There seems to be some confusion around here and elsewhere on the interwebs that ACTA is something local, like the EU equivalent of SOPA/PIPA. Unfortunately, ACTA is a treaty that was secretly negotiated and quietly pushed through by many governments from around the globe. It's already been signed by the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New ( Read more... )

We know the story by now, I suppose? ACTA is bad, but the European Parliament still needs to approve it, and there is a real chance they can be convinced not to do so if the people they represent make enough noise. Stop ACTA has summaries of and links to everything that's relevant. Here are some of the actions they recommend, in order of how much ( Read more... )

Okay, Fanfic.me is utterly hilarious, but they deserve a proper rend-and-tear post anyway. They put so much effort into their... thing. No, really, they did! It's all part of a cunning long-term plan!

Many thanks again to
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Fanfic.me appears to be a company that tries to coax people into posting fanfic on its site so it can market visitor eyeballs to advertisers. 
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Two articles recently accepted for publication/presentation: "Why we should talk about commodifying fan work" will appear in Transformative Works and Cultures in November, and "Open source production as a model for commodification of derivative works" will be presented at the Asian Workshop on Cultural Economics, which is organized by the the ( Read more... )

So, a Mr. Keith Mander bought up a Lord of the Rings fic archive with the express intention of making money out of it. Well. The relationship between Mander, LotR fic authors, and unfortunate legal reality as personified by the Tolkien estate is best summed up by this beautiful parable.
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This video gives a quick overview of why we shouldn't assume that the business model of the entertainment industry is worth protecting against the things it hates, like piracy or unlicensed creation of derivative works (such as all kinds of fanstuff).

( Video and rambling under the cut )

(I apologize for the lack of a cut in this post. There is something wrong with its html and it does not want to be fixed.)

A platform for the sale of digital content can impose restrictions upon customers, if customers get a great user experience in return. See iTunes. However, such a platform cannot impose baffling restrictions on how users are ( Read more... )

For those of us who read Dutch, a new report on the state of the comics industry in Belgium includes an article by Haruyuki Nakano (author of Manga Sangyoron) on the spectacular rise and quite exciting possibilities of manga on cellphones in Japan and Asia. The article starts from page 49 of this rather large pdf version of the report. Published by ( Read more... )

Quick recap: Kristina Busse's keynote "Affect and the individual fan" was given at the Textual Echoes conference and can be viewed in its entirety online. ( Read more... )