners (usually having to do with filtering or kicking people off of networks) tend to dominate the discussion." But Weinberg points out that we are not all sitting around waiting for professionals to come and entertain us, and that today's established studios may not have "the best interests of their future competitors at heart."

From boingboing.net: Meet the 42 lucky people who got to see the secret copyright treaty: Fans should be aware that a number of parties are trying to negotiate an international, anti-copyright treaty "that contains provisions that criminalize non-commercial file-sharing; require net-wide wiretapping for copyright infringement and border-searches of hard-drives and other devices; and disconnection from the Internet for people accused of violating copyright." A lot of people, including publicknowledge.org, BoingBoing, the EFF, and others--are protesting the secretive nature of these negotiations.

From Rachel Maddow: Hey, Rachel Maddow follows BoingBoing: could we love her more? Rachel interviews BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin about the Ralph Lauren photoshop disaster--but gets that the real story was the attempted DMCA intimidation of BoingBoing after the fact, when reprinting the photoshopped image to mock it was a classic case of fair use. Because Boingboing's ISP was in Canada, they didn't have to comply with the DMCA, and Rachel immediately gets what she calls "the deeper part of this story", that "ISPs just immediately cave whenever they're confronted by anything like this, and it sort of hurts the first amendment."

Lastly, our own Rebecca Tushnet caught the story that Mattel has licensed "Barbie Girl". For those not familiar with the case, 12 years ago, Barbie sued the Danish pop band Aqua, claiming trademark and copyright infringement. The claim was dismissed and the song was ruled as protected speech. Now, Mattel has licensed and rewritten the song to promote its new line of Barbie products. If you can't beat 'em...?

You might think fighting robots only happens in video games, in which case: read the The Slow Road to Fair Use: Why it Takes Three Weeks to Post Your Youtube Video, a guest post by video remixer IKAT381 at politicalremixvideo.com. IKAT381 chronicles the three week--but ultimately successful--slog to get a vid up on YouTube, a process that included fighting the upload bot, which did an automatic takedown, lodging a dispute through YouTube's built-in online tool, and then lodging a DMCA counternotice when the dispute was denied (by another bot?) in favor of UMG, the record company that owned the Weezer song.

Persistence paid off, but as IKAT381 points out, "imagine if I was a career artist who wanted to dedicate more time to creating than to looking up copyright law and counter-notice procedures. Or imagine I had kids, or school, or any number of things that might be more important to me than being a copyright geek."

IKAT381 concludes: In the year 2009, copyright disputes have been taken over by robots. In the year 2010, copyright disputes should be handled by people.

(You might also enjoy the vid. Super Pork and Beans All-Stars (Weezer Remix) is a tribute to IKAT381's favorite internet celebrities, of which you're sure to recognize more than a few!)

No estamos aceptando más votos. ¡Gracias por participar!

Como parte del proceso de construir el Archivo, no sólo estamos ocupadas agregando fantásticas nuevas características, ¡también estamos trabajando en pulir las ya existentes! Una de las áreas que estamos revisando es la de los Marcadores. La funcionalidad básica ya ha sido implementada, pero estamos diseñando la próxima versión, y hay una cuestión sobre la cual nos gustaría especialmente tener sus comentarios.

Por ahora, los marcadores tienen dos categorías: privados y públicos.

• Los marcadores privados son visibles sólo para el usuario que los creó.
• Los marcadores públicos son visibles para todos, y pueden ser vistos en la página de bookmarks (marcadores) (Actualmente llamada "recs" - de "recomendaciones" - pero que pronto será renombrada de acuerdo a los comentarios de los usuarios.)

Lo que estamos considerando ahora es si debería ser posible nombrar un marcador específicamente como una recomendación, creando una tercera categoría: recs.

• Las recomendaciones podrían ser públicas o privadas (¡Aunque asumimos que los usuarios preferirían que fueran visibles para los otros usuarios!) y cuando fueran públicas, aparecerían en la página de marcadores. Probablemente podríamos añadir una opción para filtrar esta página. Así los usuarios podrían elegir ver solamente las recomendaciones.

