• Buzzfeed looked at the umbrella of Disney fandom at its company fancon. "D23 serves as a giant hype machine for the company’s upcoming productions and consumer products, a big shopping center for the stuff they already have out, and a central meeting spot for fans and fan-vendors from around the world. It has two main constituencies: the hardcore Disney fans — D23 is also the name of the company’s official fan club, with 23 signifying the year Walt Disney moved to Hollywood and founded the studio — and members of the press who brave the traffic to Anaheim to write about the the studio’s movie presentations. The event is like Comic-Con, but with fewer snarky fanboys and more family-centric fare."
• A post at the Vancouver Sun looks at the evolution of gaming cons. "Over time there has been a definitive split between the two types of conventions, with consumer based ones feeding more into the actual fandom of games. PAX itself is built on the shoulders of this fandom, sponsored and created by Penny Arcade, an online comic that has long dealt with video game and various other nerd and geek culture. While most developers will hardly ever achieve a sort of fame (or notoriety) similar to film or television stars, these conventions give the public, and players a chance to directly interact with those who on the average day are hard to reach. Feedback from these conventions, where betas and alphas of games are available to play, not only help build hype and anticipation for upcoming games, but also allows the developers to gather much needed and necessary feedback from those who will eventually be buying their product."
• Meanwhile Tumblr plays host to a virtual book club that is part user reaction and part viral marketing. “I still think it can be tricky to create the feel of a book club with people in different time zones who never get to meet. I’m humbly suggesting that Tumblr might be the best way to do it. You can use text as short or longform as you want, art, gifs, videos, songs; you can include hundreds or thousands of contributors without getting confusing; and you can create original posts or share interesting things you find elsewhere on the Web.”
• These commercial efforts stand in contrast to a recent post on NextGov about an unexpected encounter with fandom, and its relevance to other social activists. "One key insight, though, came from...panelist Lauren Bird of the Harry Potter Alliance...[about]...how super-fandom can go hand in hand with intense criticism...Bird begins her defense acknowledging it may seem silly to protest labor practices in the chocolate industry by focusing on an entertainment company rather than, say, Nestle or Hershey’s. But it makes sense for the HPA...partly because a shift by Warner Brothers could put pressure on larger players in the chocolate industry." Reporter Joseph Marcks concluded "The idea that [a government] agency’s greatest fans could also be among its biggest online gadflies is rare in government. It’s tough to blame agencies for this. Many of them face so much online vitriol it’s tough to sift out any constructive criticism. But agencies are also sometimes so cynical about their own capacity for popularity that they might not recognize a fan movement even if it existed."

What merging of corporate interests and fan gatherings 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.

• Microsoft has been in the news for its copyright decisions in the past few months. Shogun Gamer had a discussion about Microsoft's retraction of a DRM decision that would have limited game buyers' rights to share games and would have required people to be connected online daily, which also restricted who could use the content. Perhaps the earlier controversy informed their second decision to open up the X-box to development. "[T]he company is doing away with its unpopular publishing restrictions, opening the door for independent developers to create and release their own games on Xbox One without enlisting the aid of a publishing partner. That essentially turns every Xbox One owner -- from well known developers to your average Joe -- into a potential Xbox One game maker."
• At PBS' Mediashift, Patricia Aufderheide discussed the case of a music copyright incident and its troubling outcome. "Baio warns fellow remixers everywhere that “fair use will not save you,” and “nothing you have ever made is fair use.” Whoa. Neither of these statements is true. Fair use is riding high in the courts. The fair uses of "Jersey Boys," who used clips from "The Ed Sullivan Show," were forcefully vindicated just a few weeks ago, and the litigious rightsholders were ordered to pay the defendants’ costs and fees. Georgia State University successfully defended a copyright lawsuit brought by greedy publishers, and got a court order for the publishers to pay over $3 million in attorneys’ fees and costs."
• It's easy, however, to find cases of companies taking questionable actions, such as the movie subtitle fansite undertexter.se being raided by the police. The site contained user-submitted translations of movie dialog. "The copyright industry in Sweden has previously asserted threateningly that the dialog of a movie would be covered by the copyright monopoly, and that any fan translation – even for free – would be a violation of that monopoly." However, a similar case took place in Poland where "the charges were dropped and the expert opinion was that translating from hearing and sharing for free is not infringing the copyright monopoly. This is relevant as any EU court sets precedent all over the EU."

What legal and technology stories have you seen that impact fan activities? 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.

