• A thesis written about the AO3's tagging system "attempts to begin exploring the question of what kind of environment the site's particular blend of open social tagging and some behind-the-scenes vocabulary control, plus hierarchical linking, creates for the users who search through it for fiction." The study, conducted in 2012, had a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods and the survey was completed by 116 people. "The current online information glut calls for some sort of subject labeling to facilitate efficiency in searching, but the volume of information is well beyond a size that could ever be dealt with by information professionals. “Social tagging” is an approach to this problem that lets non-professionals attempt to organize online information via tagging, for their own and one another's use. But social tagging is a new and rapidly evolving field, and so no consensus has yet been reached on its overall usefulness, or on what best practices might be."
• Two rather different stories about fan video game makers were in the news recently. TechDirt summed things up in its post title: "Makers Of Firefly 'Fan-game' Abuse DMCA To Try To Silence Critic". "While I think that these kinds of games should be allowed...it appears that DarkCryo -- a company that is really skirting a pretty fine line concerning copyright -- decided to abuse the DMCA and file a takedown notice on [a critic's] posting of a DarkCryo logo image."
• The other story was a little more typical, discussing how "Hasbro halts production of unauthorized "My Little Pony" video game". "This isn't the first time Hasbro has issued successful takedown notices for clearly illegal uses of its product, or even the first time it's taken down an MLP-inspired game. Previous instances where Hasbro has stepped in include the illegal download website Ponyarchive and the popular, though short-lived,multiplayer game MLP Online. Hasbro also took down the abridged series Friendship is Witchcraft, which should have been protected under under the Fair Use copyright clause afforded to transformative works within the U.S. However, issues of copyright and trademark are separate concerns with separate legal justifications. While Hasbro has so far been tolerant of copyright-protected fanwork such as fanart and fanfiction, it seems to have a rigid policy forbidding reuse of its official images and trademarks."
• Some authors decided to challenge the claims of long dead creators' estates and, as the New York Times pointed out, highlighted a schism in the Sherlock Holmes fandom. "The suit, which stems from the estate’s efforts to collect a licensing fee for a planned collection of new Holmes-related stories by Sara Paretsky, Michael Connelly and other contemporary writers, makes a seemingly simple argument. Of the 60 Conan Doyle stories and novels...only the 10 stories first published in the United States after 1923 remain under copyright. Therefore, the suit asserts, many fees paid to the estate for the use of the character have been unnecessary. But it’s also shaping up to be something of what one blogger called 'a Sherlockian Civil War.'" The battle was laid out as being between the old guard (and, until recently, male only) Baker Street Irregulars versus the Baker Street Babes, "a group of young female Sherlockians who host a regular podcast."

What legal and technology fan stories do you have an interest in? Add them to 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.

• While blogger Maryann Johanson at Flick Philosopher asks about the relevance of using the term 'fanboy' as female fandom keeps getting more and more visible, over at The Learned Fangirl, Vivian Obarski and Keidra Chaney ask what can be done about fandom misogyny, and a Tumblr account for female academics tired of mansplaining quickly led to a spinoff dedicated to female sports fans tired of the same thing.
• Yet even as female fans hope to get some support from content creators, whether by bringing more women to the professional table or simply wielding the banhammer for a good cause, media reports continue to emphasize gender stereotypes as if to explain the presence of women in what they always considered to be male events. A recent piece on Wizard World in Austin, Texas took care to separate fanboys and fangirls into different camps. "A fangirl can sometimes fanboy — get into the statistics, the completionism, the minutiae of continuity, while fanboys sometimes get their fan-girl on: obsessing about family dynamics in character development and wax poetic about the emotional and psychological implications of any and every plot development — but the discussions overheard from a fanboy booth versus a fangirl booth were pretty easy to tell apart."
• By comparison, people who attend those events have long noticed their diversity. In an interview with former Doctor Who actor, Peter Davison, he noted “I’ve always loved the fandom...You do seem to be an extraordinarily tolerant bunch of people, and I mean this in the nicest way, because it’s every kind of facet of the human condition that you see at every kind of convention.”
• Meanwhile, other recent articles have instead focused on the importance of creativity and inspiration in fandom, whether at a convention or just in everyday life. "Fandom can just as often produce a creative response, or provide life-directing inspiration. Think about the first Puerto-Rican astronaut, who was originally inspired by her love of Star Trek...UCLA historian Eugen Weber relates an amusing anecdote about a 19th century French labor leader who was asked whether he was more inspired by Karl Marx or Georges Sorel, to which the labor leader replied, “Lord no, I don’t read this sort of chap — I read Alexandre Dumas, I read The Three Musketeers!” In short, being a “fan” means nothing more than that one has heroes."

Have you attended fan cons? Do you have opinions about the terms fanboys and fangirls? Why not discuss 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.

