These past two months have seen a spike in interviews with OTW staff by various media outlets. Here's a rundown on some of the places online where you can read their discussions about fandom, fanworks, and the OTW.

• Geek Girl Con did an interview with Anna Zola Miller, who serves on the Open Doors Committee. Anna talks about her increased perception of fandom history, the challenges the project has faced, her favorite archived item, and what she's feeling fannish about.
• Board member Francesca Coppa wrote Fandom: Open Culture Vs. Closed Platforms at OrgZine which also brings up the work of Open Doors and looked at the importance of fans' ability to keep their work from disappearing from online sites. "The social networks of Web 2.0 are mostly for-profit, commercial enterprises; the web is no longer the loose network of university and government servers it was twenty years ago. Fans used to roll their own code and make their own webpages; now others own the ground beneath their feet. And the priorities of these businesses may or may not be the priorities of fans."
• Rebecca Tushnet discussed the legality of fanworks with Lauren Davis at io9 which formed the basis of a lengthy piece on this issue, required reading for anyone wanting to debate the topic, and sporting a nifty piece of fan art to boot.
• Development & Membership staffer Aja Romano is delivering some excellent discussions of fandoms and fannish activities over at The Daily Dot. A notable recent piece provided recs to online sites for people wanting to find the next Fifty Shades of Grey, a badly needed guide if some of the rec lists appearing in the media over this summer are anything to go by.
• Francesca Coppa and Tisha Turk of the OTW's Vidding Committee were the guests on talk show Hearsay Culture on KZSU-FM, Stanford, 90.1 FM, a show which focuses on the intersection of technology and society. They discussed their personal histories in vidding, what transformative works and vids are, the work of the OTW, and what our legal team's effort to secure a DMCA exemption for remixing is all about. Asked what they want the typical non-vidder to do, they exhort listeners to both know their rights and exercise them. (No transcript available).

Lev Grossman of Time Magazine (himself a novelist whose most recent novel has been compared both to Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia) has been working on a feature story for Time about the cultural and legal issues surrounding fanfiction. Members of the OTW's Communications and Legal staff have already talked with him, but now he'd like to talk to some fanfiction writers directly. So we've set up a LiveJournal community for the purpose: lg_interview.

If you write fanfiction and would be interested in talking about it (using either your pseud or your legal name; we've explained that fan pseudonyms aren't "sockpuppets," but have a history and accountability within fandom), please join lg_interview. (Basic LiveJournal accounts are still free if you haven't got one, or if you'd be willing to talk but don't want to join the community, you can leave a signed or unsigned comment on Lev Grossman's LiveJournal or blog.)

Geeksaresexy.net, which bills itself as providing "tech, science, news, and social issues for geeks," posted an article about Yuletide, the annual rare and obscure fandoms fanfiction exchange, currently being hosted at the Archive of Our Own: Yuletide: Stories About (Seriously) Everything.

It's worth noting, if you didn't parse everything released with the new DMCA exemptions announced yesterday, that the fan vids in the OTW's Test Suite of Fair Use Vids (Women's Work by Sisabet and Luminosity, This Is How It Works by Lim, Handlebars by Seah and Margie, and Closer by Killa and T. Jonesy) as well as additional vids that we presented at the DMCA hearings last year - Lierdumoa's How Much Is That Geisha In The Window, Lim's Us, and Luminosity's Vogue - are discussed in the Register of Copyright's Recommendation to The Librarian of Congress. (You can download the entire .pdf, which is searchable.)

For instance, Lierdumoa's vid helped to convince the Register that vidders need access to high quality source:

"Noncommercial, transformative users have also sufficiently demonstrated that certain uses require high quality in order for the purpose of the use to be sufficiently expressed and communicated. For instance, where focus on background material in a motion picture is essential to the transformative purpose, as exemplified in the situation of bringing the background to the foreground, the use of decrypted DVDs is necessary to make the point. One particular example of “bringing the background to the foreground” was demonstrated in the vid, How Much Is That Geisha In The Window, by Lierdumoa. This vid criticizes and comments upon Joss Whedon’s science fiction television series Firefly. The series incorporates Asian culture and art, but the vid demonstrates that almost no Asian characters are featured and that they appear only in the background."

The Register also discussed the timing, characterization, editing, and message of the other vids, concluding that, "frequently when one is engaging in commentary about audiovisual works, it is necessary to use high quality reproductions in order to make one’s point."

The OTW is grateful to these vidders for allowing their work to appear in our Test Suite and for sending their work with us to Washington. Concrete examples made using high quality source are crucial to our arguments, and it is also vital for us to know about your stories, experiences, expectations, and practices. As we noted in our announcement of the exemption, we'll have to do this again in two years, and the Copyright Office will once again require evidence of the need for an exemption. You can help strengthen our case by leaving a comment or emailing the OTW's Vidding Committee at any time.

In related news, we are continuing to keep track of press about the DMCA exemptions, so keep an eye on our links post. We are also proud to launch a Press Room to serve as a focal point for media contact and to collect media mentions of our work, as well as our own OTW press releases.