Probablemente agregaríamos algún tipo de indicación visual de que un marcador es una recomendación - mira la imagen abajo como ejemplo de los marcadores de un usuario en particular y cómo se podrían diferenciar los distintos tipos (haz click en la imagen para ir a una versión más grande). Por favor, ten en cuenta que ésta es una noción muy tosca. Nuestro actual rediseño de los marcadores los mostrará mucho más completos y lindos que esto, y éste es un concepto de diseño posible, aún no terminado. El texto rojo no es parte del diseño propuesto, si no que cumple funciones de etiquetamiento.

Haciendo esto existirían algunas ventajas:

• La gente que siente que existe una diferencia entre marcadores y recomendaciones, podría marcarlos en forma diferente.
• La gente que está buscando recomendaciones sería capaz de identificarlas fácilmente, y filtrar los marcadores que no están señalados específicamente como recomendaciones - por ejemplo, aquellos que son 'para leer'.

Por otra parte, cada característica tiene un costo, y podemos ver algunas desventajas:

• Agregará otro campo al formulario de los marcadores, generando otro elemento que la gente deberá completar.
• Los usuarios pueden actualmente colocar una etiqueta en sus marcadores, señalándolos como recomendacions (o de la forma que prefieran llamarlos), por lo que los lectores pueden ya encontrar cosas que han sido específicamente recomendadas.

Sabemos por los comentarios de los usuarios que algunas personas tienen una fuerte opinión formada acerca de los marcadores/recomendaciones (como se mencionó arriba, estamos cambiando nuestra terminología de manera que los marcadores no serán identificados como recomendaciones a menos que quién los ha marcado desee que lo sean). De todas formas, no queremos complicar las cosas innecesariamente; si las necesidades de la mayoría de la gente son satisfechas con marcadores públicos y privados (que es, después de todo, la manera en la que delicious.com funciona), no tiene sentido confudir las cosas.

¡Y aquí es donde intervienes! Queremos saber qué es lo que piensas. Nota que no estamos prometiendo seguir los resultados de la encuesta -en última instancia, haremos lo que sea posible técnicamente- pero, ciertamente, lo tomaremos en consideración. Por favor selecciona la opción que prefieras, y siéntete libre para decir porqué en los comentarios, ¡o de sugerir otras opciones completamente diferentes!

Cuando vayas a la encuesta, si la página indica que tu voto ya ha sido realizado es porque alguien más con tu dirección IP ya ha visitado la página. A fin de poder efectuar tu voto, crea una cuenta o inicia tu sesión.

The OTW's Content Policy is pleased to put the following updates to the Archive's Terms of Service forward for two weeks of public discussion. The full Terms of Service can be found linked on the archive page, but for clarity, all emendations and new policy items are listed below the cut.

Fanfiction writers and other makers of transformative works might be interested in the lawsuit brought by the famously reclusive J.D. Salinger and his lawyers against writer J.D. California, who has written a sequel to "Catcher in the Rye" called "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye," which tells the story of Holden Caufield as an old man. Unlike fanfiction, "Coming Through The Rye" is a commercial work, but it'll still be an interesting case to keep an eye on. Read more about the case at CNN, with a more thorough legal overview courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

The OTW belatedly joins in celebrating the restoration of Glockgal's Avatar site on Zazzle. As you may remember, Glockgal's store was TOSed ostensibly for violating Viacom's intellectual property rights, even though Glockgal's items were mostly textual expressions of her critique of the all-white casting of the new live-action Avatar film. Viacom was quick to assert that they support fair use and only take things down when they aren't creative or political; they also invited Glockgal to submit a DMCA counternotice. The OTW was happy to help Glockgal formulate and direct that counternotice, and we have been so delighted to see people from all around the internet banding together to take a stand against unfair takedowns. This (relatively speedy!) victory is a victory for all of us and proof that banding together and defending our rights works.

The takeaway? If someone is infringing YOUR free speech or fair use rights, SAY SOMETHING. TELL SOMEONE!

Greetings and Salutations! Calling all challenge mods, archivists, and people with vivid fannish imaginations! If you've run a fannish challenge or exchange, moderated a challenge community, edited a zine, or put together a themed rec list, we want to talk to you. If you've participated in a fannish challenge and/or have ever thought in detail about how to run a challenge, please also help us out! We're in the process of developing the design for two essential pieces of functionality on the Archive of Our Own Roadmap, Version 0.7: Collections and Challenges.