If fanfic writers are living in and fixing up buildings that theoretically belong to other people, FanLib's the guy who shows up to try to collect the rent, even though he doesn't own the buildings and hasn't done any of the fix-up work.

Posted May 22, 2007 12:45 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I can hear the lawyers firing up their word processors.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:02 AM by jmnlman

They have some at least tacit approval of various intellectual property holders, see their site for various indications of this.

I'd like to know which way the money is flowing here, if it is flowing between fanlib and the various IPs. Is, say, CBS paying fanlib or is fanlib paying CBS?

I can see good points and bad points about the whole concept and am sitting firmly on the fence until I'm convinced one way or another.

It is a very nice well-designed site, for what it's worth. But, well, I have some issues that I truly hope they'll address.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:06 AM by Leva

It's a trap!

Posted May 22, 2007 1:12 AM by Admiral Ackbar

I started making popcorn as soon as I heard about it a couple of days ago...

Apart from all the other things already raised in various venues, I can see there being fireworks when a couple of the old fandoms with Views on warnings clash horribly with the current ethos of warning for absolutely anything that people might possibly not want to read. It's going to be *really* fun when My Fandom, known for its "no death warnings because because killing them all is canonical, deal with it" faction, decides to mess with people's heads.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:16 AM by Julia Jones

Woo! Look at what showed up in the Google Ads over to the right!

Yep, an ad for FanLib!

(This is an idiosyncratic reaction, but my instant reaction to seeing anything in a Google-ad is that it's a scam.)

Posted May 22, 2007 1:23 AM by James D. Macdonald

Julia: That would be Blake's 7, then?

My own trivial gripe about fanlib is that it's just going to encourage those godawful juvenile smushnames. There's no way to search by pairing (their search facility is woefully lacking in general), so if you're writing slash or het and want people to able to find your story, you'll need to tag it. You can't use slashes in tags, so for instance, instead of Buffy/Angel people are going to tag their stories "bangel". I've already spotted one "mcshep". Yuck.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:32 AM by Jen Roth

James #6:

I'm curious, was it just a text ad or one of these? Their idea of what kind of advertising appeals to fanfic writers is...bizarre at the very least.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:40 AM by telesilla

#8: It's one of those automatically-generated text ads, in the "Ads by Google" box in the right-hand column on this page. It's the second from the top right now in that box as I look at it.

The full text of the ad reads:

Fan Fiction
Showcase and Discover Fan Fiction Where the stories continue...
FanLib.com

Just like a PublishAmerica ad or a New York Literary Agency ad, or any of the other literary-related ads that turn up in those Google-boxes.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:58 AM by James D. Macdonald

that Shrek/Gandalf/Harry Potter threesome

No foursome of Captain Kirk, Captain Crane and Doctor Smith and the Robot? Oh, the pain...

Posted May 22, 2007 2:00 AM by Serge

Some people have also suggested that it's possible that the site is aiming to draw in fanfiction authors to trap them. While I tend to view that as an overly paranoid view (as companies could find fanfiction authors easily in other ways), it's another reason authors are going to avoid it.

Posted May 22, 2007 2:16 AM by Crysiana

A huge honeypot to get the authors' names, addresses, and phone numbers? (What possible legitimate need could they have for the authors' phone numbers?)

-------------

Meanwhile, imagine my joy at discovering that Mary Sue Whipple is mentioned in the official history of Godawful Fan Fiction (http://www.godawful.net/)

(And here's someone who didn't get the joke: http://www.geocities.com/blablover5/fics/msw.html)

Ah, Mary Sue Whipple! When will we see your likes again?

That's what FanLib needs: More Mary Sue Whipple!

Posted May 22, 2007 2:36 AM by James D. Macdonald

Maybe I'm the only one, but after several years in fandom, anyone who not only spells "fan fiction" out, but uses a space (As FanLib does both on their site and in their ad), immediately screams "not in fandom" to me.

I suspect that any audience they gain is not going to be people who are in fandom now, but rather new people who stumble across it. This depresses me, because these people will then think that it is representative, while most anyone who writes quality fiction is likely going to stay the hell away.

Posted May 22, 2007 2:44 AM by Kylni

Maybe I'm the only one, but after several years in fandom, anyone who not only spells "fan fiction" out, but uses a space (As FanLib does both on their site and in their ad), immediately screams "not in fandom" to me.

What, you mean like what Uncle Jim did several times in the original post?

Making Light generally approves of fan fiction. See, for example....

Posted May 22, 2007 3:00 AM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

I didn't mean it in a negative way. I just mean that everyone I know who writes fanfiction regularly - at least in the anime/game part of fandom, which is where I hang out, though I don't remember noticing major differences in my forays into TV fandom - says "fanfic" habitually (or occasionally just "fic", or "fanfiction" if they're feeling elucidative). And I just noticed the other day when talking to a non-fanfic-writer friend that it looked odd when he spelled it "fan fiction."

And I feel like any archive run by actual authors, or people who interact with fanfic authors on a regular basis, would have used the compound word. That's all.

...And I may just be completely insane anyway, as it looks like my archive of choice when I'm not on LJ, FicWad, says "fan fiction," though it may be for parallelism - "original and fan fiction."

So really I may not have a point at all! Just an observation of dubious value.

Posted May 22, 2007 3:14 AM by Kylni

Also, it must be getting late, because my close-reading skills are suffering. I did re-skim the original post to make sure it wasn't going to look like I was insulting anyone, and I caught "Fanfiction" in the title and a couple of uses of "fanfic," though yes, the two-word version is in there as well.

And looking at FicWad again, while the header says what I stated above, just below that it says "fanfiction and original fiction."

Maybe it's a matter of context?

In any case, I better get to bed, before I fail at this conversation any further.

Posted May 22, 2007 3:24 AM by Kylni

Jim says "Fanfic" as well as "Fan Fiction". I'm thinking that they are both legitimate -- The full "Fan Fiction", or the fannish "fanfic".

#2: I can hear the lawyers firing up their word processors.

To write legalslash?

Posted May 22, 2007 3:42 AM by marty

So the ultimate goal of the fanfic community is to become part of a corporation? (McFanFic ?)

This is wrong on so many levels.

Posted May 22, 2007 5:01 AM by A.R.Yngve

A.R.Y.: Methinks you've misunderstood it so comprehensively (especially in view of your response to Cory's article) that the only applicable advice is the Irish farmer's directions to the lost tourists looking to get back to Dublin: "if I was you, I wouldn't start out from here."

Posted May 22, 2007 5:20 AM by Charlie Stross

A.R.Y. #18: A fairly large segment of the fanfic community has actually expressed a great deal of dismay at the existence of FanLib. The people who run FanLib are not part of the fanfic community and they are the one's whose goal is to produce McFanfic. Most of us in the fanfic community are content to do our own thing without any help from corporate sponsors.

