• The first wave of Kindle Worlds press coverage mostly quoted from Amazon's press release with a few reaction links. Follow-up articles proved to be more critical and more aware of fannish perspective. The Millions asked Will Kindle Worlds Commodify Fan Fiction?. "It is fitting, perhaps, that the same week as the Yahoo/Tumblr acquisition, Amazon announced a project entitled 'Kindle Worlds.' It feels like more of a broader trend than a coincidence, because the Kindle Worlds endeavor is about an organization inserting itself from the top down. 'Worlds,' we learn, are Amazon-ese for fandoms."

  By contrast "There is an enormously freeing diversity in the world of fan fiction. I don’t mean that the writers are diverse — they are mostly female, and surely there must be socioeconomic implications in the ability to sustain such a hobby...The possibilities spin off into exponentially increasing permutations, spurring weird stuff and beautiful stuff, quite often fiction that’s better written than the source material that inspired it, creating fandoms that are so broad and varied and encompassing that a person can usually find whatever they’re seeking within. If not, well, that person may as well just write it herself. If that’s not the most accurate reflection of the rest of the internet — the organic, cultivated internet, grown from the bottom up, with no contracts, no exchanges of cash — then I don’t know what is."

• The Guardian again tackled the topic, this time declaring How Kindle Worlds aims to colonise fan fiction The "colonization" term seemed deliberately chosen. "Fan fiction writers are, first and foremost, fans: passionate ones, sophisticated ones, and knowledgable about the culture they're writing for and about. And while Amazon's not-very-exciting payment terms might entice a few into the professional fold, many more will continue to write whatever they like online for the joy and social prestige of the thing itself. Nevertheless, the attempted legalisation and professionalisation of one of the weirder and most enjoyable subcultures of the internet marks a significant moment in the history of networked literature."
• Publishers Melville House decided to tackle the announcement in fanfiction form. "Jeff looked up from his arm screen to find that Damon had leaned in close enough that he could smell the cool death on his breath. 'Glad to see you’re up to your usual business, Jeff—taking a happy and vibrant community and doling out a pittance to exploit and corrupt it.' He placed his long-fingered hand on Jeff’s chest. Jeff heard himself whimper quietly from somewhere beyond his control. 'And what about content, Jeff? I assume there are restrictions? You have to take the fun out of it somehow.'"
• Geek Empire noted Amazon's true target, professional writers. "In that regard, Kindle Worlds resembles nothing so much as another Amazon service, Mechanical Turk. There, business and developers commission small, iterative tasks that users can perform, often for remuneration as low as a penny. As Amazon would have it, Mechanical Turk gives businesses a “scalable workforce”—to which one might add, a workforce that is cheap and inherently disposable . That’s what Warner Bros. has gotten in exchange for the license to use its characters: a virtually free and disposable workforce."
• Investing site Motley Fool hosted a post which noted that the move was a way to create a longer revenue stream for content owners. "Partnering with Amazon in its fan fiction program would not only help media companies, which are looking for ways to promote their television shows and movies, but it would also help laggard book publishers such as Scholastic, which need new ways to profit from concluded franchises."
• An article in Chicago Grid reminded people that books aren't all Amazon may be after. "And do remember that Amazon also has a TV production studio. The language on the Kindle Worlds page that describes the relationship between a Kindle Worlds author and Amazon is conversational; I’m certain that authors will be required to click through something more obtuse and comprehensive when the program goes live next month. But as-is, we can’t dismiss the possibility that Amazon (and its first-look production partner…yes, Warner Studios) is buying worldwide rights to exploit the author’s work across all media for the life of the copyright, for nothing more than the possibility of royalties for the ebook."
