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.

TechCrunch is reporting that YouTube's content filters have stopped allowing uploads of new iterations of the Hitler meme - you know, the hundreds of videos where Hitler rants about...Windows Vista, or Sarah Palin, or how much the Phantom Menace sucked. (Those videos.) The article, Hitler Is Very Upset That Constantin Film Is Taking Down Hitler Parodies reports that newer version of the meme have been replaced with, "This video contains content from Constantin Film, who has blocked it on copyright grounds," despite the obvious claims to fair use (transformation! parody! politics! speech! endless back-and-forth creativity and engagement); they also think it is likely that the filtering system will slowly crawl its way through and delete all the others.

YouTube's filter won't even allow its users to make the obvious response: Hitler Reacts to YouTube Blocking "Hitler Reacts" Video Parodies. There's something satisfyingly, if depressingly, ironic here, just the way there was when amazon deleted purchased copies of Orwell's 1984 off the Kindle.

It's worth reading OK GO's open letter to the people of the world in which they discuss their record label's refusal to make their new YouTube videos embeddable - despite the fact that the immense popularity of OK GO's viral YouTube videos is what made the band rich and famous in the first place. OK GO apparently argued with EMI and lost, but they clearly think their label is being penny wise and pound foolish: the penny per play on YouTube may not be worth the loss of spreadability. To counter this, the band has also put their video up on Vimeo, which does (for the moment) still allow embedding, though they're aware this will split their hit count. But: "With or without this embedding problem, we'll never get 50 zillion views on a YouTube video again. That moment – the dawn of internet video – is gone. The internet isn’t as anarchic as it was then. Now there are Madison Avenue firms that specialize in "viral marketing” and the success of our videos is now taught in business school." (Meanwhile, its worth saying that the band are clearly geniuses when it comes to spreadability: their new song and video feature the Notre Dame Marching Band. The sound you hear is that of a million high school and college marching bands tuning up: there's more than one way to get your song out there!)



OK Go - This Too Shall Pass (vimeo.com)

In other news, you can watch yours truly give a talk called Things We Don't Have In The Future...and How Fan Arts Can Help to the freshmen class at the University of the Arts, which is doing a shared First Year Experience called ReMix, ReWrite, ReAct. I served as tour guide to some fantastic fan art and vids: if anyone needs to be thinking about remixing and read-write culture, it's the artists of the future!

You might think fighting robots only happens in video games, in which case: read the The Slow Road to Fair Use: Why it Takes Three Weeks to Post Your Youtube Video, a guest post by video remixer IKAT381 at politicalremixvideo.com. IKAT381 chronicles the three week--but ultimately successful--slog to get a vid up on YouTube, a process that included fighting the upload bot, which did an automatic takedown, lodging a dispute through YouTube's built-in online tool, and then lodging a DMCA counternotice when the dispute was denied (by another bot?) in favor of UMG, the record company that owned the Weezer song.

Persistence paid off, but as IKAT381 points out, "imagine if I was a career artist who wanted to dedicate more time to creating than to looking up copyright law and counter-notice procedures. Or imagine I had kids, or school, or any number of things that might be more important to me than being a copyright geek."

IKAT381 concludes: In the year 2009, copyright disputes have been taken over by robots. In the year 2010, copyright disputes should be handled by people.

(You might also enjoy the vid. Super Pork and Beans All-Stars (Weezer Remix) is a tribute to IKAT381's favorite internet celebrities, of which you're sure to recognize more than a few!)