Posted May 22, 2007 5:54 AM by telesilla

#4, Shouldn't that be: "I've got a bad feeling about this"?

Posted May 22, 2007 5:58 AM by Zarquon

*evil grin*

I've been throwing in my two cents' worth for the debate. I put up a list of seventeen questions on the Fanthropology community in LiveJournal (where one of their staffers showed up and said she was willing to answer questions). She has answered eight out of the seventeen questions I posted, as well as a supplementary one, and from that information I gleaned the following:

* The board of FanLib are self-selected, presumably on the basis of how much money they put in, rather than on any link to any fandom community.
* The board of FanLib are not answerable for their actions to anyone except possibly themselves for what happens to any venture capital they're given.
* The board of FanLib are not required to undergo any of the kinds of corporate oversight which is expected of a publicly owned corporation - it's a private company. [1]
* The board and staff of FanLib are totally unexperienced in the day-to-day business of running a large-scale multi-fandom fanfiction archive.

Given that so far they've failed to show *any* understanding of the fandom communities outside their own stereotyped views of what the average fan is (teenaged, brand-obsessed, easily fooled, and presumably male) I doubt they're going to get too far. It's going to be interesting... for Chinese values thereof.

[1] I don't know what the laws are in regards to overseeing the business practices of privately owned companies in the US. Could anyone enlighten me?

Posted May 22, 2007 6:25 AM by Meg Thornton

Kylni @ #13:
Maybe I'm the only one, but after several years in fandom, anyone who not only spells "fan fiction" out, but uses a space (As FanLib does both on their site and in their ad), immediately screams "not in fandom" to me.

Whereas to me, with multiple decades of perspective, people who just use "fanfic" immediately scream "I haven't been in fandom long enough to remember when the primary medium was print."

Posted May 22, 2007 6:57 AM by Susan

Slightly offtopic, but right below the Fanlib Google ad, there was this:

FanFiction Ringtones
10 Bonus Ringtones from FanFiction! Download Instantly. No CC Needed.

I'm wondering what that would sound like....

Posted May 22, 2007 7:05 AM by Connie H.

Lord help us...filk ringtones.

Posted May 22, 2007 7:09 AM by abi

Re #3: They don't have permissions from all of the rights holders. At best, they've got approval from the few they've been directly linked with -- Ghost Whisperer, The L Word, a few others. Why? Because (as others have also pointed out) if they'd somehow managed to get formal approval from every rights holder -- or even a few key ones -- they would be shouting it from the rooftops. They aren't.

Moreover, they've got fanfic that goes against the known wishes of several of the rights holders. (Adult HP fic, for example, which JKR et al have requested be kept away from places where younger readers might stumble upon it.) No way do they have every rights holder's permission.

Oh, and on another topic -- Meg @ #22, did you see they've now got the FAQ down for revisions?

Posted May 22, 2007 7:12 AM by G. Jules

Heard about it. I looked there once, and decided "never again" once I could stop my eyes from bleeding. I have to admit, I'm interested in finding out whether they actually *answer* some of the questions they've been frequently asked over the past couple of weeks.

Posted May 22, 2007 7:18 AM by Meg Thornton

Back in my fanfic days, everyone I knew worked on the principle of: "If you keep your head down and don't turn a profit, they'll leave you alone." Now, maybe we didn't stand on particularly solid legal ground with that philosophy, but I am 95% sure that the very litigious fandom I was involved in last was fully aware of the site I ran, but did nothing about it. (And we even sold t-shirts and gym bags and sweat pants...but carefully priced them to collect no profit.)

Making money off of someone else's intellectual property sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen, and I can't believe the folks running this site don't realize that. That's one of the downsides to internet fanfic: people are no longer being ushered into fanfic by people who can explain the history and rules to them.

Posted May 22, 2007 7:19 AM by Jennifer Pelland

#2: I can hear the lawyers firing up their word processors.

#17: To write legalslash?

Clarence Darrow/Perry Mason FTW!

/shudder

Posted May 22, 2007 7:28 AM by Q

people are no longer being ushered into fanfic by people who can explain the history and rules to them

I'm not sure that this is quite as true as it seems. If you manage to find fanfic on your own, and stay away from a couple of traps like fanfiction.net, you'll probably be in places where people will mention to you if you've stepped across some boundary line. There are also some other pressures--many archives and fests have specific spaces for disclaimers, indicating that it's generally considered good practice (if legally dubious) to have one.

Mostly I'm just commenting to note that it's odd to be reading a blog I normally read from an RL perspective, and to come across people I know well in fandom in the post...

Posted May 22, 2007 7:40 AM by Go Seaward

James D. Macdonald at #6 wrote:

> (This is an idiosyncratic reaction, but my instant reaction to seeing anything in a Google-ad is that it's a scam.)

Aw shucks - I run the occasional Google ad myself for my lame undervisited sudoku site, and I don't want your money.

Well, yes, I supposed I do want your money if you have no further use for it, but I'm not actively soliciting.

Posted May 22, 2007 7:42 AM by Steve Taylor

Making money off of someone else's intellectual property sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen, and I can't believe the folks running this site don't realize that.

Presumably they do, which is why they have it in their TOS that, if you get sued, not only will they not help you (which is pretty standard, though most sites which host fanfic don't go around in their FAQ trying to convince you that if you post on their site it's all perfectly legal because they're Special), but you have to defend them, "including but not limited to attorney's fees", if they get sued.

Posted May 22, 2007 8:21 AM by Jennifer Barber

Just as a comment, the cost to bid on the keyword "fanfiction" in adwords was $1.00 a click as of a few months ago. It may have changed, but I doubt it. There is lots of money in online advertising and fans are a prime target because we buy merchandise.

Posted May 22, 2007 8:24 AM by Leva

See, Jim? I told you some of those were legit.

Posted May 22, 2007 8:24 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

#21:

No, it should be "It's a trick. Get an ax."

Posted May 22, 2007 8:25 AM by Malthus

#2: I can hear the lawyers firing up their word processors.

#17: To write legalslash?

#29: Clarence Darrow/Perry Mason FTW!

I was thinking more along the lines of "Copyright, etc. and Trade Marks (Offences and Enforcement) Act 2002/Sexual Offences Act 2003".

Posted May 22, 2007 8:34 AM by Jules

To start off, IANAFFANR (I am neither a fan fiction author nor reader). It seems, though, like there might be room for a website that was honest and aware of the fan fiction community to provide enough value to fan fiction authors that authors would be willing to pay for memberships. I've been trying to think what such a site should offer -- does any of this seem valuable to the more knowledgable people?