• Fan films tend to be a particularly difficult and time consuming type of fanwork given their collaborative nature, whether they are animated or live action. At least for some gamers though, the best sort of fanwork is that which creates new games, though having projects shut down after so much time and effort are always a concern. Perhaps this was why the site EuroGamer had to clarify an earlier story that suggested Microsoft was barring fanworks from utilizing Halo content. "The majority of everything the community makes currently is fine, as long as they are not basically running a big Halo-based business or using Halo as if the IP was its own property. That isn't a change to our policy, simply a clarification and update of the dry legal language, and as we've mentioned, even that 'new' language was actually updated months ago. We don't have squads of lawyers waiting in the wings to go after folks making machinima, or showing off their skills in Halo."
• Discussions such as these, which focus on content owner permission, tend to crop up with other fanworks as well, such as this take on a brand designer's house sigils for Game of Thrones. "Crescenzi's finished product, which comprises some 42 crests on a poster, is undeniably beautiful. However, he is selling them as prints, which somewhat alters the project from being a labor of love to a vehicle for profit. That makes us very curious to see GoT author Martin's take on them, as he is famously prickly about fan fiction, particularly where it concerns profit."
• Yet fans, too, can be concerned about focusing on creators, even when discussing other fanworks, such as this one on podfic vs. written fanfiction. As one fan quoted by the Daily Dot stated "'I wonder how the fic author feels about the fact that the podfic is apparently oh so special and famous (with the fic itself being apparently unimportant compared to the reader's performance)'.” Meanwhile, "Fans of podfic, feeling battered by arguments likening them to unoriginal plagiarists and bad cover artists, rallied with a podfic appreciation meme, where appreciative readers and other podficcers could praise podficcers in comments. "
• Another often unappreciated fan creation, albeit usually outside of fandom, is slash. At least one site though, After Elton, decided that it should be celebrated. "We were blown away by the internet explosion that was the Ultimate Slash Madness Tourney, and it occurred to us that a regular weekly column on the subject of slash might be a great fit for AfterElton. The name for such a column was easy: The Shipping News. The only catch was who to write it?...Even after reluctantly eliminating a dozen impressive submissions, we we're [sic] still left with five great people we wanted to work with. The happy solution we came up with was a weekly column penned by a rotating roster of slash experts." And the appreciation wasn't only by the AE site. As one of their contributors noted in the inaugural column, "Can we just take a moment to appreciate how many celebrities pimped their show's fave pairings in the AfterElton Ultimate Slash Madness Tourney? In addition to Misha Collins, Colton Haynes and the rest, we had John Barrowman and David Hewlett urging their fanbases to vote. Gone are the days when fans were on one side of canon and creators, producers, and actors were on the other."
• At least one fanwork that definitely got a place of honor recently was the AO3, which has had its kudos icon memorialized on a user's skin. Consider us chuffed!

If you're a slash lover, a fan film maker, a gamer, or have your own OTW-related tattoos, why not put together an entry 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.

• A U.S. state senate candidate who is a gamer has had her hobby used against her. "In an unusual press release issued Thursday, the Maine GOP attacked Lachowicz for a “bizarre double life” in which she’s a devotee of the hugely popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft. In the game, she’s “Santiaga,” an "orc assassination rogue" with green skin, fangs, a Mohawk and pointy ears." However "Lachowicz has a master’s degree in social work and runs the school-based programs for a statewide mental health center. She’s the former Democratic Party chairwoman for her town and has served as vice chairwoman of the county" party." But the opposition party thinks that it's what she does in her time off that matters. "Maine GOP party spokesman David Sorenson said. 'Certainly the fact that she spends so much time on a video game says something about her work ethic and, again, her immaturity.'"
• In nearby Connecticut a library has banned furries, but at least some of them think the library had its reasons. "'I can certainly see how [library officials] might be leery of allowing anyone in a costume to simply walk in and run about,' says Samuel Conway, head of Anthrocon, the biggest furry convention organization in the country. It's the potential attraction of children to folks dressed up like fuzzy Disney animal creatures that has librarians worried." Instead, another furry suggests that "any fursuiter who wants to appear at a library should probably meet library officials in advance, provide identification and ask for permission."
• TheForce.Net wrote about a Miami TV station which covered a Star Wars con by focusing on the "Celebration VI photo gallery [and] proceeded to insult and demean the Star Wars fan community through the use of mean spirited captions that seemed to step over the line into full-blown cyber-bullying." The community refused to allow it, insisting through numerous challenges that the station both take down its feature and apologize to the individuals targeted. "Local10 eventually removed the post but also started removing social networking posts by Star Wars fans (especially on Facebook) that brought light to their ill-thought-out photo gallery. Then there was a sarcastic Local10 Facebook apology that just fueled the fire some more." Eventually, however, the fans prevailed. As the apology post noted their action got an international response -- "They lit up our phones, filled our Facebook page and inboxes."
• Meanwhile The Total Fangirl podcast puts a spotlight on raising geek kids. "Your kids might be into less mainstream things because you're a geeky parent or because they happened to gravitate toward fantasy or science fiction all on their own. Either way, it can leave them feeling like no one 'gets them.'" The podcast discusses challenges, and how parents can help their kids feel like they're not weird and find a place where they belong. (No transcript available)

If you have things to say about cyberbullying, discrimination against fans, or multigenerational fandom families, why not check out 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.