• The Age reported on a lawsuit involving the founders of The Writers Coffee Shop. "The lawsuit asks the court to recognise that TWCS is an ongoing partnership and, as a partner, Pedroza is entitled to 25 per cent of the profits. Pedroza and Beebe are seeking...'to trap funds not yet paid by Random House'" as a result of their rights purchase for Fifty Shades of Grey. The plaintiffs claim that Amanda "Hayward, 'fraudulently' restructured TWCS under the guise of tax minimisation, without the knowledge of the partners, so payments from the Random House deal, signed in March 2012, flowed exclusively to herself."
• A post at Screen Invasion suggested that companies using Amazon's Kindle Worlds were setting a precedent for the “potential market” factor of fair use. However, it is the pornier side of fanfiction that is likely to be unaffected. "TV’s GG can show a blush-worthy encounter between Chuck and Blair in his limo’s spacious backseat...but Kindle Worlds can reject a GG fanfic that describes a similar tryst based on the author’s word-choice. Ergo, sites featuring only blue fan-fiction do not impact the same market(s) as their un-obscene peers." This argument tracks to the case involving The Wind Done Gone, since part of that legal argument was that there was no lost revenue because Margaret Mitchell's estate would never have licensed such a work.
• Evergreen State College's student newspaper posted an open letter from faculty about threats to academic freedom involving a parody theater piece about Disney content. "On Monday of week eight, without consulting the faculty sponsors, Dean Reece issued a written request to fundamentally alter the script, with indication that the college would prevent the students from using campus facilities to perform the script as written." The letter cited the fair use aspects of the work and their belief that a fear of legal action was behind the effort to alter the performance.
• TIME looked at aspects of One Direction fanfiction following a high-profile fanfic book deal. "Jamison also notes that the idea of making money from fanfiction — something long seen as dubious among fans, even as recently as 50 Shades of Grey — doesn’t seem to be so strange to younger and newer fanfic writers...After all, it’s much less legally thorny to file off those serial numbers when the inspiration is reality: changing the names of a boy band doesn’t risk overstepping the fair use of someone else’s creation. And besides, it’s a time-honored tradition. As Jamison says: 'Every fiction author bases their characters on real people.'”

What fandom-related legal issues have you heard about? Create some entries for them on 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 Fannews post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• At Antenna, Myles McNutt argued for the need to focus on male fandom. "Blue Mountain State has connected with young audiences outside of the metrics and discourses most easily visible and counted within the television industry." By this, McNutt means that "the vast majority of the Kickstarter contributors—over 3,200 as of April 16th—are male. This matches the series’ demographic appeals...but diverges from how we typically imagine fan engagement...we rarely consider those audiences as the type of fans who would go so far as to pay to see a series resurrected. That kind of organized fandom has more commonly been associated with women, as part of a broader feminization of fan culture—over half of the Veronica Mars kickstarter backers were women, for instance, despite the fact that Kickstarter’s membership is predominantly male."
• While the advantages of gender-balanced fandoms are obvious to some marketers, researcher CarrieLynn D. Reinhard discusses fractured fandoms. "This project explores the tensions in the fan discourse surrounding the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic movie Equestria Girls. Producer Hasbro operates an official Facebook page for My Little Pony that was used to market the movie. With each post, fans’ comments demonstrate the tensions within the fandom and to this film. These tensions demonstrate the range of subsets of the fandom due to its cross-gendered and cross-generational nature. The discourse and resulting fractured fandom highlights the issue of 'appropriateness' in reception of children’s programming."
• Megan Farnel wrote about gendered disputes in Sherlock fandom. "[I]t’s not like the argument that Moffat is more than a tad sexist is a new one, or anything, but I find the form it takes here particularly compelling. Does he truly think he’s fooling anyone by saying that an episode involving a scene that so clearly mocks slash-fiction writers, calling them 'out of their mind' and arguing they are not 'serious' enough, comes to us from the ACD canon?" Instead "I think a lot of it comes down to labour and gender. This move on Moffat’s part at once allows him to use the canon of the show to respond to the fans he deems not ‘serious’ enough, while also deeming their engagements with the show as any meaningful form of labour worth forming a dialogue with."
• Of course, sometimes gendered friction can be quite local when, as Toronto Life published, discovering your spouse's explicit fanfiction. "What to do depends largely on where you found it. If the pages were tucked away in a drawer, buy her some sexy lingerie, then rise to the occasion, but don’t mention your discovery. If she left the story open on the kitchen table, take it as an invitation to discuss her rather specific sexual pinings. Be open, accepting and prepared to spice things up in the bedroom (or bathroom or kitchen)."