* Binding agreements from publishers not to sue any author who complies with take-down requests (perhaps with an exception for obstinate repeat offenders). I would think these could be obtained for select authors, it seems to be the default behavior anyways.

* Automatic format conversion: upload in word, HTML, plain text etc. and your reader can download in any of them. Support for illustrated fiction.

* Searchable and customizable RSS feeds. If I want to know every time that someone posts a Sherlock Holmes/Harry Potter crossover, I can.

* Reliable backup servers, including verifiable date stamps to settle plagiarism disputes.

* If the site grows popular enough, cons organized for the members of the community.

I don't have any plans to carry this out myself, but when I see an idea done badly I like to think about how it could be done well.

Posted May 22, 2007 8:46 AM by DavidS

I am all for fanfic right up until the point where people start trying to make a living off of it. In my experience, people who make a solid income drawing or writing other people's characters begin to get a fair bit of derision from the community, feeling that it is sort of like hanging a neon sign on Robin Hood's hideout. It ruins the sneaky, quiet, (dis)honest love affair the rest of us are trying to have with other people's characters.

I've had a lot of fun writing fic, I've made a lot of friends and I've been running around in it, mostly in the anime/game scene, for ten years now. Made any money off of it? Not a damn cent. That's not what fanfic is for. In fact I lost some in my one obscure short-run Vagrant Story zine, because even I admitted that it's not a high demand series and I'd go so far as to say readership for it is almost nil. I printed the book because I liked my story and some Kinko's-employed friends had bound it for me as a birthday present, so I made a few copies for a convention art table and sold them under my cost. The ones that didn't sell then I sold online for a donation to the Humane Society's Hurricane Katrina Fund. After that, I still have leftovers. From an inital print run of ten. Not really breaking the bank, here.

Other zines I've contributed to have all been done by fans, for fans, at cost. When someone comes along, and tries to make a buck off of being a fan without going through the proper routes, they make the rest of us look bad, and call too much attention to us, to boot. It makes our "by fans for fans no profit" seem like we're lying.

We like to lay low, but that's not as easy as it used to be.

as an aside, fanfic/Fan Fiction is to me like the difference between saying 'pornography' and 'porn.' It depends. Are you in a courtroom, or are you actually looking to buy some of the product in question? One is formal and one isn't and it depends on your audience. I almost always say fanfic, because I'm talking to people who know what I mean.

However, if you say "porno," you just sound like someone's disapproving grandmother bewailing the current state of American morals.

And, I apologize for pairing name mashups. I'd love the etymology for that, actually. When my partner started using 'seifuu' as a handle on ffnet--referencing a Final Fantasy VIII pairing-- we hadn't heard of it anywhere else, but it must have been happening in other places to become so nauseatingly insidious so soon. This was in '99, and we never used it in earnest for fic-labeling, sticking to the tried and true (x) or (/) which we still use. It's bad enough when the names are in English, but the Japanese messes of English names squished together-- I'm thinking here of Pirates of the Caribbean pairings-- are a nightmare. If we had anything to do with starting that mess or even contributing to it, we're sorry. Really.

#5 Julia-- Obsessive warnings are one of the reasons we've stoped posting fic anywhere but our own site. It's gotten to the point where people want you to put the entire damn fic in the warning, so they'll know they don't want to read it, even though by reading the summary, they pretty much already have.

Posted May 22, 2007 9:22 AM by Tenshi no Korin

DavidS: a lot of that is being planned as we speak (see LJ community Fanarchive). The only thing on your list I don't think has been mentioned is the "permission from publishers" thing; fanfic writers as a group prefer the current tacit agreement where by and large publishers and other copyright holders pretend we don't exist if we don't force them to do otherwise. (That's one of the reasons FanLib was doomed from the beginning, actually.) Optional subscriptions as a way of raising funds for servers and bandwidth if donations are insufficient is more likely than mandatory membership fees, too.

Posted May 22, 2007 9:24 AM by Jennifer Barber

I can see a for-profit fanfic archive format where there's a split in revenue between the intellectual property holder (IP) and the archive itself. And I suspect we may see this happen eventually -- there's a lot of money at stake here.

However.

There's a slight problem, as others have pointed out, with *content* ... and major advertisers have content restrictions. Google's are a bit draconian, and they don't even *define* adult content.

Also ... how many IPs want to look like they're making money off pr0n? A significant portion of fanfic is a bit strongly rated and that's the whole point of the fic. (Plot? What Plot?)

I sure wouldn't want the job of policing a legitimately for-profit archive for content. Strikes me as a bit of a thankless job.

OTOH, I would have no problem posting my fanfiction (which tends to be het/gen) on a for-profit archive if I knew a percentage of the profit was going back to the IP. Particularly if it was an individual author rather than a big corporation that was getting the moola. Because few authors make the money they deserve anyway.

Leva

Posted May 22, 2007 9:29 AM by Leva

Meg Thornton @ 22

* twirls cutlass *

"Har! Har! The pirates are here!"

The first thing I thought on seeing their site was "Oh, it's a vulture capitalist milking machine", and your post rather confirmed that. My guess is that the board, and whatever shadowy figures stand behind it, don't give a rat's hindquarters about fic, the fans, or any other primary aspect of this site. I think they're afters secondary aspects: a way to launder VC money into their own pockets, while simultaneously touting themselves as Web 2.0 gods, thus adding to their Wall Streetcred. As we all know, godhead of that type is somewhat transitory, but what the hay, Fimbulwinter comes, and we move on to the next universe.

Jim is probably right, this venture is going to augur in, sooner rather than later, I think, and the people who set it up won't care a bit. They'll be counting the currency on the way out the back door.

IANAL, but I believe that the precise responsibilities of an officer of a privately-held company are less determined by explicit law than by contract law applied to their (ostensible) hiring contract. For the owners themselves there isn't any control to speak of. And how much you want to bet that the angels' money comes in as a loan via a third-party VC consortium, thus muddling the trail even further?

Hmm ... Gordon Gecko fanfic anyone?

Posted May 22, 2007 9:32 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

#37 DavidS-- There are lots of free fanfic archives online (some of which have most of those amenities) for sharing fic between readers. These are especially good for authors who have no website of their own. It was more relevant before the advent of blogs, and the quality varies wildly of course.

ffnet is now too dilapidated and wank-ridden to even be worth linking to, but ficwad is an excellent alternative.

Binding agreements would be a nightmare, though. The range of fandoms has no limit and trying to get those permissions would be several full-time jobs. the majority authors in my experience are happy with a don't ask don't tell policy, and turn the other way. There are a few heavily lawyered exceptions, and you will not find their names said kindly among fans. You also won't find fic for them easily.

