• Lolcats! March 2009

    By OTW Staff on Sunday, 1 March, 2009
    Tags: OTW Graphics, Announcement, Resources for Fans

    These Lolcats were created to promote our fund-raising and membership drive in March 2009. Feel free to use them -- just copy the html below the image and paste into your website or journal!

  • Job Search: Translator

    By .KA Bessa on Wednesday, 25 February, 2009
    Tags: Volunteering

    Job: Translator

    Description: The Translation committee is looking for people interested in joining these existing translation teams: Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Japanese. (We are also open to forming new language teams. If you are fluent in languages other than these, please let us know.)

    Translators are currently working on the OTW website and various other materials (membership drive posts, etc), but will soon begin the massive job of translating the Archive, which means active translators will get Archive beta accounts!

  • Vidding on NPR's All Things Considered

    By .fcoppa on Wednesday, 25 February, 2009
    Tags: Media Mentions, Vidding, Fan Videos, OTW Sightings

    National Public Radio's program All Things Considered is doing a 5 minute segment on vidding tonight, February 25th, 2009, featuring members of the OTW's Vidding History project and some well-known vidders. You can listen live on NPR or hear it streaming online later at npr.org. (The site can also tell you when the show broadcasts in your area.)

    Edited to add: The piece is now online; a short accompanying article, Vidders Talk Back To Their Pop-Culture Muses is also available.

  • Links Roundup: Things of Interest To Fans

    By .fcoppa on Saturday, 21 February, 2009
    Tags: Gender and Sexuality, News of Note, Fan Videos, Fannish Practices

    AfterEllen has an article on femmeslash and fan art called Fan Art Empowers Queer Women, written by Danielle Riendeau. There's links to some great stuff in Buffy, Xena, the L-word, etc. as well as vids. Well worth checking out.

  • February, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 25

    By .fcoppa on Saturday, 21 February, 2009
    Tags: Newsletter

    Welcome to the first newsletter of the new year! All the OTW committees have re-formed, and we've got a couple of new ones, too. Find out what the various committees have been working on. Get an update on the archive! (Find it all under the fold!)

    ADT/Archive Development: AD&T hit the ground running this year. Black_samvara took over from Naomi as Chair. We welcomed new Members to the Committee, new volunteers and formed a new team. We also gained an Archivist who is working with us on our documentation. Our big news is that we are releasing new code this weekend and we are very excited. The Archive of Our Own is currently on revision 953 and the Test Archive is on revision 1077 which represents a massive amount of coding work. We have a huge list of bug fixes and 2 brand new pieces of functionality.

  • Remix Culture event in NYC

    By .fcoppa on Thursday, 19 February, 2009
    Tags: Intellectual Property, Event, Remix

    Fans and others interested in remix culture might want to check out this event: Lawrence Lessig + Shepard Fairey + Steven Johnson speaking at the New York Public library on Thursday, February 26, 2009. Tickets will probably sell out fast, as we're not the only ones who love these guys.

    We do however note with some disappointment, in the direction of WIRED and the NYPL, that--as great as these guys are, they're all guys. In fact, they're all white guys. Considering the idea here is that we're going to be "guided" through "emerging remix culture", and considering how much of remix culture came out of--not only fandom, but hip hop and sampling--it's problematic that there are no women or people of color on the program.

  • Political Remix Video Puts the Spotlight on Vidding

    By .fcoppa on Monday, 16 February, 2009
    Tags: News of Note, Vidding, Remix, Fan Videos

    Political Remix Video, a site dedicated to showcasing and promoting some of the best, most innovative and inspiring examples of Political Remix Video works on the web, is doing a series of posts focused on vidding as political remix. Like vids, political remix videos (known as PRVs to their makers) are transformative guerilla media works. The first of these posts features the vidder Charmax and her wildly compelling Troy vid "No Bravery"--check it out.

  • Visit our new Vidding History project page

    By .fcoppa on Monday, 16 February, 2009
    Tags: Announcement, Intellectual Property, Vidding, Fan Videos, Resources for Fans

    The Vidding History project of the OTW has now got its own home on our website. The project is committed to documenting and celebrating the 35 year history of fan vidding, and to arguing that vids are a fair use under US copyright law.

    Our work toward these ends include:

    * A Test Suite of Fair Use Vids, offered as part of the OTW's reply comment in support of the EFF's petition to the Copyright Office for a DMCA exemption for vidders and other makers of transformative or otherwise fair use works.

    * Vidding (2008), a documentary introducing people to vidding produced by the Organization for Transformative Works in partnership with MIT and New Media Literacy, 2008.

  • OTW Selected As Designated Charity for Escapade 19

    By .fcoppa on Monday, 16 February, 2009
    Tags: Fan Conventions, Event, Financial Support

    The OTW is delighted to announce that it has been chosen as the recipient charity for Escapade 19. Escapade is one of the longest running slash cons, held annually in southern California since 1990, and known for the quality of its panel discussions, its vidshow, and its charity art auction. Escapade runs March 6- 8, 2009, and places are still available.

  • Sometimes People See Sense...

    By .fcoppa on Saturday, 7 February, 2009
    Tags: Announcement, Intellectual Property, Twitter, Legal Advocacy, YouTube, Roleplaying

    ...The Twitter accounts of fans roleplaying Mad Men characters have been restored, after being briefly taken down for supposed copyright infringment. To quote this excellent summary of this issue from The Guardian, "the accounts returned after the show's marketing department had stepped in to persuade AMC that, whatever the legal standing, it was insane to stop this outpouring of (completely free, you fools) fan-promotion."

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