Thinking ahead to the Fan Labor panel

[elements]

The sure-to-be-wonderful MIT Comparative Media Studies Futures of Entertainment 2 conference is starting this morning, and while I'm excited about the entire event, I'm not surprisingly most interested in the panel on fan labor, which is scheduled for this afternoon and features the brilliant Catherine Tosenberger, known and loved by many of us

Comments

Re: a few disjointed thoughts

[pir8fancier]

I think this very issue became an "issue" when Fanlib saw all this creativity and wanted to make bucks off of it. The individual expression as dollar signs. I'm very cynical. If they had been vaguely successful, fandom would have died. Because it would have said to the people who own the original copyright that money can be made off of it. Which would have sent them to their lawyers pronto and asked for a piece of their pie. Whether it IS their pie is still up for debate. Derivative, pastiches, etc. That inevitable court case would have happened sooner. It WILL happen because someone who is a lot smarter than Fanlib and who understands fandom (not some lameass male execs) will couch renumeration in some acceptable language, and the lawyers will go to town. Unfortunately, I don't think the future of fandom is in our hands. Until the legal aspects of writing fanfiction is solved, then I think fandom is sort of in a bubble.

Another aspect is that the strikethrough revealed to me how fragile all this is. Say 25% of the HP fandom fled and went to other journals. I think it had a tremendous impact on the energy of the fandom. Some people have returned, but it's not the same. I think it's difficult to quantify because all this happened with the publication of the last book and the closing of canon, but the HP fandom has/had an enormous amount of slash-based fanfiction, which I think had an enormous impact on people. It forced me to flock my LJ. I'd never considered that before. I now friend anyone who friends me, but that limits MY control over my LJ.

I agree with above. I want the freedom to write what I want to write, I don't want to make money off of it (because once you start making money, your choices are limited because you have an audience that needs to be fed). The freedom to write WHATEVER is more important to me than anything else. Once money is involved, the suits show up. Once the suits show up, then the power I have over what I can post is GONE. And as much as I hate saying this, the Fanlib debacle said to me that a bunch of young hip white guys think we are all a bunch of naieve, stupid women who don't know the financial power that we wield. Of course we know what sort of power words have. The point is that we are not giving that power to you. Assholes!

Re: a few disjointed thoughts

[spare_change]

Apologies for both rambling at you and then for deleting -- I am totally out of it and making no sense whatsoever. Will try to put together a better response tomorrow.

*stumbles off dizzily to bed*