Most ficwriters I know would regard any sort of pay-site with some suspicion.

Posted May 22, 2007 9:32 AM by Tenshi no Korin

It is not axiomatic that profiting from fanfiction is impossible, or will lead to certain doom, or cannot lead to independently-creative professional work, it is simply that this is a thorny, rocky road, where the threat is the likelihood of notice by the primary rights-holder(s), and your only hope in that eventuality is their mercy or inaction.

Waving a banner does not help -- this is not Japan, FanLib is not Comiket, and just as not every circle is CLAMP, there's a big jump from "Free/In-Trade" to "Pay Even a Penny".

Even worse, I'd worry that getting the permission of SOME rights-holders, and then posting and charging for access to works derived from properties of rights-holders not contacted (or worse, contacted and who refused), is going to do more harm that good when the lawpocalypse arrives. It pretty well demonstrates that you were fully aware of the issues involved.

Posted May 22, 2007 9:44 AM by BSD

Steve #31:

Aw shucks - I run the occasional Google ad myself for my lame undervisited sudoku site, and I don't want your money.

Well, nothing personal, but I've seen entirely too many sites, advertised by Google Ads (in one of my incarnations I follow Google Ads to see where they go and whether they should be blocked from that site), with micro-unreadable text all the way at the bottom of the page that says "By using this service you agree to have your cell phone charged $9.95 per month" or something similar.

So, again nothing personal, but if I wanted sodoku I'd just Google on "sodoku," because (idiosyncratically) when I see something advertised in a Google Ad if I don't see the scam right away I figure that I just haven't looked hard enough.

I may not be the only person who has that reaction.

Posted May 22, 2007 9:45 AM by James D. Macdonald

Bruce @41: I decided that Web 2.0 had gone Bubble, and not in a good way, earlier this month, when I saw this. (Don't get me going about the overrated advantages of ignorance in start-ups.)

This is just another cynical game of fleece-the-VC, and not even a terribly well-thought-out one. The only risk is that legitimate fanfic writers will be among the victims.

I'm sticking my savings in real estate. It may go down, but it's not going remotely as far as these carpetbaggers when the stock exchange music stops.

Posted May 22, 2007 9:46 AM by Charlie Stross

Jim, re: adsense scam sites -- Google's cracking down fairly hard on the most egregious offenders.

There's a business model where scammers make a site with lots of ads, and a little text content, often ripped off from legitimate sites -- there was one that simply displayed the RSS feeds from my site, to my everlasting annoyance.

Then the scammer buys a whole bunch of very cheap ads and points 'em at the site.

Their business model is (a) buy cheap ads and (b) readers then click on more expensive ads on their site. This is called click arbitrage. And it's big business ... I've seen one scammer go on record claiming 70K/income with 75% profit/month.

Google is cracking down, of course, *finally*. Because this business model hurts them. (And annoys me, because, dude, they had nofollow on all the links in my rss feeds, in addition to stealing my feeds for their profit.)

And the end result is going to be a lot less scummy websites that drag down the value of adsense ads.

Google's also cracking down on some other areas of scamminess. I think they're aware of the noise-to-bandwidth ratio in the ads and are looking to improve things.

Posted May 22, 2007 10:04 AM by Leva

As reactions go, one can hardly go wrong with fanlib fanfiction.

Posted May 22, 2007 10:05 AM by Admiral Ackbar

I've seen this before.

There are three types of people involved in this scheme:
- the FanLib guys, who probably do believe in their product, and are going to get screwed.
- upper level corporate management, who don't know much about the Web and know less about fanfic, but see this as a way to follow the trend and make big bucks, having been sold on this by -
- not-quite-so-high corporate management, who know that this is crap but see it as a way to bust out their superiors and make some quick personal profit before the whole thing collapses.

And there is my cynicism ration for today.

Posted May 22, 2007 10:08 AM by Jon Meltzer

#14

What, you mean like what Uncle Jim did several times in the original post?

When quoting or semi-quoting the FanLib people.

#20

The people who run FanLib are not part of the fanfic community....

That is intuitively obvious.

#41

Jim is probably right, this venture is going to augur in, sooner rather than later, I think, and the people who set it up won't care a bit. They'll be counting the currency on the way out the back door.

Time to get your bids in on the deadpool at Fucked Company.

Posted May 22, 2007 10:12 AM by James D. Macdonald

I am actually curious about Making Light's views on the business model of http://www.battlecorps.com/BC2/index.html

They seem profitable. They've been in business for some time, and they've been acquiring new properties. They seem to be kind of a merging of battletech novels with the battletech fanfic world, posted on the internet on a subscription basis.

I know few people are going to be up to date on the politics of the battletech fanfic publishing world, but I'm not a subscriber to their site and I've always been curious about it from the business point of view, and how they fit into the wide world of publishing.

Posted May 22, 2007 10:21 AM by Patrick

I have to admit, I've been deliberately avoiding the FanLib site. Something about what they are doing and how it has been presented just strikes me as unpleasant and the type of venture I don't want to associate with in any way.

Besides, it's always so much more fun to watch these things implode from afar.

Posted May 22, 2007 10:35 AM by MsCongeniality

Charlie Stross @ 45

O great Arachne, Builder of webs! I am gobsmacked by that 13-year old "entrepreneur". So Web 2.0 is all about Junior Achievement? And the writer of that fluff is "inspired"? Anyone want to bet on when we start seeing Web 2.1? My advice is to stand well back from the giant sucking vortex.

Posted May 22, 2007 10:39 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

#46

Jim, re: adsense scam sites -- Google's cracking down fairly hard on the most egregious offenders.

I don't see anything they're doing as ending the scamminess of WL Writers Literary Agency, PublishAmerica, or any of the other frequent Adsense advertisers. Hitting link farms and google traps isn't enough. There are enough scams that still fall on this side of the letter of the law to make going to any Adsense advertiser risky.

Posted May 22, 2007 10:43 AM by James D. Macdonald

The one fan produced derivative work I'm not averse to letting someone profit from is one-off artist alley sketches. I'm even pretty neutral on copying off some high quality prints of some of your art sketches and selling them to me out of a binder. Of course, 90% of that stuff is originally derived from Japanese works, and the companies that release anime in the U.S. seem to be very litigation-light... mostly because they understand the power of fan word-of-mouth.

What people don't seem to understand is that comiket and the doujin writers don't make any money. Anything they do make over their costs is used to finance the next book, or con.

I can't think of anything even remotely legitimate (other than hobby tables in artist alleys in cons) that makes a profit from fanfiction.

Well... hmm.