What examples of gendered fandom friction have you seen? Write about it on 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.

• On March 1, Three Patch Podcast released an episode with Development & Membership Chair, Kristen Murphy, as a guest. They discussed the formation of the OTW and the AO3's million fanwork milestone. Asked about the AO3's popularity she replied, "I think there are a lot of different factors that have helped it become popular. One is that a lot of people just like the features of the Archive, which is awesome! I think another factor is the way fandom has spread out to new platforms, some of which are not very conducive to posting fanworks. Like, if you mostly interact with other fans through Twitter, but you’re a fic writer, you’re going to need someplace other than Twitter to post your fic. There’s something really cool about the fact that fans are spread out in all these different places — Twitter and Tumblr and journals and forums — but there’s this place in the middle where so many of us come together to share our work." (No transcript available).
• The OTW wasn't the only one celebrating a big milestone in February as Japan's online art community Pixiv passed 10,000,000 registered users. Crunchyroll reported on their celebration activities and listed the top tagged fandoms on the site.
• RocketNews24 looked at how artists were responding to the gold medal won by figure skater Hanyū. "[F]ans are having fun making their own Photoshop creations including “Hyōjō no Prince-sama”(Prince-sama on Ice)."
• The music group Emblem got some attention for promoting a fan's story about them on their Wattpad account which Just Jared dubbed 'official fan fiction.' "The guys – Wesley and Keaton Stromberg, and Drew Chadwick – each have their own stories written about them and will be updating it every week!"
• As Vintage Books was announcing that Fifty Shades had passed the 100 million sales mark, Wired asked if a new publishing model was at hand when it comes to fanfic. "For decades, it was understood that fanzines and amateur press associations were where writers—particularly in genre fiction and comics—got their chops...It’s easy to argue 50 Shades of Grey is an outlier, that its success isn’t indicative of a larger trend. However, since its publication in 2011, the lines between literary and fan publishing have continued to blur."

What fandom milestones have you seen? Write about them on 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.

• Even while fanfic writer Bianca Bernardino is seeing her work turned into film, another author is turning to fanfic of her own work. As L.J. Smith explained last year, "[E]ven though I have written the entire series, I don’t own anything about The Vampire Diaries. And from now on, the books will be written by an anonymous ghostwriter, just as Stefan’s Diaries are. It will say 'Created by L. J. Smith' on the cover, but I am not allowed even to change a word in the ghostwriter’s book." Instead, Smith has released the first of a series through Amazon's Kindle Worlds.
• J.K. Rowling's changing views on relationships in Harry Potter led to articles across the Internet, from The Washington Post to The Wire recording fan reaction. But blogger Lucy Softich reminded readers that "it doesn't change anything." "It was also really interesting when she told us Dumbledore was gay, but it didn’t really affect the story. It didn’t add subtext that wasn’t already there, or validate any arguments. Authors decide how to write their books, yes, but once they’re published, they can’t change anything...Fanfiction, on the other hand, can do anything. It can take the smallest interaction between characters, and turn it into a shipping war. It can take the merest hints, and create new and unexpected plot-twists. It can highlight things everyone else overlooked. And unlike books, its not permanent."
• While more people trying out fanfiction are pleasantly surprised by the experience, Emma Cueto at Bustle suggests that the real problem is that too many people don't understand what it is. "Look at the book (and movie) The Hours, which was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Isn’t it just meta-fanfic where the book that inspired the fan fiction is also part of the story?...It just happens to be very well done and rooted in a literary great, so no one bothered to notice. Then there are shows like Once Upon a Time that put a new spin on fairy tales, or Sleepy Hollow and Dracula that grew out of classic novels...Don’t tell me that isn’t just fan fiction with a budget."
• Kendra Mack at Open Source focused on the importance of participation in fanwork communities. "But female fans have long participated in (and led) fan communities before this RW shift, remixing and making new meanings from fictional texts. Henry Jenkins has written about the influence of television fan fiction writers in the 1980s, many of whom were women...This practice of fan refocalization continues today with shows like Adventure Time, a (personal favorite) cartoon with two male character leads that has many fans creating derivative fiction and art focused on the secondary female characters. The show also received positive fan reaction and high ratings after airing an episode in which the gender of all the characters are reversed, not to mention a slew of fan art and fiction involving the gender-swapped heroines."

What fanwork transitions do you think should be remembered? 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.