This is the second in a series of Q&A posts with Graham Reynolds, a Canadian copyright scholar from Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The Q&A focuses on Bill C-11, which went into effect near the end of 2012 and made some significant changes to Canada's Copyright Act, some of which influence the way fanworks are treated under Canadian law. The first post, in which Graham answered questions about the general contours of the law and about the law of "fair dealing", is available here.

A quick search for the term "love" on Fanlore brings up nearly 7,000 results. In comparison, the term "write" brings up just under 5,000 results, there are just over 2,000 uses of "vid," and "art" is mentioned roughly 6,500 times. This seems appropriate, as the heart of fandom is about loving something. We are fans because we pour our passion into something we love, whether it be a band, a video game, or a novel.

In the age of the internet, one great way to say you love something — aside from 'i <3 u,' that is — is to create a wiki about it. Fanlore, OTW's wiki, is a living record of all things fannish, dynamic and regularly changing. The "stories" that reside on Fanlore are ones told by fans whose love for a genre, work, fandom activity, or moment in fan history led them to create an entry and tell the story in their own words. Fanlore itself is the story beneath the story: it is the fan-run support structure that allows these stories to be stored and accessed by other fans.

The fan community deserves to see our tale told and to have somewhere we can use our own voice to tell the tale. Fanlore provides a place to do so, one cared for and maintained by fans themselves in yet another show of — you guessed it — love.

Help keep Fanlore growing and thriving — please donate today.

The OTW is committed to defending the right to create and distribute fanworks, and our Legal Advocacy project is at the forefront of these efforts.

We're particularly proud of our work on Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) exemptions for makers of noncommercial remix videos such as fan vids, AMVs, and political remix videos. OTW staffers testified before the US Copyright Office in 2009 and 2012 to help win these exemptions, in partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other like-minded organizations, and we were victorious both times. The noncommercial remix exemption takes away the threat that vidders' works — though transformative, fair uses — would still be considered unlawful under US law because of the way in which they may have acquired their source footage.

We're also gaining a valuable network of allies in the larger free-expression, pro-fair-use activist world. As well as working closely with EFF, we've had positive interactions with groups such as the Documentary Filmmakers' Association and USC-Annenberg's Norman Lear Center.

Volunteers from Legal have also worked on contributing to the Wikipedia page on legal issues in fanfiction to provide a more law-based discussion of fans' rights; advising fans who have received DMCA takedown notifications; and filing amicus briefs in three cases with implications for fans and fanworks.

The Legal committee is also happy to assist fans who have questions regarding non-commercial fanworks. You can contact the Legal committee here.

The OTW is a dedicated champion of fans' rights, with an established track record of success — but there are many battles, large and small, still to be fought. Help us fight those battles — please donate today.

The OTW launched the Symposium blog in 2010 to give fans and academics a place to publish meta together, and to signal-boost great ideas and info on fans that weren't finding an audience. This year, we've revamped the blog into the shiny Fanhackers.

More insightful and relevant academic, fannish and other meta is being created now than ever before, but a lot of these useful ideas never get beyond the borders of wherever they were published. Academic meta on fans remains hard to access — it's often locked in expensive books and journals, or written in needlessly complicated and inaccessible language. Fannish meta is scattered all around the internet. Activists working on topics like copyright and open culture often publish ideas that are incredibly relevant to fans, but many of those ideas never reach fannish spaces. We have so much info, and yet so much of it goes to waste.

Fanhackers is a small project with big dreams. We want to experiment with new ways to get info on fans from wherever it is to whoever needs it, in a way that really makes a difference. That means sharing the good ideas in formats that people are actually likely to read, like short quotes with the key parts from long books or articles. It also means sharing the good ideas in places where people are actually likely to stumble across them — like Tumblr, Twitter, Pinboard, LiveJournal or Dreamwidth — instead of locking them up on separate websites. It also means making sure that people who need help finding an inaccessible resource like an expensive academic paper have a place to get help. Because Fanhackers is very much an experimental project, we can try things out at will to see what works and what doesn't, which is a pretty liberating way to work.

Fanhackers started out small, but it's already been a far busier first month than we expected. And there's so much around the corner: expanding onto Twitter, translating quotes and short posts from meta in Japanese (and hopefully other languages), publishing a tagged and sorted bibliography of academic works on fans to make those even easier to find, and exploring all the great things in the newest issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, to name just a few.

Fanhackers and Transformative Works and Cultures proudly honour the OTW's commitment to encourage and share fannish and academic analysis of fan culture. We love fandom, and everything it stands for — to help us continue Fanhackers and other labours of love, please donate today!