Actually, you can make a pretty substantial profit reselling doujin you import here. I wonder where that falls in the continuum?

Posted May 22, 2007 10:58 AM by Leah Miller

I will be amazed if this site subsists for more than a year without vicious takedown demands from copyright holders. For every corporation who is enlightened enough to see that fanfiction helps to propagate a brand, there are three who regard it as a threat. Hello, Fox, I'm looking at you.

Plus, where's the fun in fanfiction if it has a corporate sponsor? No one wants to go see the dance band at the school gym... they want to sneak out to the punk rock show in someone's basement.

And the site is very web 2.0 in a grim way. As a web designer, I'm already sick of the 2.0 look. Can we move on to 3.0, with puppies and flowers?

Posted May 22, 2007 11:01 AM by Steve Libbey

Can I briefly gloat? Halting State features Web π. (3.1415926535 ...) Looks like I got there just in time ...

Posted May 22, 2007 11:09 AM by Charlie Stross

Somehow I am unsurprised that Simon & Schuster is involved.

That's no moon...

Posted May 22, 2007 11:10 AM by Greg London

Jim, #53 -- oh, publishing scams. Right. I think I've managed to ban most of them from my site ... Took a few months of whack-a-mole on the scam publishers, but I rarely see them anymore. Maybe one or two new ones a week.

Posted May 22, 2007 11:13 AM by Leva

Actually, if you're going to link to Icarus, her subsequent post is better, summing up the FanLib story.

Posted May 22, 2007 11:18 AM by Lis Riba

I can't think of anything even remotely legitimate (other than hobby tables in artist alleys in cons) that makes a profit from fanfiction.

I've been following the Fanlib story pretty closely (was even approached by them last winter at some point--sadly I deleted the email, thinking it was a scam, which it was but not in the way I thought), and what's interesting is the way Fanlib keeps pointing to Fanfiction.net, Livejournal, and Yahoogroups as evidence that it's okay to make a profit off fic.

The problem there is that LJ and Yahoo don't tailor their business towards fic, and aren't out recruiting ficwriters; however FFN is a bit of a dodgy situation, since they went ad-supported a few years back and some people are claiming they're making a profit. I haven't seen any real data on that, but from a practical point of view (if not a legal one), FFN is a much weaker target than Fanlib would be. No venture capital there, after all.

Fanlib claims to have a lawyer on the board, and I would hope they've done the research, but when challenged on the legal status of fic, they dodge the question and just say that the IP holder would likely come after Fanlib first. Except as noted in Jim's original post, Fanlib's TOS requires the writers to indemnify Fanlib. (With what, pray tell? Half the ficwriters I know are underemployed or in college or grad school.) At any rate, Fanlib has not proved to anyone's satisfaction that they won't get sued by copyright-holders, and has not reassured their prospective content-providers that they won't pass the cost of litigation on.

Even if Fanlib settles, the situation could get very ugly, and nobody wants to see the general public's reaction to, say, HP Threesome chan tentacle bondage porn in the letters column of the average hometown paper. If it does go to court, oddly enough, the wackiest stories farthest from the original source are most likely to be protected, but that sort of thing is really impossible to predict...

The whole thing has really been a debacle in terms of community relations, complicated by the fact that the LJ-based live-action media fandom community is, by and large, female, and none of the decision-makers at Fanlib are either female or in any way conversant with the live-action media fandom community's history or customs. In fact at least one of the press releases implies that Chris Williams invented the idea of sharing fanfiction on the net. (The residents of alt.tv.x-files and the Trek usenet groups will be intrigued to learn this; it's right up there with some guys at Harvard announcing they invented fanvidding in 1996.)

The new fanfic archive project, spearheaded by Shalott, may well be able to pull off constructing a community-supported alternative, if the community can agree on what should be posted in it and how it should operate.

Posted May 22, 2007 11:49 AM by cofax

I can't think of anything even remotely legitimate (other than hobby tables in artist alleys in cons) that makes a profit from fanfiction.

All those collections of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, or the occasional entire series of it? That one book about Little Women told from the perspective of the father, the 'finished' version of Jane Austen's last unfinished novel, the new Romeo & Juliet anime coming out...

I can never remember if 'fanfic' is supposed to cover fan works based on out-of-copyright works or not. The Les Miserables fanfic archive I've stumbled across on occasion suggests it should--there's certainly plenty of fanfic, good and not, based on works that aren't under copyright anymore--but a lot of discussion about making a profit on fanfic seems to assume that all fanfic is the kind based on still-in-copyright material. I suppose the majority of it is, but it's worth making the distinction about which way someone is using the term, when discussing legitimacy and profit.

Posted May 22, 2007 11:57 AM by Fade Manley

I'm not sure which of several possible threads is the one in which to bring up Simon and Schuster's *other* latest venture,[*] involving a prediction market for unpublished fiction. It all smacks of some really twisted reality show, to me.

[*] NYT site, may require some sort of registration

Posted May 22, 2007 12:00 PM by joann

> Halting State features Web π. (3.1415926535..)

Based on the model of TeX version numbers ?

Posted May 22, 2007 12:22 PM by Alan Braggins

Alan: no, it's a comment on irrational optimism.

Posted May 22, 2007 12:47 PM by Charlie Stross

Fade Manley @61

Doh! There was a version of that post that the internets ate. That original version included a further qualifier, something like:

I can't think of anything even remotely legitimate that makes a profit from fanfiction (excluding fic based on works currently in the public domain).

But even THAT calls things into question. Is a commercially published star trek novel fanfic? (Hmm, it looks like there's some debate on that subject in the community itself.)

I suppose I conventionally think of fanfic as "derivative works produced by fans of currently copyrighted material without permission from the author." But that's not the real definition, it's just what comes to mind for me.

Posted May 22, 2007 12:54 PM by Leah Miller

But that's not the real definition, it's just what comes to mind for me.

For the heck of it, I went back to the OED's SF Citation project to see how they defined fanfic.

Here's what they came up with:

fiction, usually fantasy or science fiction, written by a fan rather than a professional author, esp. that based on already-existing characters from a television series, book, film, etc.; (also) a piece of such writing

Posted May 22, 2007 1:03 PM by Lis Riba

I can never remember if 'fanfic' is supposed to cover fan works based on out-of-copyright works or not.

The people involved in Jane Austen fandom consider what we do "fanfic", certainly, though I agree that discussions on the legality of fanfic usually tend to leave out the fact that not all fanfic is based on works where copyright is an issue.

(And considering how many of the people writing Austenfic seem to have never read the original novels and instead are using, most frequently, the 1996 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice as "canon", well.... But there's still a great deal of Austen fanfic that can be presumed to be 100% legal.)