• Australia's Business Review Weekly put a local angle on Amazon's expanding properties for Kindle Worlds. "The e-book market has enormous growth potential but it is also fraught with pitfalls. Australia’s biggest book retail chain Dymocks tried its hand at e-book publishing but struggled to get the business model right and closed its D Publishing venture in March this year after 15 months. However, it is not just about size; one of the big stories in the e-book world is Australian-based Writers Coffee Shop, a small e-book fiction publisher that shot to fame with the success of erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey."
• Canada's The Province Book blog posted about Kindle Worlds as well with a different sort of "local" angle. "Amazon has made a fortune off of KDP, and it is well aware that many indie writers either got their start writing fan fiction or continue to write fan fiction even as their writing careers take off. Bestselling author Naomi Novik, for instance, whose Temeraire series has been optioned for film by Peter Jackson, is a supporter of fan fiction...The Organization for Transformative Works, a 'nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms,' has a pretty good roundup of responses to this latest move by Amazon. While some fans certainly celebrate the announcement, others have concerns about what Amazon may want in terms of intellectual property — are they going to make films out of the fan fiction others publish?"
• Digital Book Wire claimed Kindle Worlds Has First Imitator: Outlier Digital From Twilight Producers. "The problem with the recently released Kindle Worlds’ platform, is it traps writers within the confines of Amazon’s as yet unestablished fan-fiction community instead of the extensive network already at their fingertips,” said Mark Morgan, one of the company partners, in the statement. “Their idea is close, but it actually prevents fan-fiction writers from posting their stories anywhere else, halting their existing fan-base outreach on other free portal options. It’s like saying they can write whatever they want as long as they do it for Amazon."
• Gamma Squad talked about the Jim Henson Company's pitch to fanfic writers to write a prequel story to The Dark Crystal. "To be fair, this is a bit more of a deal than Amazon’s attempt to get the next Fifty Shades of Grey for dirt; the winner, if there is one, will receive $10,000 as part of their contract. Of course, one doesn’t see the word 'advance' anywhere in the official rules, so you might be forking over your writing ability for little more than a pat on the head, but at least they don’t put 'valuable exposure' as a prize." Of course, given how media outlets are now ready to slap a fanfiction label on anything, the spotlight moment seems more and more likely.

What fanfic marketing promotions have you come across? 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.

• The experience of BioWare and EA, developer and publisher of multiplayer online role-playing game Star Wars: The Old Republic suggests that addressing problems of representation should probably not be done after the fact. While many were happy to hear the company would be introducing same-sex romance options to the game, the announcement received both the usual homophobic backlash as well as disappointment from same-sex romance supporters of how slowly and how poorly the gamers were accommodated. "These characters will only be available via Rise of the Hutt Cartel, an expansion pack to be released in Spring 2012 [sic], meaning that players will have to pay to be gay in the game. SGR will also only be limited to Makeb, a planet that has been dubbed as a "gay ghetto" by multiple media outlets."
• The Daily Dot also wrote about two fans' live-action remake of Toy Story and included Pixar employee tweets stating "Remember when being a big fan of a movie only meant you could quote all the dialogue?"
• Deirdre Macken of The Australian would likely prefer those fans of old. Lamenting "the extinction of literature's audience", she wrote "Instead of readers, a writer today will have fans who pay homage to the author by plagiarising their style in fan fiction. Instead of readers, a writer will have followers, for whom a retweet is as good as a read, user reviews (especially if mum knows her way around Amazon), festival audiences, theatre audiences and even corporate audiences, but few solitary sessions with a reader. The writer is downloaded into the library of good intentions but never read." She also later adds "LOL, imagine linking SMS to literature" apparently unaware that writers have indeed published novels through tweets and texts since at least 2007.
• Macken doesn't seem to be the only one failing to keep up with cultural developments. Scott Sterling at Digital Trends thinks much the same of the TBS show King of the Nerds. "We all knew someone like the contestants described above, but somewhere along the line, we became them. Comic-book movies dominate theaters and fan-fic tops best-seller lists. Coding is widely practiced. Almost every person uses a computer on a daily basis, and half of us carry one in our pocket. The fact that mainstream culture has adopted nerds and their activities as their own is no revelation. The point is not that nerds are cool, as any commentary of The Big Bang Theory seems to end with, but rather that King of the Nerds makes it painfully obvious that we’re all nerds, at least in the traditional sense of the word that anyone of a certain generation grew up with."

What fandom changes have you seen during your time in it? Write about your experiences 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.