• 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 a lot of fans are aware that older fiction is often part of the public domain, many might assume the same to be true about speech by deceased celebrities and historical figures. But as a Freakonomics podcast discussed, a century old speech might still be restricted. "What I assumed was that as we’ve all written quoting throughout our writing career you abstract a certain amount of words, and you don’t necessarily quote an entire book, but you can quote selected passages" under fair use. "Well there is no fair use law in the United Kingdom." So for a biography on Churchill his estate would require "Five hundred pounds per 1,000 words quoted." The problem extends to institutions and valuable historical material. "[W]e’ve had lots of cultural institutions, museums and galleries coming to us saying we’ve got tapes, old videotapes, spools of tapes rotting in our basements because we can’t digitize them, because in digitizing you are changing the format, which require permission from the copyright holder. And with a lot of these old 1920s, 1930s films and recordings the copyright holder can’t be found. And so these tapes are left rotting for fear of litigation. So, you know, we really see these absurdities abound." (Transcript available).
• Even when entertainment industries want to encourage fan interaction, they are often extremely limiting in how that may occur. For example, the official Girls site on Tumblr does not allow material to be combined, any original text, a longer animation than 5 seconds, and even insists on images coming from an official source. "The Girls Tumblr blog has not caused any sort of outrage (yet) but has made GIF artist collective Mr. GIF question HBO's intentions. 'It is pretty funny that they put so many constraints on what you can submit,' Mr. GIF told the Daily Dot. 'It looks like its a legal thing. I mean it seems like a odd barrier for entry though. You would imagine that the goal is to get as many people as possible to submit.'"
• Yet as The Learned Fangirl points out, unauthorized content can keep a fandom's heart beating. "YouTube seems like an unlikely location for an multimedia fandom encyclopedia, but it’s probably the only location where such a function is even possible online. Think about it: YouTube is currently the Internet’s second largest search engine – bigger than even Yahoo and Bing – and the Internet’s second most trafficked website. Not to mention, its interface makes for easy social sharing and embeds. The playlist functionality makes it easy for content uploaders to group and categorize videos...And clever labeling of metadata makes it relatively easy to locate obscure content – if you know what you’re looking for. It’s YouTube’s unique combination of platform functionality and social community that makes this, a tech startup probably couldn’t recreate this even if they tried."
• Or as one cartoon made the case, if Copyright vs. Shakespeare had taken place, Shakespeare, and the larger culture, would have lost.

What absurdities of copyright have you come across? 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.

The following was written by Journal Committee staffer Nele Noppe

Many readers of this blog will have heard of Aaron Swartz, a hacker and free culture activist whose suicide on January 13 sent shockwaves around the Internet. One of the many things Swartz campaigned for - in fact, the cause that got him in the most trouble in the end - was open access to academic research, a cause near and dear to the OTW in general and its Gold Open Access academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) in particular.

I want to take this sad opportunity to say a few words on what open access is and why it's so important for research on fans. Academics who research fans must do their utmost to make sure their work is available for everyone, particularly fans, the very group they're studying; and all fans should have the right to access to research on topics that are relevant to fandom.

What is Open Access?

Open access is the idea that academic research should be available for free to anyone who wants to read it. An open access academic journal makes its articles available online, entirely free for anyone to read. TWC is a good example of an open access journal. Open access publishing, although gaining traction, remains a departure from the traditional and still-dominant model of spreading the results of academic research, which is to publish papers in (expensive) print journals and locked online databases. That publishing system is becoming controversial among many academics, in part because it monetizes the content not to authors or scholarly organizations, but to the large publishers that negotiate and then retain control of access. Locking research away in expensive databases denies access to the many nonacademics who genuinely need information from academic research. Even information created through taxpayer-funded research, such as information funded by the US National Institutes of Health, is locked away, even though such articles are meant to be open access and cannot be copyrighted.

Let's take a hypothetical example of a fan worried about copyright, and the academic paper that could ease her concerns. (This example supposes that said fan doesn't ask for free advice from the OTW's friendly legal experts.)

Fan A has just been told that the GIF set she's posted is illegal. She's confused and wondering whether she should take her work down. Unbeknownst to her, publicly funded law researcher B has written a solid and well-thought-out journal article about copyright and GIF sets that says exactly what fan A needs to hear. How likely is it that the information from researcher B's research will make it to the person who needs it, fan A?

• First of all, and perhaps most importantly, fan A is unlikely to find out that the article even exists in the first place. The closed online databases that contain academic articles don't tend to show up much in search results from regular search engines. The specialized search engines and search techniques used to find content in academic works can be very handy if you know what you're looking for and where to look, but they're not very relevant to how many nonacademics try to find information.
• If fan A does find out about the article's existence and guesses from the title and abstract that it may be useful, she probably won't be able to gain access to the online academic database that houses it. Unless fan A happens to attend a university whose library had enough money to pay tens of thousands of dollars in subscription fees to get access to that database, fan A's only option is to buy a download copy of the article. The cost for a single academic article of around thirty pages is often in the $20 to $45 range, and there may be no way to get a preview of the article to find out if it actually contains the information needed. Unless fan A is swimming in money and can afford to buy a couple of $20 articles in the hope of stumbling across what she wants, she won't pay this.

And that's where fan A's attempts to get anything useful out of academic research will probably end. Thousands of academic researchers do massive amounts of work on topics that are relevant to fans, but if that research is published in a closed journal, only other university-affiliated researchers, or people who physically go to a library that happens to subscribe to the relevant databases, can ever see it. Fans who may need the information are locked out.