Posted May 22, 2007 1:03 PM by Jennifer Barber

I'm reading on a few other places that are compiling information (mostly fandom_wank, for the entertainment value) that one of the original contests-with-prizes was based on volume of uploaded fanfic. Whether that's by number of individual fics, or wordcount, that's so amazingly prone to abuse I have no idea how they thought that was a good idea. They certainly don't seem to have anything in the abusive TOS to explain what they'd do in cases of plagiarism. (Even aside from the weirdness of trying to define the fuzzier edges of plagiarism when talking about fanfic. Ah, the joys of gray boundaries between things.)

I did a test search on the website, to see what they had available. I quickly discovered:

1) They don't have a category listed for the fandom I write in.

2) They don't have any way to search by rating, but...

3) You can turn on and off an 'adult' filter... through clicking a button that doesn't even make a pretense of asking you for an age.

Even if this were a legitimate effort by well-meaning fans rather than corporate goons trying to make a quick buck off the work of other people, I'd be pointing and laughing. The main point of a large archive site is to make it easy to find what you want to read. Incompetent search features rather negate the purpose.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:21 PM by Fade Manley

My guess is that the basic impulse behind FanLib's creation is the desire to duplicate the success of Web 2.0 content management systems like LiveJournal, MySpace, and Flickr. Its creators looked around and said, "Okay, what do people spend a lot of time doing on the Web which generates content but doesn't yet have an omnium-gatherum content management site? ... Aha! Fan fiction!"

I suspect Jim is right, and that FanLib's founders aren't all that different from some of the clever wights who looked at the DotCom bubble, decided that they too were going to become fabulously wealthy by running an online business, and only as an afterthought decided what they were going to sell. (My favorite: Garden.com. Don't get me started.) So far, I'd say the biggest difference is that their press release isn't written in dotcom-era gibberish:

FanLib Brings Fan Fiction into the Mainstream, Launches New Website with Major Media and Publishing Partners

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FanLib®, the People Powered Entertainment(TM) company, ...

...launches its flagship website today at www.FanLib.com. The online storytelling community destination fuses the power of the Web with the passion of the most avid entertainment fans.

If anything can truly be said to fuse the power of the Web with the passion of the most avid entertainment fans, it's Television without Pity. Which has been around for a while.

FanLib.com provides fans with a new home to write, showcase, discover, rant and rave about their favorite movies, TV shows, and books.

The launch of FanLib.com represents the coming of age of fan fiction, or "fanfic."

Fan fiction is the original consumer generated media -

- original works of fiction written by fans and based on their favorite TV, film and book characters.

FanLib.com launches with co-promotional partners including HarperCollins, Penguin Books, Showtime Networks, Simon & Schuster, and Starz Entertainment. The launch partners are heavily featured and have customized marketing integrated on the site while providing promotion for FanLib.com.

...

I went and poked around at the FanLib site. It's not that great:

All the fandoms are dumped into a single bin where they can only be sorted alphabetically or by number of fics.

Stories are categorized only by their primary subject. For example, stories based on Batman comics, animated cartoons, movies, and graphic novels would all be jumbled together.

The interface is slow, cumbersome, and burdened with unnecessary graphics.

The interface will only display ten stories at a time. Given that their Harry Potter section has over five hundred stories in it already, that's a problem that will only get worse.

Within a single fandom's worth of listings, you can sort by featured, most viewed, highest rated, newest to oldest, oldest to newest, most favorited, shortest, or longest; but you can't sort by author or title.

The submission form won't let you tag your fanfic as being based on a work they don't already have on their approved list. For example, you can claim that a piece of fanfic is based on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but not Anna Karenina.

You can only tag your fiction as belonging to a single "genre" from their preselected list --

action & adventure, alternate universe, angst, animation, anime, art, biographical, children, classic, comedy, crime/gangster, cult, cyberpunk, deathfic, drabble, drama, established relation, faith & spirituality, family, fantasy, first time, fluff, gay & lesbian, genderswap, genfic, historical/period, holiday, Hong Kong action, horror, hurt & comfort, miscellaneous, music & musicals, mystery, news/current events, politics/religion, PWP, real person, reality, romance, sci-fi, self insertion, slash, soap opera, sports, teen, thriller/suspense, vignette, war/military, Western.

-- which is insane. They're mixing up non-exclusive characteristics like length, style, genre, setting, emotional tone, and sexual content. They're combining politics with religion, but making "news/current events" a different category. They're allowing "real person" fic, which IMO is inviting trouble to come live with you. And they've left out known varieties like (O barf me out) mpreg, babyfic, songfic, wingfic, badfic, and mst3k.

Their codings for sexual content are a simple age-based rating -- all ages, 13+, etc. In a milieu where fans can assimilate codes like "fluffy AU non-PWP slash noncon underage mpreg OTP wingfic, some bloodplay, PG-13 except for one scene you can skip," that's way too low-res.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:24 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

My first thought on seeing this was "Oh my, the Bubble is back."

It may be time to do what I only thought about with dotcomBubble 1.0, namely bust out a copy of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and see which ridiculous idea from the South Sea Bubble is ready to launch again. My pick for the last go-round was "company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is"; given the high ideals and plan of FanLib being set forth here, I think this could still be a winner.

BTW someone was asking upstream about the duties and responsibilities of the board of a privately held company. They are not negligible - they mostly correspond to those of public companies - but a lot of board members are oblivious of them. If anyone is interested, I can expatiate at length on the subject. (I was formerly CEO, board member, and chairman of a privately held corporation which was unsuccessfully trying for VC money.)

Posted May 22, 2007 1:27 PM by Clifton Royston

Joann (62), I heard about that yesterday from another editor. Someone's got to be putting funny stuff in the water at S&S.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:37 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Their codings for sexual content are a simple age-based rating

And their ratings conflate language with content, so that a story with a single use of "shit" in it is stuck into the Adult section, alongside the Dumbledore bondage tentacle porn. Oh, that's helpful.

I tried to look for the names of writers I knew, but absent searching for them one at a time, there was no way to scan the member list easily, so I gave up. I hadn't realized you couldn't sort by author name, which is deeply frustrating, and indicated of Fanlib's presumption that fic is fungible.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:43 PM by cofax

Their codings for sexual content are a simple age-based rating

And their ratings conflate language with content, so that a story with a single use of "shit" in it is stuck into the Adult section, alongside the Dumbledore bondage tentacle porn. Oh, that's helpful.

I tried to look for the names of writers I knew, but absent searching for them one at a time, there was no way to scan the member list easily, so I gave up. I hadn't realized you couldn't sort by author name, which is deeply frustrating, and indicated of Fanlib's presumption that fic is fungible.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:43 PM by cofax

Clifton, maybe it's time to get started reprinting Bubble Playing Cards.

