The Why And How Of It: Issues Surrounding The OTW/AO3
Three days ago, a person on my subscription list, whom I met online in 2007 through the FanLib fiasco, asked the world at large, "OK what *is* the thing going on with OTW right now? I keep seeing people going 'I'm not going to comment on this' but I have no idea what's going on. Help?"
Because I like to write summaries, I decided to answer.
The short answer: nothing particularly new or different is going on with the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW). What has changed is that the people involved are finally talking about it openly.
This summary isn't about what, however, but how and why the situation developed. If you are looking for what, rydra_wong posted a concise summary today, and every link she included is worth exploring.
Spoiler: my conclusion is optimistic.
So: the long answer, beginning with the necessary background for folks who know little about the OTW, and its largest project, an Archive Of Our Own (AO3).
The OTW was formed in 2007 by a group of fans in response to FanLib. The best known fan involved was Naomi N., a fanfiction writer whose "day jobs" were web development and professional fiction writing.
FanLib, with an all-male board of directors and clueless advertising, was one of the more obnoxious (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to "monetize" fanfiction.
Within a month of FanLib riling up fandom (May 2007), LiveJournal's Strikethrough debacle occurred (June-August 2007), in which LiveJournal purged without warning the accounts of suspected "pedophiles," based on the demands of a small (as in three people) neo-nazi group, the Warriors for Innocence (WfI).
WfI was effective in convincing LiveJournal to purge the accounts (which included fanfiction communities and fan artists) because WfI was experienced at strong-arming content hosts through advertisers. Roughly 500 accounts were purged; eventually, about 350 were restored.
FanLib, followed quickly by Strikethrough, convinced many in western media fandom that transformative works by fans needed a home that could not be held hostage by advertising. Thirty thousand signed a fandom counts petition in two days.
Therefore, the OTW and AO3 were initially enthusiastically supported. Fandom felt under attack from many directions. It was time to fight back!
The OTW formed committees. It recruited volunteers and members. It raised funds, bought servers, had server naming contests, did fan outreach, held elections, built the AO3, supported accessibility across multiple end-user platforms, and protected the rights of vidders.
All of these things are good. They are fantastic. But any large group of people working toward a common goal - particularly when the group is launched in what we could call life during wartime - will in the beginning make trade-offs. I'll explore that in detail, but first a few words about the OTW's structure.
In May, 2007, when Naomi N. suggested through her blog that fandom needed a fandom-owned fanfiction archive, my sole contribution to the discussion was to strongly urge that the organization have collective ownership - anything but a person, or a small group of people.
I believed the organization needed collective ownership because a single person, or a small group of people, can make "executive" decisions that aren't pretty (Henneth-Annun.net, theOneRing.net, fanfiction.net, dear me I could go on), or can eventually throw in the towel (GreatestJournal).
Ultimately, the OTW was set up as a non-profit with a board of directors, who are elected by OTW members. More on this later, but remember: the OTW does not have owners in the typical fandom website sense.
That's the background. Now I can start chipping away at the situation facing the OTW, and "fandom" - fandom being shorthand for the OTW's hundreds of members and volunteers, the folks (+25,000) who directly use the OTW's creations (such as AO3), and the hundreds of thousands who simply visit the site. To do so, I must discuss group dynamics, social exchange, and trade-offs.
We all know group dynamics intimately. Group dynamics determine who is going to wash the dishes after a large holiday meal.
They determine the strange policy in your office, where solicitations for charity are forbidden, except for your boss's daughter's annual Girl Scout cookie sale (it's okay; you sort of like Thin Mints).
The Thin Mint situation happens because you have made a trade-off. You mostly like your boss - or you desperately need your job - so you buy the damn cookies and don't say anything to get your boss in trouble. You are dimly aware the higher-ups know about it, but aren't saying anything either, because they mostly think your boss is okay, and they are afraid of appearing to be jerks, because Girls Scouts and cookies are two things people are expected to tolerate, no matter what the rules are. No one wants to look like a jerk. For fuck's sake, it's little girls and cookies.
Another example of a trade-off: when you are trying to get someone to take a job, such as serve as the CEO of your company, you may offer a trade-off, like promising to donate a bunch of money to the potential CEO's favorite charity. When a trade-off is official and above-board like that, it may be called a perk. Trade-offs are also called sweeteners or bribes, depending on the emotion you wish to invoke.
