• Slate wrote about how badly the DMCA affects accessibility of technology from ebooks to online videos. "[P]ublishers, video programmers, and other copyright owners lock down digital content with digital rights management technology designed to limit users’ ability to access, copy, and adapt copyrighted works to specific circumstances. And copyright owners frequently fail to account for the need to adapt DRM-encumbered works to make them accessible to people with disabilities.

  For example, e-books often include DRM technology that prevents people who are blind or visually impaired from running e-books that they have lawfully purchased through a text-to-speech converter that reads the books aloud. Similarly, Internet-distributed video and DVD and Blu-ray discs include DRM features that prevent researchers from developing advanced closed captioning and video description technologies that make movies and television shows accessible."

  What's more the process is the same one the OTW has to follow to maintain its DMCA exemption for fan video makers. "Requiring nonprofit disability groups to ask permission from the government every three years and navigate a complex legal minefield to implement urgently needed accessibility technology is not compatible with progressive, conservative, or libertarian values; the goal of equal access for people with disabilities; or common sense.”

• Two of the OTW's Legal Committee members, Heidi Tandy and Rebecca Tushnet, recently were on a fanfiction panel with Vice President and Senior Intellectual Property Counsel for Warner Bros, Dale Nelson at the 6th Annual PIPG Symposium. Tushnet wrote about the panel and Nelson's discussion of fan activities: "Fan activity is fans having fun. Are they legitimate, are they acting from love? Or do they see fan activity as a loophole—make a fan film to showcase talent without having read Harry Potter? It’s not fans commercializing the property. We have exclusive rights; commercialization/merchandising in particular will draw our attention. But we tolerate a lot, including fan films, websites (the Leaky Cauldron, popular HP site); Dallas fan site; Lord of the Rings fan site; Quiddich players." She also responded later that it was how they interpreted fan intentions that mattered the most. For example, running ads on a website was usually not an issue because "some fan activities/sites do involve costs, and if it couldn’t run ads/raise a little money it wouldn’t exist."
• Techdirt posted about a White House petition aimed at changing copyright for the digital age. "The petition notes that the public has lost respect for copyright law, and the government should take steps to fix that, including securing first sale rights, more transparency and a right to remix." Fan rights are expressed in the following: "[A]s responsible creators we need to be able to freely remix existing music and other forms of creative expression to create new works without undue fear of prosecution. This upholds the original Constitutional purpose of copyright, which is to promote progress."
• Popular bookmarking site Pinboard has made it easier for fans to use it. "For months now it's been possible to declare yourself a part of fandom on the Pinboard settings page, but apart from making people feel good, the checkbox had no practical effect. I've finally changed that by offering a version of the sitewide search engine scoped only to users who self-declare as fans. This should make it easier to find fic using common keywords that would get drowned out on the main search page."

Do you have stories about fan-focused technology or legal developments? 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.

• In The birth of a fanboy, writer Larry Sukernik talks about the rationalization people use for their investments in something, as the seed that shifts them from consumer to fan. "[Once] you buy your first iPhone...you’re invested in Apple. Apple’s success is now your success, Apple’s failure is your failure. But why?" The reason is the continuation of the fandom product, because its loss will negatively impact your investment in it. "Not only does that leave you with an abandoned phone, but it also means that you made the incorrect phone choice. You made a bad decision, and you were wrong. Nobody wants to be wrong."
• A look at Girls' Generation fandom also discussed financial investment in a fandom. The group is "enjoyed by people of all walks of life. But within that is where we start to see sharp differences in fans: not in their love, but in their wealth. While there are individuals with high-paying jobs and disposable income, there are also students with nothing but a meager allowance attempting to import relatively expensive albums from halfway across the world. It’s situations like this that make us ask, 'Does merchandise and money spent on the group measure a person’s dedication?'"
• While the creation of fanworks has its costs, these days it increasingly has its rewards as well. Fanfiction contests are fairly common but one held by the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Library has a focus on fan crafts as well. "The contest was started seven years ago by an anime club that met at the library and has grown to more than 100 entries in the two categories" with fan art comprising any non-text entry. "[L]ibrarian John Hilbert said. 'Someone baked a cake in the shape of a cat. We had a tree skirt that ended up winning. It can be any medium as long as it can fit through the door.'"
• Of course these days a fanwork might make money for someone other than the creator. A review of Spank: The Musical, a parody of Fifty Shades of Grey, "pokes fun at James’ writing process and her roots in fan fiction. The musical centers on a woman named E.B. Janet (Suzanne Sole), who spends a weekend penning a steamy love story." The play caters to its "audience of mostly women" with fanservice, even if they don't know the term. "When Hugh performed a Batman-themed strip tease, and E.B. describes him as having the jaw line of, 'a pre-weight gain Val Kilmer,' the audience squawked and squealed. In another scene, Hugh and Tasha play out a 'Home Improvement' skit that E.B. writes as part of the show’s fan fiction while taking a break from her book."

