OTW Board Chair Naomi Novik was interviewed by Annalee Newitz for io9 at ComicCon: in the featured video, Naomi explains why fanfic is important (and why fans should use the Archive of Our Own!): Naomi Novik says fanfic is part of literary history - and reveals what's next for Temeraire.

Edited to add:: Transcript in comments, courtesy of Tree.

Here's a roundup of stories that might be of interest to fans: news, blog posts, book reviews, lectures, and even video art!

First up, here's a group of stories for vidders, about the direction YouTube is taking.

* In the New York Times, we have, At YouTube, Adolescence Begins at 5, an article about YouTube's 5 year anniversary. Unfortunately, in this article "growing up" seems to mean "selling out", or at the very least, making YouTube a lot more like television and less like a home for user-generated content. "Once known primarily for skateboard-riding cats, dancing geeks and a variety of cute-baby high jinks, YouTube now features a smorgasbord of more professional video that is drawing ever larger and more engaged audiences."

* Similarly, this article--YouTube's Top 100 By Type--defines YouTube's success by how many of its videos are professional and/or have ads on them, and also by the decline of user-generated content like vids. "Overall, YouTube is doing fairly well: although only 41.93% of the most popular videos have ads, that number is growing by 0.83% per month and both unofficial TV/movie clips and user-generated content are down." (emphasis mine)

Next up, a couple of links that talk about the development of tools for what some people are calling "affirmative" fandom (which is creator-centered; vs. "transformational" fandom, which is community and fanworks-oriented):

* The NYT did an article about Cambio, a new website/web video portal that bills itself as "your destination for original shows, specials and short videos featuring your favorite actors, musicians and athletes." It is also being billed as "a 'safe environment' [for artists and celebrities] to talk to fans"; what it purports to offer is direct access to artists and special content for fans. (The Jonas Brothers are partners in this enterprise and will be using Cambio to do direct outreach and marketing to their fans.)

* Similarly, publisher Richard Nash, gave a talk on what he thinks the future of publishing will look like--and it looks a lot like parts of fandom. For example, Nash himself is starting a publishing business/social network called Cursor, which is described as as "a social approach to publishing that focuses on the establishment of powerful, self-reinforcing online membership communities made up of professional authors, reader members, and emerging writers."

Other links include:

* On BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow cited a LiveJournal post by bookshop in Pulitzer-winning fanfic: a non-exhaustive list, which sparked some intense debates as to the definition of fanfic.

* The EFF's Fred von Lohmann reviews Adrian Johns' new book Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Quote: "Opposing the 'intellectual property defense industry' is not the same thing as opposing 'intellectual property.; Rather, it is about insisting on values like civil liberties, privacy, and autonomy, and not allowing antipiracy enforcement to trample them."

* Lastly, we have a different kind of transformative work than those that we normally talk about here. In Transformation through YouTube, video artist Patrick Liddell uploads a video to YouTube, rips it, uploads it and rips it, until the sounds and image degrades. From his description: "An homage to the great Alvin Lucier, this piece explores the 'photocopy effect', where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying."

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about you can submit it in three easy ways: comment on the most recent Link Roundup on LJ, IJ or DW, tag a link with "for:otw_news" on Delicious 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 recent articles that might be of interest to fans.

* Academia as a Commons: David Bollier's speech at Amherst talks about the ways in which academia should be a model for intellectual and creative sharing. Instead, he lists the ways in which "a series of court cases have also reduced the scope of fair use rights", preventing scholars from quoting letters, printing images, citing song lyrics, copying coursepacks, etc. Bollier argues that students are being taught only about copyright infringments and not about fair use, which is to say "their lawful ability to copy and share information under certain circumstances." Many of the battles that fans are facing to preserve their values--collaboration, community, noncommerciality--are also being fought in academia.

* Copyright @300 was a conference held at UC Berkeley School of Law to explore "the past and future of copyright law." Much of the conference is now online in the form of .mp3s or .pdf summaries of arguments. Fans who are interested in the ways in which copyright may be evolving may want to listen in.

* Rodo, one of our German translators, reports on how the large, multifannish German archive fanfiktion.de/ was sent cease and desist letters by a group of opticians arguing trademark infringment. At issue is the fanon term "Lichtbändiger" (aka Lightbender) in Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic; fans created the term to parallel canon's Airbanders, Waterbenders, Firebenders and Earthbenders. But it turns out Lichtbändiger is also the brand name of certain eyeglasses. After consulting a laywer, the archive owners decided to remove the "offending" stories. While we understand their decision (in that they probably don't have the means to argue the point), we have to ask: is there really any potential for confusion there? Should companies be able to own words regardless of context?

* A group of European digital rights organizations, libraries, consumers' rights groups, and ISPs have released Copyright for Creativity – A Declaration for Europe, an appeal to the European Commission, the European Parliament, and Member States, to adopt sane copyright practices that will encourage innovation, education, accessibility, creativity, and participation.

[no-glossary]Merriam-Webster's online dictionary recently released its new additions for 2009 (you can see them here), and for those of us who work on OTW's academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, one new term stands out: fan fiction. You could hear our whoops of joy across town. Language geek that I am, I immediately tweeted and e-mailed all my friends in a frenzy of happiness. Not only had MW finally added the term to their lexicon, thereby acknowledging its importance to popular culture, but the styling I preferred was confirmed!

It's taken awhile (the term has been around since 1944, MW informs us), but at long last, fan fiction has been defined by an authoritative source—and for those employed in the U.S. publishing industry, it is the authoritative source; no other dictionary will do. MW defines the term as "stories involving popular fictional characters that are written by fans and often posted on the Internet." The entry concludes with the note that it is "called also fan fic," which is intriguing because this term is also styled as two words, although it does not have its own entry.

When I wrote the first style sheet for TWC, I struggled with the styling of this common term. I really, really agonized about it. Ought it be fan fiction or fanfiction, the latter a styling that certainly got plenty of usage? In the end, I styled fan fiction as two words, precisely because it was not in MW. (If a potentially compound word is not in the dictionary, then it is styled as two words rather than solid.) I saw the term as two words in print but as one word on the Internet—but online, it seemed to always end up referring specifically to fanfiction.net rather than just being a generic version of the term.

In addition to fan fiction, TWC (against OTW's house style, you may have noticed) styles most fan words as two words rather than one: fan art, fan artwork, fan vid, fan film. Mostly this is a result of the two-words rule, as none of these other potentially compound words is in the dictionary. But mostly TWC decided to treat fan terms as two words because fan is not a prefix. Turning the two words into one elides the active work of the fan by making the entire word about the artwork: it's fan fiction, a piece of fiction actively created by a fan. Styling fan fiction as two words foregrounds the active process of creation and keeps us—writers, artists, vidders, fans—in the linguistic picture.[/no-glossary]