Recently, I've been writing fanfiction about European psychoanalysts in 1910, and their group dynamics make fandom_wank look like a basket of kittens. For instance, when Sigmund Freud was trying to get an international association of psychoanalysts off the ground, he proposed that Carl Jung be chosen as president for life - which would have been a looong presidency, because Jung was only 33 or something at the time (following a massive fight, Freud was overruled).
For many complicated reasons, Freud was willing to make a huge trade-off to obtain Jung's support, but the most urgent was to combat anti-Semitism; a majority of the early psychoanalysts were Jewish. It was life during wartime for Freud and his fellow psychoanalysts (considering Freud barely escaped with his life in 1938, he had reasons).
When things went wrong between members of the psychoanalyst association, the wank was glorious. A condition of admittance to the organization was submitting to psychoanalysis, which meant dissidents had their tales of anal masturbation and parental death wishes thrown back in their faces.
But the grimmest punishment, the worst thing a group of human beings can do to an individual human being short of the death penalty (or is the death penalty just the ultimate expression of it?) was exclusion from the group. Following the vicious infighting, in which everyone who disagreed with him was labeled psychotic, paranoid, or (less dramatically) neurotic, and eventually ejected from the group, Freud wrote Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego. I'm going to take a wild guess it proves Freud is not to blame for anything.
Back to the 21st century. The OTW, as it struggled into existence during a period of FanLib, Strikethrough, and increasingly shitty economic times, made trade-offs.
One trade-off was the OTW taking over supporting the Yuletide fic exchange, which was a pet project of a member of the board of directors, Naomi N. Supporting the Yuletide fic exchange had negative results. The fledgling AO3 couldn't take the strain, and it crashed.
Which brings us to what is happening right now.
At some point, especially when an organization is suffering from a scarcity of resources, the damage caused by trade-offs may exceed their benefit, and when that happens, the trade-offs get re-evaluated.
That's what's happening with the OTW right now: people are taking openly about the damage caused by trade-offs, and they are re-evaluating them.
This brings us to something extremely important.
One OTW trade-off was not talking about what things, and why, were going wrong due to the trade-offs. As a result, though it criticized the symptoms it saw (such as the annual Yuletide AO3 crash), fandom was unaware the trade-offs existed.
(As I stated earlier, by fandom I mean the people the OTW is in a social group relationship with: every person who volunteers, uploads fic to the AO3, reads fic at the AO3, uses FanLore, and so on.)
Not talking about trade-offs is perhaps the most common trade-off of all. You do not tell your boss's boss you are tired of buying Thin Mints. If you finally do, it's because the Thin Mint situation has become more intolerable than the repercussions you may experience as a result of talking about the Thin Mints.
When I began following the numerous posts about issues with the OTW, and the OTW election (in progress when I posted this), I was not at first thinking about trade-offs. Not until I saw someone refer to an OTW board member, Naomi N., as a "founder."
"Founder" is one of the labels you apply to someone when you believe they deserve perks, or trade-offs. And once I began thinking of the situation in the light of trade-offs, everything - the lack of communication, the inefficient and error prone development process, Yuletide breaking AO3 repeatedly - made sense.
Trade-offs are a single slice of something much larger - all consuming, really - for human beings: social exchange. Without each other, we die. Therefore, we continually make new deals, and adjust existing deals. Our ability to do this is a matter of life or death; our lives depend on knowing whether we can trust the stranger who stops to help us with a flat tire, and we are fucking good at this.
Our highly developed social exchange abilities is why we love crime shows so much. Crime shows (even when the detectives are werewolves) are about identifying and punishing the people who violate our rules of social exchange. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga sums up this diverse group of violators with the simple term cheaters.
An informal but no less important way of identifying and punishing cheaters is gossip. When we gossip, we have many terms for the people who embody our social exchange ideals (hero, saint), but we have far more for the people who fail them: coward, mean girl, thief, adulterer, scumbag, bully.
Fandom, like all human social groups, exists thanks to social exchange. What fans give each other is the same thing human beings give to each other in innumerable other social exchanges: time, and (to a much lesser extent in fandom) time's symbol, money. They write, they vid, they recommend fics, they organize a fan convention, they write summaries, they loan you a DVD you must watch right now. And in return they receive the time of others: the fics, vids, art, recs, feedback, picspams. This is why FanLib was so disgusting to fandom: it violated fandom's rules of social exchange by trying to profit without compensation off the time of others.
