The OTW is proud to announce an important legal victory for fan vidders and other makers of noncommercial remix videos, achieved in conjunction with our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: the Register of Copyrights has recommended that the Librarian of Congress maintain the vidders' exemption from certain provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

As you probably know, the OTW is committed to the legal position that fanworks, including vids, generally represent "fair use" of their source material under U.S. copyright law. Although this theory has not been tested in the courts yet, it means that vidders ought to be able to use parts of their source in their works without being liable for copyright infringement. However, since the passage of the DMCA, vidders have had an additional legal problem. The DMCA forbids circumvention of access controls to protected works—in other words, ripping DVDs or source purchased from online services (like Amazon Unbox) to get the source to make the vids in the first place. The statute applies even if the ripper was going to put the source to a legal use, like making a vid. So while a copyright owner might not be able to sue a vidder for infringement, it still might be able to sue her just for accessing the source.

The DMCA is a bad law in general, not only for vidders. Fortunately, every three years, the Librarian of Congress has the responsibility of considering proposed exemptions to the DMCA which are technically necessary for otherwise legitimate uses. This means that individuals whose uses are covered by the exemption will not be legally liable just for circumventing access controls to get the source they need. In the last round, the OTW sought, and won, an exemption for vids. But each exemption must be re-approved each time, and so the OTW had to apply again this year, in the face of industry opposition that was much stronger than before.

Drafting work was done by the Legal committee, and Francesa Coppa, Tisha Turk, and Rebecca Tushnet appeared before the agency to testify. They were able to point to many examples of vids that hinged on access to high-quality source for their full effect, such as giandujakiss's "It Depends on What You Pay." And, in the end, the OTW once again persuaded the appropriate official to formally recommend renewal of the exemption—keeping the U.S. safe for vidders.

For those interested you can read the full decision (in PDF format) on the U.S. Copyright Office site or you can see an HTML version at Cryptome.

The application for the exemption is a great example of a project that benefits all of fandom and which would have been impossible without an organization that let us tap our combined resources. The OTW is grateful to all its members, whose support makes its legal work possible, and to the many others who assisted us!

Here's a roundup of fanworks making the news stories that might be of interest to fans:

• While there are still plenty of stories in the media that take the "weirdness" angle to discussing fanworks, as fan creativity become more and more visible online there are an increasing number of stories that take a more admiring approach. For example, Visual News looks at fan movie remixes, and Comics Alliance looks at the artistic range of Emily Partridge's fan art, while io9 focuses on the Sew Nerdy gallery show.
• Then there are the posts that take a second look past first impressions. In The London Evening Standard, a piece on fanfic takes a rather lazy look at fandom categories on Fanfiction.net but concludes, "On my visit, I found nothing that risked brilliance, even basic competence. As a glimpse into the recesses of the human imagination, however, it is awe-inspiring, like The Library of Babel in Borges’s story, which contains every single book imaginable...Suddenly, anything seems possible in publishing."
• Indeed some writers go farther in noticing the important sort of commentary that can be found in fanworks which is too often overlooked. This may range from simply highighting a fannish remix to taking to task its detractors, as blogger s.e. smith does in "What’s With the Fanfic to Book Hate?". "Many people involved in the discussion swirling around books like these seem unaware of the cultural and social attitudes underlying the way they frame these works. This refusal to interrogate the source of their attitudes means that they miss out on a much deeper conversation; if everyone’s fixated on the ‘ew, gross, trashy, for women’ factor, they can’t have an honest discussion about the actual content of the books. Refusing to acknowledge that fanfiction does have a place in the literary canon, and that it is creative, means missing out on a huge and fascinating community...Many of these critics haven’t read a single word of fanfic, and they’re letting the male literary establishment tell them how to react to it?"

If you're into fanworks for criticism to squee or anything in between, why not write about it in Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup at transformativeworks.org. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

Here's a roundup of stories on music and the classics that might be of interest to fans:

• The post Are music startups killing online music fandom? examines social aspects of music sharing, or the lack of them. "Honestly, I think I discovered more new music when MySpace was the only game in town for burgeoning bands to share tunes. Thanks to Facebook, I know how little most of my social circle and I have in common when it comes to music preference. More broadly, I think the music startup explosion hasn’t really done much to promote new music discovery at all, but mostly encourages an echo chamber of musical tastes where friends and acquaintances share the same small pool of artists, bands, and songs with each other."
• While most documentaries about bands tend to recount the history of the group, one of Rolling Stone's selections for Seven Best New Music Documentaries of the Year was So Color Me Obsessed, which focuses on people fannish about the group. “It’s not just about the Replacements,” Bechard says. “It’s about how any band affects you and becomes almost part of your family.”
• Music mashups are pretty common but it's less common when the setting is classical. "[T]he Met is breathing new life into the charming form of the pastiche as a way to celebrate Baroque opera’s renewed popularity." The Enchanted Island opens on New Year's Eve in New York City and "places the four lovers from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Prospero’s island from The Tempest. It’s all set to the music of the greatest Baroque master composers."
• Similarly, a life of cosplay isn't that common, particularly when it is as a long-dead author. But one fan "is a hit with locals in her hometown on Keighley, West Yorks - near Bronte homeland Haworth" particularly as her efforts help direct tourists to the local Bronte sites. The Telegraph notes "Locals regularly stop to compliment her on her unusual style as she struts her stuff doing her food shopping, or while munching on a Big Mac."

If you're a fan of opera, music, or authors, why not contribute to Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

Here's a roundup of stories on women in fandom that might be of interest to fans:

• A post at Pop Culture Pirate both celebrates women's skills in creating remixes, and urges others to join in. "For women and girls, especially, it’s a way to talk back to branded affirmations of beauty, take back our identities from corporate commodification, and create better stories about women that don’t revolve around men."
• Two instructors at the The Alice Smith School Secondary Campus in Malaysia also urge the hands-on approach when writing about how to use fan fiction in the classroom to help students better engage with literature. Among their suggestions are the “substitute” ending, the "“what if?” of both characters and events", creating backstories, imagining crossovers, and creating diary entries or email exchanges for characters.
• Much of the media coverage of fans tends to focus less on fan activities than in how they make a good market for the entertainment industry. In this article from the Christian Science Monitor titled "Duran Duran fans spend hard", fan finances are the focus in a piece that nonetheless reveals the fandom's influence on their lives. "Kasandra O’Connell lives in Dublin, Ireland. At the end of October, she will travel to New York on business. The trip, however, coincides with Duran Duran’s Madison Square Garden show...She plans to travel to Venice, Italy, in the spring for a concert. "I never would have traveled like this to see them before Twitter but I've met so many ‘DD sistahs’ that I feel perfectly happy traveling and meeting up with new friends,” O’Connell says.""

If you create remixes or fan fiction or travel to concerts, why not contribute your perspectives to Fanlore? Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.