• A post at Tosche Station poked at all the problematic possibilities in Amazon's announcement -- such as rights granted upon submission, not acceptance, no legal protection if there's infringement of non-partner brands, and "The net revenue is based off the customer sales price, not the wholesale price, which tends to be less. That seems okay, doesn’t it? It does until you read this: 'Amazon Publishing will set the price for Kindle Worlds stories.' Hm. So that means that your royalties and revenue could change in an instant, depending on how Amazon decides to price your story–and keep in mind, Amazon could decide to price it at zero, depending on how your contract is written."
• Another fannish blogger noted the problem with shared universes among fans -- who really owns fanon? "Lastly, what about plagiarism between Fan Fictions? Fan Fiction writers inside of fandoms can and will borrow from each other. Sometimes an idea is so great that one person reads it in a Fan Fiction, thinks it’s actually canon that they missed, and puts it in their story. I’m guilty of that because the idea that Tycho Celchu was talking to his fiance when Alderaan was destroyed was a beautiful idea and I honestly thought it was canon. When I asked the writer, they also had thought it was canon then realized it wasn’t and unfortunately I was never able to trace back to the person with the original idea. But at least in Fan Fiction, it’s free and we can call enough other out on it without needing legal recourse. Now that we start making money off of the ideas? Oh boy…"
• The UK's Metro covered the bases with the pros and cons of fanfic as well as where best to publish it. "Tastes may be changing – Justin Bieber and The Hunger Games have made way for One Direction and Star Trek in the past year or so – but demand remains high – fanfic story uploads to the site [Wattpad] have increased by 60 per cent from 2012 to 2013, and this year is only five months old...The other issue is control –- [novelist Sheenagh] Pugh suspects that better writers will opt out to preserve theirs, particularly as Amazon would take ownership of their ideas. ‘I don’t think the best of fic will find its way on to Kindle Worlds,’ she said. ‘If the standard does prove to be low, that in itself will put off writers who care about their work, in the same way that they often won’t put their work on the FanFiction.net website because of its reputation for hosting acres of rubbish.’"
• The Daily Dot also took note of the varied volume of content among fandom sites. "However, there is also the possibility that Kindle Worlds is aimed at a new generation of fans—ones who are growing up with the assumption that it’s completely reasonable to want payment for your fanfic. While popular Tumblr-based fandoms range from crime shows to young adult novels, and participants range in in age from 12 to 60, many are simply unaware of the seething underbelly of Wattpad-style fanfiction. On Wattpad, a One Direction fic written by a middle-schooler can receive upwards of a million hits. The fiction on traditional sites like Archive of our Own may be more tightly written, but the most popular story there only boasts a measly 360,000 hits. The question is, will the mostly teenage Wattpad audience have enough interest to pay for fanfic when you can already read ten stories on your smartphone every day, for free?"
• At The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky uses comic fandom to suggest that there's little difference between official tie-in works and fanworks. He asks "In terms of creative process and in terms of audience, does it really matter all that much if you're writing about Kirk and Spock's new adventures for free or for profit?" Then he dismisses one obvious difference with "Admittedly there's not a whole lot of gay sex in super-hero comics... but that seems more like a genre distinction than an existential one." Instead he suggests "If "fan fic" was the name of a genre and a community, it can now be the name of a marketing campaign and a marketing demographic. You could even say that Amazon is turning the term "fan fiction" into fan fiction itself, lifting it from its original context and giving it a new purpose and a new narrative, related to the original but not beholden to it. Dreams come out of the corporation and go back to the corporation, fungibly circulating. Your brain is just another medium of exchange."