Like any social group, fandom punishes the people who violate its rules of social exchange, usually through gossip (in person, or online). Some of the rules are straightforward, and generally understood, such as "credit the maker of your icon, you ass." But other rules are harder to pin down.
Fandom_wank is a web site that identifies and punishes cheaters through online gossip, and is fairly good at identifying the hazier fandom social exchange violations, which can be seen in the tags. Examples: creator wank; elitism; fandom entitlement; flouncing; my education let me show you it; not good with criticism.
But trade-offs! Crap, still not done with them.
Trade-offs can make us uncomfortable because they do not fit into our neat social exchange guidelines.
Most social exchanges are clear cut. I write a fic, you read it and leave feedback. I watch a vid, and I email the vidder and tell her it was great. In each scenario, a person gives time, and receives time. When we obsess about feedback for fics (are kudos acceptable? must there be a comment?), we're establishing the acceptable social exchange.
But in a trade-off, someone gets a benefit which does not result in an immediate tangible benefit to others.
Basically, a trade-off is a loan. And eventually, it is called in.
One of the unspoken fandom social exchange rules (because it is a rule in human society in general; see Gazzaniga's The Ethical Brain) is that no fan's time is worth more than that of another fan.
This rule is enforced through insistence on proper credit - whether it is thanking a podficcer, mentioning your icon came from fan12345's screencaps, saying you got a fic idea from a work of fan art, leaving feedback for fanworks, and of course not plagiarizing. It is reflected in fandom_wank's tags such as creator wank, elitism, fandom entitlement, and so on.
At the OTW, however, the social exchange got way out of whack.
As you have probably guessed, I'm going to suggest this is at least partially due to life during wartime syndrome. Some of the "founders" got perks because the situation in 2007 seemed Really Bad. Thanks to OTW members and volunteers finally speaking up, fandom is discovering the trade-offs, of which they were previously unaware, and they are re-evaluating the OTW in light of the new information.
Reading the many statements by disillusioned and exhausted OTW volunteers, the same thing comes through repeatedly. They are people who gave, gave, gave. And while they were giving, they had to watch other people get the benefit of perks. Eventually, the giving people no longer felt valued. And some gave up. (Note: some left the OTW because events in their lives meant they simply could no longer give time to the OTW; I do not include them in the "disillusioned and exhausted" group).
That they spoke up about their experience fills me with appreciation and gratitude. They risked the worst punishment known to us humans: they risked exclusion from the group.
Running for a slot on the OTW board in the current election, Naomi N. has been singled out as a board member who received perks during her previous term on the board. One of the perks she received was acquiescence to a change and development process which suited her, but made other developers conclude their time would not be valued, and stay away. But the main perk she received appears to be an environment in which she was not subject to the same criticism and oversight as other members. Whether or not she deserved criticism isn't the point; the point is it wasn't allowed.
Her recent statement about the election makes me think of Captain Jack Aubrey when he realized his beloved ship could be taken away. Damn it, gentlepeople, I'm Lucky Jack, and these boards are soaked with my blood! She jumped in when it was life during wartime, so it must be incredibly painful to her to discover the perks she received - which she undoubtedly never saw as perks, because numerous people made sure she didn't - are being judged too high a price to pay.
But as Lucky Jack discovered, captains don't own their ships, the Fandom Navy is just letting them drive, and what the Fandom Navy wants from its captains can change. Inevitably will change. Fortunately, like Lucky Jack, I believe she will also discover that, as much as she loves captaining, she loves the Sea more.
The Sea being the cruel mistress wildly creative and turbulent social group we call fandom.
Conclusion: regardless of the outcome of the OTW elections, the OTW has been permanently changed, because people have begun to talk about the cost of the trade-offs. To that, I say: hooray!
I support the OTW and AO3. I plan to use the AO3 as my sole fanfiction archive for as long as it exists. I hope one day to be in a financial position that will allow me to commit time to it as a volunteer. I am thrilled by the work the OTW has done to protect the rights of vidders. I think the folks who have worked to make it all a reality are fantastic. But that does not mean I, and others, cannot re-evaluate and criticize the OTW.
I've seen many folks express worry about the future of the OTW, which is not surprising when you consider the fate of numerous fandom websites in the past. But if the OTW was set up correctly, the way hundreds imagined it should be back in May 2007, it will come through this. And the very good news is: it was set up correctly.