In fact, this would be a good business for Charlie Stross's 13-year-old CEO to diversify into, once his chemistry card game is established.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:51 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

Fuses the power of the Web? Has "fuse" become one of those words like "synergy" that you use to suggest that something exciting and profitable is going to happen as a result of your proposal, only you have no idea how it's actually supposed to work?

It's the Underpants Gnomes School of Business Planning:

Step 1. Collect fan fiction.
Step 2. ...
Step 3. PROFIT!

Posted May 22, 2007 1:53 PM by janine

“history and rules&rdquo, huh?

In the late Seventies, Les Fish, original member of the Nameless Anarchist Horde (from whom a number of the SCA Horde tropes were stolen, but that's several other stories) and now Well Known Filker, introduced me to "slash", which I thought was very odd.
However, she was actually GoH at a couple of Trek cons. It also seemed weird to me to actually be PAID to be a Trekkie, but non olet.

“history and rules&rdquo, huh?
I guess it's like they say, “We'll KNOW that rock is dead when you need a degree to get a job in it.&rdquo

Posted May 22, 2007 1:57 PM by Neil in Chicago

Charlie @45: This is just another cynical game of fleece-the-VC, and not even a terribly well-thought-out one.

Yeah, you'd think people would have learned by now not to try to fleece the Viet Cong.

Posted May 22, 2007 1:58 PM by Canard

BSD @ 43, it's possible I'm just having decoding problems this morning, but are you emphasizing or ignoring one of FanLib's logical errors, that being their assumption that The Net=USA?

It's not Japan, either.

Or Australia, although the flimsiness of their selection process may well make some authors vulnerable to prosecution under that country's kiddie porn laws.

Posted May 22, 2007 2:12 PM by JESR

#64 -- Wouldn't that be transcendental optimism?

Posted May 22, 2007 2:12 PM by Neil Rest

This may be me being naive here, but I thought the reason no one made money off of fanfic was because if you wanted to make money, you had to get permission from the rights holder, and if you have permission from the rights holder, you aren't writing a fanfic- you're official now.

Posted May 22, 2007 2:12 PM by Patrick

Is this going to turn into one of those sci-fi vs. SF vs. skiffy faction wars?

When I write Gernsback slash*, I call it "fanatifiction."

*I do not write Gernsback slash. I also did not invent the roman à sports fan when I did not write À la recherche du temps Purdue/IU, a ten-volume coming-of-age story set in the Boilermakers' locker room in 1972.

Posted May 22, 2007 2:24 PM by Howard Peirce

3:I did look at the site. Not really sure what this tacit approval means in practice. After all I rather doubt there is tacit approval for sexual explicit Harry Potter for instance. It only takes one rights holder to get mad.

Posted May 22, 2007 2:48 PM by jmnlman

H.P. @ 81: Helpless quivering mirth.

Posted May 22, 2007 3:04 PM by Clifton Royston

Charlie: Is it perhaps an early warning sign of the Singularity when you can just barely get an SF thriller into publication before most of the events and features it describes start happening?

Posted May 22, 2007 3:12 PM by Clifton Royston

Tenshi (38): And, I apologize for pairing name mashups. I'd love the etymology for that, actually. When my partner started using 'seifuu' as a handle on ffnet--referencing a Final Fantasy VIII pairing-- we hadn't heard of it anywhere else, but it must have been happening in other places to become so nauseatingly insidious so soon.

I think, though I'm not positive, that originated in X-Files fandom. Harry Potter is where I first encountered it, with the unfortunate Snape/* pairing names: Snarry, Snupin, Snucius, Snaco and Snack. It's also quite prevalent in SGA fandom, which has the result of making any pairing involving Rodney sound like something you'd order at McDonalds': "Hi, I'd like two McSheps, a McDex and a McWeir Happy Meal to go."

Posted May 22, 2007 3:24 PM by Darkrose

Patrick @80: There's still the matter of works out of copyright. Someone who writes their Javert/Valjean Les Miserables fanfic has as much "permission" to write it as the latest Mary Russel novel dealing with Sherlock Holmes does; but I wouldn't really call the former official, whether or not the fanfic writer in question manages to make money for it.

Or, in a different direction: I write fanfic for a roleplaying game's setting, and the owners of that game have made it quite clear that they're just fine with people writing fanfic and posting it online. I can't sell that fic (except maybe to them, if they ever cared to publish fiction based on the setting), but I could certainly put it on a website with standard Google ads and "make money off it" in that way if I felt like it. I'd have permission, and I'd be making money off of it (in theory--the fandom's not big enough that this is likely in practice), but it still wouldn't be "official", and it would still definitely be fanfic.

But then, I consider the Mary Russel novels, which seem to sell quite well and so presumably make their author money, to be Sherlock Holmes fanfic. So I may be using a different definition of the word "fanfic" than you are. I'd consider most approved tie-in novels for property fanfic too, except in the cases where it's clear the author was chosen for their name or connections and not because of any appreciation for the property, in which case it's usually just a bad tie-in novel.

Posted May 22, 2007 3:27 PM by Fade Manley

Canard @ 77

Yeah, you'd think people would have learned by now not to try to fleece the Viet Cong.

Oh, but it makes such ideologically pure sweaters!

Posted May 22, 2007 3:27 PM by Bruce Cohen, SpeakerToManagers

Howard Pierce @ 81

I call it "fanatifiction."

Fundamentalist slash?

Posted May 22, 2007 3:32 PM by Bruce Cohen, SpeakerToManagers

#65 Leah Miller: I suppose I conventionally think of fanfic as "derivative works produced by fans of currently copyrighted material without permission from the author." But that's not the real definition, it's just what comes to mind for me.

Hmmm. "Derivative works produced by fans of currently copyrighted material without creative control from the author." ?

Posted May 22, 2007 3:37 PM by MWT

I think the sentence "Investors have $3 milllion dollars to publish fan fiction" sounds like a con man pulling out a flash roll to lure in the suckers and the uneducated.

Posted May 22, 2007 3:49 PM by Victoria

So I may be using a different definition of the word "fanfic" than you are.

If so, you're not the only one here who has a slightly different definition than most. My own view on TV/film adaptations of novels is that they are nothing but high-budget fanfic. They may be good fanfic, worthy of being fanficced in their own right, but that doesn't make them the same as the original source. Not even if you enjoy the adaptation more than the original--which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, so long as you're honest about it.

But then, I spent a few years in a fandom where there was a great deal of outrage over the casting of a recent adaptation because the lead was played by someone with a significantly smaller bust size than the person in the same role for an earlier adaptation, when there's next to no physical description of that character in the book. With talk of boycotting and everything. That's naturally colored my views somewhat.

