Fanvideos: a clarification

[starlady42]

Hi all --

There have been a couple of videos which keep coming into the queue this week, and I keep asking folks to post them in the Friday fanart/fic/vid post instead.  Since they keep on rollin' in, I thought I'd hip you all to the criteria I generally use in determining whether a video should be a top-level post or discussed in the Friday post: if it is a transformative work, whether it is created by a member of this community or simply found by one, it is a fanvideo.  To borrow from the Organization for Transformative Works, "A transformative work takes something extant and turns it into something with a new purpose, sensibility, or mode of expression. Transformative works include but are not limited to fanfiction, real person fiction, fan vids, and fan art."  Therefore:

• Videos which are not transformative -- for example, clips of interviews, official trailers for films, excerpts from television shows, etc. -- are fine for top-level posts (unless, of course, they break one of the community rules).
• Videos which are transformative in some way -- for example, remixes of various ST scenes into a new narrative, videos which take ST scenes and set them to music, parodies, or anything which uses or spoofs already-created content (whether you personally edited/spoofed it or just found it) -- are, for our purposes, fanvideos and should be posted as comments to the Friday fanstuff post.

These aren't necessarily official mod policy (yet; we're discussing it), but are the criteria I've been using to send things like the Voyager-theme-with-lyrics and the How It Should Have Ended videos to the Friday post.  There's a fair amount of grey area, and what happens sometimes is that my initial thought is that a particular video is a fanvid -- so I ask the member to post it to the Friday post instead of approving it as a top-level post -- then it comes in again and again, so maybe I was wrong but I feel like I can't accept it at that point out of fairness to the first person. (Does that make sense?)  The sticking point seems to be parody; is an SNL skit based on ST, for example, sufficiently original to warrant a top-level post?  How about the animated How It Should Have Ended video (which pretty clearly animates scenes directly from the film as its starting point)?  Obviously, I take a fairly broad view on what's transformative, but would be very interested to hear your thoughts.

Since there seems to be a lot of interest in them, I've posted the Voyager and HISHE videos under the cut.  Feel free to (a) tell me in the comments whether you think they count as fanvideos or should have been allowed to be top-level posts (b) ignore me and just talk about the videos (c) ignore both me and the videos and post sparkly penis text (d) ignore me, the videos, and the sparkly penis text and... you know, this could go on for a while, so I'll just leave off here. ;) ♥