John Watson: People might talk.
Sherlock Holmes: They do little else.
-The Great Game, Sherlock BBC
Because I like to write summaries, I decided to answer.
The short answer: nothing particularly new or different is going on with the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW). What has changed is that the people involved are finally talking about it openly.
This summary isn't about what, however, but how and why the situation developed. If you are looking for what, rydra_wong posted a concise summary today, and every link she included is worth exploring.
Spoiler: my conclusion is optimistic.
So: the long answer, beginning with the necessary background for folks who know little about the OTW, and its largest project, an Archive Of Our Own (AO3).
The OTW was formed in 2007 by a group of fans in response to FanLib. The best known fan involved was Naomi N., a fanfiction writer whose "day jobs" were web development and professional fiction writing.
FanLib, with an all-male board of directors and clueless advertising, was one of the more obnoxious (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to "monetize" fanfiction.
Within a month of FanLib riling up fandom (May 2007), LiveJournal's Strikethrough debacle occurred (June-August 2007), in which LiveJournal purged without warning the accounts of suspected "pedophiles," based on the demands of a small (as in three people) neo-nazi group, the Warriors for Innocence (WfI).
WfI was effective in convincing LiveJournal to purge the accounts (which included fanfiction communities and fan artists) because WfI was experienced at strong-arming content hosts through advertisers. Roughly 500 accounts were purged; eventually, about 350 were restored.
FanLib, followed quickly by Strikethrough, convinced many in western media fandom that transformative works by fans needed a home that could not be held hostage by advertising. Thirty thousand signed a fandom counts petition in two days.
Therefore, the OTW and AO3 were initially enthusiastically supported. Fandom felt under attack from many directions. It was time to fight back!
The OTW formed committees. It recruited volunteers and members. It raised funds, bought servers, had server naming contests, did fan outreach, held elections, built the AO3, supported accessibility across multiple end-user platforms, and protected the rights of vidders.
All of these things are good. They are fantastic. But any large group of people working toward a common goal - particularly when the group is launched in what we could call life during wartime - will in the beginning make trade-offs. I'll explore that in detail, but first a few words about the OTW's structure.
In May, 2007, when Naomi N. suggested through her blog that fandom needed a fandom-owned fanfiction archive, my sole contribution to the discussion was to strongly urge that the organization have collective ownership - anything but a person, or a small group of people.
I believed the organization needed collective ownership because a single person, or a small group of people, can make "executive" decisions that aren't pretty (Henneth-Annun.net, theOneRing.net, fanfiction.net, dear me I could go on), or can eventually throw in the towel (GreatestJournal).
Ultimately, the OTW was set up as a non-profit with a board of directors, who are elected by OTW members. More on this later, but remember: the OTW does not have owners in the typical fandom website sense.
That's the background. Now I can start chipping away at the situation facing the OTW, and "fandom" - fandom being shorthand for the OTW's hundreds of members and volunteers, the folks (+25,000) who directly use the OTW's creations (such as AO3), and the hundreds of thousands who simply visit the site. To do so, I must discuss group dynamics, social exchange, and trade-offs.
We all know group dynamics intimately. Group dynamics determine who is going to wash the dishes after a large holiday meal.
They determine the strange policy in your office, where solicitations for charity are forbidden, except for your boss's daughter's annual Girl Scout cookie sale (it's okay; you sort of like Thin Mints).
The Thin Mint situation happens because you have made a trade-off. You mostly like your boss - or you desperately need your job - so you buy the damn cookies and don't say anything to get your boss in trouble. You are dimly aware the higher-ups know about it, but aren't saying anything either, because they mostly think your boss is okay, and they are afraid of appearing to be jerks, because Girls Scouts and cookies are two things people are expected to tolerate, no matter what the rules are. No one wants to look like a jerk. For fuck's sake, it's little girls and cookies.
Another example of a trade-off: when you are trying to get someone to take a job, such as serve as the CEO of your company, you may offer a trade-off, like promising to donate a bunch of money to the potential CEO's favorite charity. When a trade-off is official and above-board like that, it may be called a perk. Trade-offs are also called sweeteners or bribes, depending on the emotion you wish to invoke.