What fanworks, financial issues and fan practices have caught your attention? Tell us 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.

• While 2012 is now behind us, some of its legal developments may catch up to us in 2013. TechDirt warned that a proposed copyright small claims court "may have a bigger impact than the DMCA." Because prosecuting users is generally so expensive for rights holders, they're looking for other ways to target those they consider guilty of infringement. "We see a lot of the bullying and trolling that takes place in the informal copyright system, where overreaching DMCA takedown notices and cease and desist letters are common. As many people reading this may know, bogus copyright claims are regularly misused to takedown otherwise legal content. So we have to balance the need of independent creative people to get 'justice' for their works being wholly misappropriated by bad actors, while keeping life sane for average internet users."
• It's not like we need more examples of bogus copyright takedowns to prove a point, but we still give a nod to Tech Crunch for making the story entertaining with its headline Amazon Pulls Self-Published Memoir About Star Wars Because it References Star Wars. " [I]f Amazon wants to be the central repository for all paid and unpaid unpublished work, they need more than a Mechanical Turk to kick books into the 'potentially infringes' pile...Amazon cannot go the route of YouTube and other media sharing systems that are reliant on the good graces of big media and tend to ban first and ask no questions later. Instead, problems like these need a dedicated person with some authority to make the ultimate and intelligent choice."
• An article on frictionless entertainment explained the term as the "world of streamed music and videos where the producers, broadcasters, advertisers and various others (mostly stealthy tracking parties) watch what you watch and listen to what you listen to." Discussing how services such as Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Kinect, Apple and Amazon gather data, they note "In almost every other setting, all these practices would qualify as cyberstalking."

What legal developments are you concerned about in 2013? If you're interested in fair use and how it relates to fanfiction and other fanworks, 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.

Last week remix artist Jonathan McIntosh had a troubling story to tell which put a spotlight on the current problems facing transformative works creators. In our current environment of automated copyright claims and the layers of entities users may have to go through to assert fair use rights, it takes real dedication sometimes to be heard.

McIntosh's work, Buffy vs. Edward, is a well known video which has, as he cites in his post, been used on numerous occasions in academic settings. It is also among the Test Suite of Fair Use Vids that the OTW assembled as part of their successful case for a renewal of the DMCA exemption for vidders.

McIntosh details months of effort to get his video reinstated which would, ironically, have been much simpler had he been making an effort to profit from the video. It was because ad placements have been disabled on his account that he was targeted by a subcontractor for Lionsgate, MovieClips, to either permit them or have the video deleted. Yet as a matter of U.S. copyright law, the non-commercial nature of Jonathan's video bolsters its status as copyright fair use.

Though his video was eventually reinstated, it’s striking how much effort McIntosh had to put into dealing with the problem. Jonathan's video has been cited by the U.S. Copyright Office as an example of transformative fair use, yet he has had to defend it from numerous attacks and accusations. For every artist like him who is very familiar with the law and is willing to fight for his rights again and again, how many people are simply seeing their work disappear?

This is one of the reasons we can see chilling effects, especially since this situation is a reminder that even clear cases of fair use aren’t safe from this kind of action. In fact, it appears that the video that was the subject of Lenz v. Universal, the case that established that copyright holders have to consider whether something is fair use before sending a DMCA take down notice, has once again been removed due to a copyright claim –- and this was a video which has already been litigated and determined to be fair use.

The OTW wants to remind fans that its legal advocacy project is a possible resource for someone who finds themselves in a situation where their work has received takedown notices, and offers recommendations for vidders in particular on our Fan Video and Multimedia section of our website.