What other discussions have you seen about Kindle Worlds? Write about it in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. 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.

• Amazon's announcement earlier this month that it would be launching Kindle Worlds as a way to capitalize on fanfic writers didn't just get a lot of attention among fans and online discussion sites it also launched dozens of related articles ranging from tech publications, business publications, publishing sites, entertainment sites, journalism sites, fan-oriented media and mass-market media, in the U.S. and internationally, as well as individual responses by authors. We thought we'd take a look at some of the issues raised in this coverage and what the media was focusing on.
• One of Forbes' articles on the topic pointed out that the content restrictions imposed by Amazon's terms mean that the juggernaut hit that was Fifty Shades of Grey wouldn't have been able to be published through this program. Writers using this program won't be making that much either. "The revenue split is considerably less generous than authors who use their own characters enjoy, with Kindle Worlds writers keeping 35% of the net. That’s for works over 10,000 words; for shorter ones, the rate is an even lower 20%. Ordinarily, writers who self-publish e-books through Amazon keep 70% percent."
• Author John Scalzi also looked critically at Amazon's terms and what a bad deal it is for fanfic writers. "Essentially, this means that all the work in the Kindle Worlds arena is a work for hire that Alloy (and whomever else signs on) can mine with impunity. This is a very good deal for Alloy, et al — they’re getting story ideas! Free! — and less of a good deal for the actual writers themselves. I mean, the official media tie-in writers and script writers are doing work for hire, too, but they get advances and\or at least WGA minimum scale for their work."
• Scalzi's comments about how Amazon's move was more likely to replace writers of tie-in novels with cheap, unedited writers, tied into Forbes contributor Suw Charman-Anderson's comments about how Amazon's move was yet another example of a slow-moving and risk-averse traditional publishing industry. "How many more business opportunities are Amazon going to create from things that the publishing industry has ignored or rejected? Publishers cannot allow themselves to be pushed constantly onto their back foot by Amazon, they can’t let outdated attitudes towards copyright, licensing and creativity define their future. They need to do what Amazon does only too well: Find under-served communities and then give them the tools to write, to create and to make money from their work." Megan Carter at The Daily Beast also looks at the matter from a publishing perspective, saying "The interesting thing about the Kindle Single is that it isn't just changing how long people write, but how people write. The books can be written much faster--you say as much as you have to say, and then you stop. Then if they do well, they get turned into a hardcover, which can be revised and extended based on the commentary the ebook received. "
• Some, such as Matt Carter, are concerned about what this will do to professional writers. "The joy of fan-fiction for some has always been the pleasure of writing for the sake of writing, and then sharing among like-minded friends. The concern here is twofold in that the original author of, say, a “Vampire Diaries” script could feel slighted if a fan-fiction author suddenly pulls in more money than them, and that there will suddenly be authors who will actually take to writing fan-fiction rather than trying to create original worlds of their own, thus setting a limit on future creative projects."
• Carina Adly MacKenzie at Zap2It pointed out what Alloy is. "It should be noted that Alloy is a book packager, so the three available properties aren't the brainchild of specific authors, but of a sort of brain trust of creative types and marketing geniuses. Alloy has a team of people who sit down and come up with plot ideas that they believe will make profitable franchises, mostly directed at young women. Then, they hire an author to write their previously outlined stories. This means that Alloy retains the creative rights to the "world" in which the books are set, because Alloy came up with it, which makes something like Kindle World a lot easier. Whether this sort of system would work with content that emerged in a more traditional way -- from the mind of one writer or producer -- is yet to be seen."
• TechnoBuffalo raised a concern likely on many fans' minds -- what comes next. "One lingering question from this project, however, is if the studios that license the properties will continue to allow fans to publish their works for free around the Web. In theory not much should change, but there is now a financial stake in this sub-section of fandom where companies can earn money from the work of others, so there might be an incentive to drive people towards the pay version of fan fiction. We reached out to Warner Bros., the parent company of Alloy Entertainment, for comment on the matter, but had not received a reply by publication time."
• One concern about the Worlds program may not be as restrictive as people think. "Fan fiction has never been about money. Inhabiting a beloved world and bonding about it with other fans is what's kept people publishing thousands of words for free. Doing so for dollars but being limited by Amazon's terms (one of which is no pornography, of which a sizeable amount of fan fiction is comprised) may turn many off. However, when asked if Fifty Shades of Grey would violate the "no pornography" clause, an Amazon spokesperson said, "Fifty Shades of Grey involves consensual sex between adults and does not violate our content guidelines." So how Amazon defines pornography is definitely somewhere outside the "I know it when I see it" dictum."
• However, others are more concerned about what this development will mean for fanfiction communities, though the less they know about them, the more likely the think of Kindle Worlds as a great development. "Most fan fic authors would jump at the chance to legally write for their beloved franchise, but with a possibility of getting paid and perhaps even recognition from the creator? It's going to be an instant, phenomenal success." Others are less sanguine: "Fan fiction is a place of wing fic...and Mpreg...You can't package up a place like that and sell it. And telling and retelling stories, however we want to, is bigger even than a giant like Amazon. Fanfic existed before the internet and it will still be around when we live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. After all, it's created enough of them." And one commentator proposed the idea that Amazon spaces will become community forums for fanfic writers. "'I think it just builds the network effect, which is one of the cornerstones of Amazon’s competitive advantage,' said R.J. Hottovy, senior ecommerce analyst at Morningstar. 'The more people use (the platform) and discuss, the more powerful it is for people who sell things.'"
• Some outlets contacted the OTW for comment, such as Wired: "Indeed, given the limited licenses, draconian content guidelines, and dubious contracts, it’s hard to imagine fans abandoning open platforms for a far-from-guaranteed paycheck. While Kindle Worlds is sure to attract a fair number of fan writers excited at the prospect of working under official license and maybe even making a buck or two off their stories, for many, the most appealing route to publication will remain the one taken by Fifty Shades of Grey author E. L. James: just file off the serial numbers."
• At least one likely outcome to widespread media stories on fanfiction will be the continuing practice of spreading confusion about fanfiction terms and practices due to a lack of fact checking or research, including being able to accurately determine the number of Vampire Diaries stories at Fanfiction.net. But at least fanfiction readers can rest easy that fanfic's already been easily available for their Kindles since 2010.

What additional views on Kindle Worlds have you seen? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. 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.