Recently, I've been writing fanfiction about European psychoanalysts in 1910, and their group dynamics make fandom_wank look like a basket of kittens. For instance, when Sigmund Freud was trying to get an international association of psychoanalysts off the ground, he proposed that Carl Jung be chosen as president for life - which would have been a looong presidency, because Jung was only 33 or something at the time (following a massive fight, Freud was overruled).
For many complicated reasons, Freud was willing to make a huge trade-off to obtain Jung's support, but the most urgent was to combat anti-Semitism; a majority of the early psychoanalysts were Jewish. It was life during wartime for Freud and his fellow psychoanalysts (considering Freud barely escaped with his life in 1938, he had reasons).
When things went wrong between members of the psychoanalyst association, the wank was glorious. A condition of admittance to the organization was submitting to psychoanalysis, which meant dissidents had their tales of anal masturbation and parental death wishes thrown back in their faces.
But the grimmest punishment, the worst thing a group of human beings can do to an individual human being short of the death penalty (or is the death penalty just the ultimate expression of it?) was exclusion from the group. Following the vicious infighting, in which everyone who disagreed with him was labeled psychotic, paranoid, or (less dramatically) neurotic, and eventually ejected from the group, Freud wrote Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego. I'm going to take a wild guess it proves Freud is not to blame for anything.
Back to the 21st century. The OTW, as it struggled into existence during a period of FanLib, Strikethrough, and increasingly shitty economic times, made trade-offs.
One trade-off was the OTW taking over supporting the Yuletide fic exchange, which was a pet project of a member of the board of directors, Naomi N. Supporting the Yuletide fic exchange had negative results. The fledgling AO3 couldn't take the strain, and it crashed.
Which brings us to what is happening right now.
At some point, especially when an organization is suffering from a scarcity of resources, the damage caused by trade-offs may exceed their benefit, and when that happens, the trade-offs get re-evaluated.
That's what's happening with the OTW right now: people are taking openly about the damage caused by trade-offs, and they are re-evaluating them.
This brings us to something extremely important.
One OTW trade-off was not talking about what things, and why, were going wrong due to the trade-offs. As a result, though it criticized the symptoms it saw (such as the annual Yuletide AO3 crash), fandom was unaware the trade-offs existed.
(As I stated earlier, by fandom I mean the people the OTW is in a social group relationship with: every person who volunteers, uploads fic to the AO3, reads fic at the AO3, uses FanLore, and so on.)
Not talking about trade-offs is perhaps the most common trade-off of all. You do not tell your boss's boss you are tired of buying Thin Mints. If you finally do, it's because the Thin Mint situation has become more intolerable than the repercussions you may experience as a result of talking about the Thin Mints.
When I began following the numerous posts about issues with the OTW, and the OTW election (in progress when I posted this), I was not at first thinking about trade-offs. Not until I saw someone refer to an OTW board member, Naomi N., as a "founder."
"Founder" is one of the labels you apply to someone when you believe they deserve perks, or trade-offs. And once I began thinking of the situation in the light of trade-offs, everything - the lack of communication, the inefficient and error prone development process, Yuletide breaking AO3 repeatedly - made sense.
Trade-offs are a single slice of something much larger - all consuming, really - for human beings: social exchange. Without each other, we die. Therefore, we continually make new deals, and adjust existing deals. Our ability to do this is a matter of life or death; our lives depend on knowing whether we can trust the stranger who stops to help us with a flat tire, and we are fucking good at this.
Our highly developed social exchange abilities is why we love crime shows so much. Crime shows (even when the detectives are werewolves) are about identifying and punishing the people who violate our rules of social exchange. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga sums up this diverse group of violators with the simple term cheaters.
An informal but no less important way of identifying and punishing cheaters is gossip. When we gossip, we have many terms for the people who embody our social exchange ideals (hero, saint), but we have far more for the people who fail them: coward, mean girl, thief, adulterer, scumbag, bully.
Fandom, like all human social groups, exists thanks to social exchange. What fans give each other is the same thing human beings give to each other in innumerable other social exchanges: time, and (to a much lesser extent in fandom) time's symbol, money. They write, they vid, they recommend fics, they organize a fan convention, they write summaries, they loan you a DVD you must watch right now. And in return they receive the time of others: the fics, vids, art, recs, feedback, picspams. This is why FanLib was so disgusting to fandom: it violated fandom's rules of social exchange by trying to profit without compensation off the time of others.