Calls to action in memory of Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was campaigning to change all this. He believed that information should be free. In January 2011, he used MIT's academic network to gain access to a huge academic database, JSTOR, and then used a script to download copies of eight million academic articles. It was an activist stunt, not an attempt to rob JSTOR of income, and JSTOR declined to press charges after Swartz gave them the copies he made. However, prosecutors still decided to charge him with thirteen separate felony counts related to the way he gained access to JSTOR's database. These felony counts could have ended up costing Swartz a fine of up to $1 million and decades in jail. His trial was due to begin in only a few months, but 2 years to the day after he was arrested for the JSTOR case, he killed himself. Many commentators claim that the threat of draconian punishment may have contributed to Swartz's decision to take his own life, and that the charges were mostly baseless regardless. No one was hurt; no money was lost.

The tragedy of Swartz's death has activists calling for reform of the Copyright Fraud and Abuse Act under which Swartz was charged, and the criminal justice system that threatened him with disproportionate punishment. One of the first and most conspicuous of these calls was made by academics on Twitter, who used the hashtag #pdftribute to post public copies of their papers that were first published in locked journals.

While actions like #pdftribute are admirable, they're not a sustainable solution to the access problem - and not just because we can't rely on every individual researcher to do this. Let's get back to fan A and her copyright worries for a second. What if researcher B becomes concerned about giving the public access to her research, and tweets a copy of her paper? Would that mean fan A can find what she needs?

Nope. The fact that a free PDF of an article is floating around somewhere doesn't mean that the information inside it becomes magically available to fan A. To point out just one obstacle: how is she even going to locate that file? Even if she managed to find out that researcher B's article exists, all fan A will find by searching is the paid version, with no indication that there's a free PDF around that she might find with a little more digging. Further, it's likely that researcher B doesn't have the legal right to distribute her paper, even though she wrote it: she signed over copyright to the journal it appeared in.

Long term solutions

To make a long story short, making research accessible isn't just about removing obscene price tags from academic articles. While the term "open access," used in its specific, legal sense, refers to journals that publish free copies of papers, making research truly accessible requires so much more than that. Open access is also about making sure that important research results are made available in a place where the people who need the information are likely to find it. (Imagine how much faster fan A could have found the info she needed if someone had mentioned researcher B's conclusions in, say, a relevant Wikipedia article!) Open access is also about making sure that people without experience decoding academic papers can still read and understand the information. Open access is also about making sure that the information is published in a format that people can reuse, and under a license that allows them to reuse it.

Improving access by fans to the academic research being done about them has been a key concern of the OTW from the very start. Since its founding in 2008, TWC has published no less than 200 articles, interviews, editorials, and book reviews (bibliography). Making sure that all this research is available for free online has taken tremendous effort; to get some idea, read this post by journal editor Karen Hellekson about the difficulties of running an online academic journal in an academic publishing system that doesn't value online content.

Fanhackers, Coming Soon

But just "free" is not accessible enough, and limiting our efforts to what happens within our own organization is no longer enough. That's why in a few weeks, we're launching a new project to expand our efforts toward making research truly useful and relevant beyond the borders and acafannish audience of TWC. We'll experiment with concrete ways to make research on fans more accessible and usable, encourage researchers to publish their work in an open way (no easy task when the closed print model carries prestige, which in turn can be used toward promotion and tenure), and give any support we can to other projects that share those goals.

In 2008, Aaron Swartz articulated the feelings of many when he wrote in his "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" that keeping academic research behind pay walls is "a private theft of public culture" that should be resisted by all means necessary, especially by the researchers who can actually access all those locked papers. We call on all academics whose research is relevant for fans to make sure that their results can actually reach the people who need information.

• A piece in the New York Times examined how technology, and those creating it, are censoring the Internet. "The New Yorker found its Facebook page blocked for violating the site’s nudity and sex standards. Its offense: a cartoon of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve’s bared nipples failed Facebook’s decency test. That’s right — a venerable publication that still spells “re-elect” as “reëlect” is less puritan than a Californian start-up that wants to “make the world more open.”" The article cites numerous companies at fault, the most influential being Google. "Until recently, even the word “bisexual” wouldn’t autocomplete at Google." While some cases are a matter of cultural conflict, others show corporate influence. "How do you teach the idea of “fair use” to an algorithm?"
• The Daily Dot looked at just such a problem by investigating how Google's automated search for copyright violations ends up being anything from a nuisance to censorship of people creating or using royalty-free content. "Miller's saga...led him through the depths of EMI Music and Warner/Chappell Music, two labels that showed up as having management rights to the track. But when Miller made the necessary efforts to contact the labels, he learned that neither of the two actually held any rights to the song. In both cases, the two creators lost their ability to pull revenue from the ads that ran on their videos. Instead, those dollars—or pennies, as Mullins articulated—went to the purported rights holders of each composition—something that's not technically fair, if at all ethical—until the channel owner’s able to straighten out the situation. That can sometimes take days, weeks, or in Mullins case with the guitar stringing videos, not happen at all."
• Knowledge at Wharton posted a video interview and transcript with information management professor Shawndra Hill on the topic of Social TV which is "the integration of social media and TV programming" designed to capture fan activity. "There are a number of [successful] social TV applications that have been developed by [several] businesses to allow people to basically show how big a fan they are of different TV shows...So networks in the U.S., at least, have ways for their viewers to interact with one another on the networks' websites and in fact are trying to drive them to their own websites to do just that."

If you have technology or legal stories relating to fandom, why not share 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.