• Posting on Mondaq, a legal, regulatory and financial commentary site, law firm Duane Morris offered advice to people about paying more attention to Terms of Service language at the sites where they post. "Smash Pictures produced a porn/adult movie entitled Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation. A predictable result was a lawsuit by Fifty Shades Limited and Universal City Studios, who own rights to the book franchise and movies respectively...the defendants raised an intriguing argument in Counterclaim, namely that the copyrights in the Fifty Shades of Grey books are invalid -- and free for everyone to use -- because 'as much as 89% of the content of the allegedly copyrighted materials grew out of a multi-part series of fan fiction called Masters of the Universe based on Stephanie Myer's Twilight novels'...So a distinctive point in the case was the role of the fan fiction site's user terms of service. Such contracts are a kind of Super-IP right in which the normal boundaries of copyright can be expanded and rights apportioned."
• OTW Legal Committee staffer Heidi Tandy said the following about the case: "The current Terms of Use at Fanfiction.net [www.fanfiction.net/tos/] does not state that any uploaded work loses its copyright, is placed in the public domain or is abandoned by the writer; accordingly, we do not believe that merely uploading a fic to FFN places it in the public domain, given that an author has to take specific steps when abandoning the copyright in a work."
• Legal staffer Rebecca Tushnet pointed to details from another case involving commercial but transformative use. "In one recent case, the plaintiff, Keeling, created a parody version of the film Point Break, [called] 'Point Break LIVE!' The parody stemmed from recreating the storyline of the original film — about an FBI agent who goes undercover to take down a group of surf-loving bank robbers — using amusingly unrealistic props and staging, and putting an unrehearsed audience member in the key role of the FBI agent...The lawsuit began when the defendants, after a dispute with [Keeling], started staging their own version of 'Point Break LIVE!' They obtained a license from the owners of the rights to Point Break, but none from Keeling, and argued that she had no valid copyright because her version was an unauthorized infringing work. The court, and a subsequent jury, found that she had established that her version was fair use. Therefore it had its own independent copyright, which the defendants infringed."
• Creativity Tech posted Fan Fiction and the Limits of Copyright and referred fans to the OTW. "If you’re confused, rest assured that you’re not the only one. The rules related to fan fiction and 'fair use' are not hard and fast. They’re fluid and uncertain. As I said before, they’re also determined on a case by case basis. If you’re a fan writer, just be careful about how and where you distribute your work. You might also be interested in consulting the Organization for Transformative Works. The organization offers information and resources."

If you've got your own cases of fair use and parody works to share, write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. 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.

• Although there's been a lot of talk recently regarding fanfic authors going pro, there's been less focus on fan video makers. Tessa Stuart wrote in L.A. Weekly about Machinima's overreaching contracts with fan producers on YouTube. "Over the last two years, YouTube has quietly transformed from the province of amateurs to an increasingly cutthroat ecosystem where everyone — stars, networks, advertisers — is competing for views, viewers and view time." As a result "Internet and intellectual-property lawyers say that a rash of public disputes between networks and their talent suggests a serious problem in the emerging industry." The article talks about the origins of the machinima community and how the practice was co-opted by for-profit entities. One of the latest is a new organization called Union for Gamers. "Everyone in Union for Gamers, Duncan says, would be entitled to the same CPM, which would be raised every year. Gamers no longer would be forced into restrictive contracts — union members would have the right to leave whenever they saw fit. He promises 'resources to help people create better videos,' adding, 'and we'll do the labor, the administration and ad-serving side, allowing them to monetize their content.'"
• An AP article on Nerdist described the site as "the purest expression of fanboy-ism" following "a kind of manifesto...of an 'artful nerd' — one whose fandom isn't merely critical and passive, but is passionately proactive." The analogy to a growing empire seems apt, "As Hardwick says, there's something of 'a land grab with nerd culture right now'" and they are following it with podcasts, a YouTube channel, book, talk show, etc. "Nerds can be out about the stuff that they love without as much as the stigma against it as when I was growing up," says Hardwick. "I just want people to feel OK about what they love. Unless that thing is murder and you're a Murder Nerd."
• Writing for New Republic, Marc Tracy talks about the effect of gambling on sports fandom. "I am a football obsessive. I’m also something of a purist. Not counting fantasy football and March Madness pools, I had made maybe four sports bets in my life until last month, when I decided to bet throughout the NFL playoffs. I wanted to see if, as I’d long believed, betting distorts one’s appreciation of the game; if the psychic benefits outweighed the costs, literal or otherwise; and if I could balance one type of entertainment (elite competition) with another (risking money)." He found "Nothing is as bewitching as money. When it’s at risk, your mind can think of nothing else...There was great football being played, and here I was thinking about money—not even money that I had risked, but rather money that I had not risked." His conclusion? "Our pastimes, whatever they may be, should be sacrosanct. They are part of why we go to work, save money, and take time for ourselves."

What commercialization of fandom stories do you have to tell? Write about it in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. 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.