Like any social group, fandom punishes the people who violate its rules of social exchange, usually through gossip (in person, or online). Some of the rules are straightforward, and generally understood, such as "credit the maker of your icon, you ass." But other rules are harder to pin down.
Fandom_wank is a web site that identifies and punishes cheaters through online gossip, and is fairly good at identifying the hazier fandom social exchange violations, which can be seen in the tags. Examples: creator wank; elitism; fandom entitlement; flouncing; my education let me show you it; not good with criticism.
But trade-offs! Crap, still not done with them.
Trade-offs can make us uncomfortable because they do not fit into our neat social exchange guidelines.
Most social exchanges are clear cut. I write a fic, you read it and leave feedback. I watch a vid, and I email the vidder and tell her it was great. In each scenario, a person gives time, and receives time. When we obsess about feedback for fics (are kudos acceptable? must there be a comment?), we're establishing the acceptable social exchange.
But in a trade-off, someone gets a benefit which does not result in an immediate tangible benefit to others.
Basically, a trade-off is a loan. And eventually, it is called in.
One of the unspoken fandom social exchange rules (because it is a rule in human society in general; see Gazzaniga's The Ethical Brain) is that no fan's time is worth more than that of another fan.
This rule is enforced through insistence on proper credit - whether it is thanking a podficcer, mentioning your icon came from fan12345's screencaps, saying you got a fic idea from a work of fan art, leaving feedback for fanworks, and of course not plagiarizing. It is reflected in fandom_wank's tags such as creator wank, elitism, fandom entitlement, and so on.
At the OTW, however, the social exchange got way out of whack.
As you have probably guessed, I'm going to suggest this is at least partially due to life during wartime syndrome. Some of the "founders" got perks because the situation in 2007 seemed Really Bad. Thanks to OTW members and volunteers finally speaking up, fandom is discovering the trade-offs, of which they were previously unaware, and they are re-evaluating the OTW in light of the new information.
Reading the many statements by disillusioned and exhausted OTW volunteers, the same thing comes through repeatedly. They are people who gave, gave, gave. And while they were giving, they had to watch other people get the benefit of perks. Eventually, the giving people no longer felt valued. And some gave up. (Note: some left the OTW because events in their lives meant they simply could no longer give time to the OTW; I do not include them in the "disillusioned and exhausted" group).
That they spoke up about their experience fills me with appreciation and gratitude. They risked the worst punishment known to us humans: they risked exclusion from the group.
Running for a slot on the OTW board in the current election, Naomi N. has been singled out as a board member who received perks during her previous term on the board. One of the perks she received was acquiescence to a change and development process which suited her, but made other developers conclude their time would not be valued, and stay away. But the main perk she received appears to be an environment in which she was not subject to the same criticism and oversight as other members. Whether or not she deserved criticism isn't the point; the point is it wasn't allowed.
Her recent statement about the election makes me think of Captain Jack Aubrey when he realized his beloved ship could be taken away. Damn it, gentlepeople, I'm Lucky Jack, and these boards are soaked with my blood! She jumped in when it was life during wartime, so it must be incredibly painful to her to discover the perks she received - which she undoubtedly never saw as perks, because numerous people made sure she didn't - are being judged too high a price to pay.
But as Lucky Jack discovered, captains don't own their ships, the Fandom Navy is just letting them drive, and what the Fandom Navy wants from its captains can change. Inevitably will change. Fortunately, like Lucky Jack, I believe she will also discover that, as much as she loves captaining, she loves the Sea more.
The Sea being the cruel mistress wildly creative and turbulent social group we call fandom.
Conclusion: regardless of the outcome of the OTW elections, the OTW has been permanently changed, because people have begun to talk about the cost of the trade-offs. To that, I say: hooray!
I support the OTW and AO3. I plan to use the AO3 as my sole fanfiction archive for as long as it exists. I hope one day to be in a financial position that will allow me to commit time to it as a volunteer. I am thrilled by the work the OTW has done to protect the rights of vidders. I think the folks who have worked to make it all a reality are fantastic. But that does not mean I, and others, cannot re-evaluate and criticize the OTW.
I've seen many folks express worry about the future of the OTW, which is not surprising when you consider the fate of numerous fandom websites in the past. But if the OTW was set up correctly, the way hundreds imagined it should be back in May 2007, it will come through this. And the very good news is: it was set up correctly.
John Watson: People might talk.
Sherlock Holmes: They do little else.
-The Great Game, Sherlock BBC