Someone even wrote a fic dramatizing my opinion of people who write in a supposedly book-based fandom and time after time include scenes that were never in the book in question. Some have bragged about never having bothered reading the book they call themselves fans of, in fact. (It also parodies a couple of other trends in the fandom, so some of the "mistakes" are very much intentional. But that's beside the point.)

Disclaimer: I would never actually treat books the way "I" do in that story.

Posted May 22, 2007 3:55 PM by Jennifer Barber

Fade Manley @86: Someone who writes their Javert/Valjean Les Miserables fanfic has as much "permission" to write it as the latest Mary Russel novel dealing with Sherlock Holmes does

And then there's the Japanese fighting game that's based on Les Miz partly by way of the musical (judging from the costumes).

Posted May 22, 2007 4:03 PM by Julie L.

Julie L. @ 86: And then there's the Japanese fighting game that's based on Les Miz partly by way of the musical (judging from the costumes).

I...

...wow. Right when you think you've seen it all.

I really have nothing to say to that one. I'm just sort of boggling here.

Posted May 22, 2007 4:17 PM by Fade Manley

Julie: That's just plain scary.

And now I shall attempt to refrain from further contribution to this thread, because I'm starting to freak myself out with my sudden burst of posts.

Posted May 22, 2007 4:19 PM by Jennifer Barber

Bruce, 88: Fundamentalist slash?

Actually, I was riffing on "scientifiction." But you knew that.

I'm not sure there's a real market for fundamentalist slash -- when I want to read about steamy homosexual encounters involving prominent fundamentalists, I check the news blogs.

Posted May 22, 2007 4:24 PM by Howard Peirce

Meg Thornton @ #22 and Bruce @41:

* The board of FanLib are not required to undergo any of the kinds of corporate oversight which is expected of a publicly owned corporation - it's a private company. [1]

Any start up that doesn't seem interested in appropriate board oversight or corporate auditing has 'you take his tricorder, I'll take his walllet' written all over it. I hope that VC wasn't interested in seeing a return on its investment.

Bruce, I think you hit the nail on the head. Puts me in mind of the Crimson Permanent Assurance.

Posted May 22, 2007 4:46 PM by L. L. Daugherty

I found the website of FanLib's parent corporation (an all-Flash site) which has their B2B pitch:

Introducing the new, turnkey entertainment marketing service

More @ my blog

Posted May 22, 2007 4:56 PM by Lis Riba

Meg Thornton #22: There's no more oversight for private companies than there is for private people: the shareholders set the rules. (The IRS does what it will.)

Clifton Royston #70: Look up "SPAC". Investigate. Be amazed.

Posted May 22, 2007 4:58 PM by Seth Breidbart

Lis, #97 -- hmph. Thanks for helping me decide which side of the fence to jump off on.

Posted May 22, 2007 5:13 PM by Leva

I was kinda going to ask what Patrick at #80 asked .. Let me get this straight. 1) There's a bunch of idiots out there who think that they can make money from fanfic, even though fanfic is almost by definition not author-approved or author-authorised. 2) Several large publishers may or may not have their grimy mitts in the pot.

So ... there's a part of me that says, "this is a way for the publishers to try to make money." Another part of me says, "Gee, I wonder if it's being presented to the people who created the characters and worlds as a way of getting a cut of the money to be made from writing about their characters ... except that at the moment, no one is making money because it's ... fanfic? I find this illogical.

Also, well, I can see where fanfic and legit fic *do* cross lines ... fully-permissioned (Sorry -- I know that's not actually English) serialised Star Trek novels, for example. And I know some of those (and others of the same sort) are written by people who started out writing fic in those worlds. But it seems to me that, once they start writing into a legally organised canon, it becomes canonical, and not fic.

I'm not sure where I was going with this, except that I'm terribly confused. After all, even if JKR were, for example, to authorise G-rated HP fic as written for and presented on the Fanlib site, I can't imagine that she'd ever approve the slash or pr0n-y stuff. Ergo, the only fic that would make money (and I doubt that -- more that the publishers and authors would take the largest cut) would be the fic that has been redefined as canonical in fact, if not in intent.

Can someone explain to me why this would ever be considered a good idea for anyone? As it is now, the original authors can disclaim any involvement, the fic writers can continue to write for their own pleasure and for the entertainment of others, and no-one gets hurt. And no one is profiting from the hard work of others. Oh ... wait.

Posted May 22, 2007 5:15 PM by Another Damned Medievalist

Seth @ #98: Surely you mean no more external oversight? The board is responsible to look after the shareholders' interests, and to see that the management does the same. While that doesn't mean they will do a good job of it, and many boards are really clueless, even in private companies the shareholders have some ability to hold their feet to the fire.

Posted May 22, 2007 5:37 PM by Clifton Royston

I hadn't realized you couldn't sort by author name, which is deeply frustrating, and indicated of Fanlib's presumption that fic is fungible.

There seem to be a popular conception that women who read romances never look for specific authors. Romance books are never sorted in the second hand bookshops I've visited, and I seem to remember that subgenre subscriptions are common. Just like fanfiction, romance readers are perceived as mostly female.

Posted May 22, 2007 5:43 PM by Kit

There seem to be a popular conception that women who read romances never look for specific authors.

That would be news to the romance-reading friends I have, who keep telling me to read Carla Kelly and Laura Kinsale. Oh, and Loretta Chase and Jennifer Crusie.

Posted May 22, 2007 6:17 PM by cofax

Kit #102: Romance books are never sorted in the second hand bookshops I've visited

News to my local Book Exchange, which has categories of which I'd never conceived. Downright nit-picky, they are. Western Romance, anyone?

Posted May 22, 2007 6:57 PM by joann

There seem to be a popular conception that women who read romances never look for specific authors.

I am tempted to drop that into one or two of the other blogs I frequent, and then stand at a safe distance to watch the pretty explosions.

Posted May 22, 2007 7:40 PM by Julia Jones

Lis, you didn't reproduce the one bit from that brochure that will really make things explode.

"Completed work is just 1st draft to be polished by the pros"

Posted May 22, 2007 8:05 PM by OG

FWIW, that brochure has a copyright on it 2001-2004 (thanks, MM, for pointing that out to me) and appears to be about contests they've run in the past. It doesn't appear to be about the current archive.

The brochure still has a stinky patronizing tone, and fandom certainly wasn't meant to see it. If that's their attitude towards fans, I want nothing to do with the company.

OTOH, they were targeting IP execs. Having had a few ... enlightening ... conversations with a few hollywood types over the years, it may have simply been written to target their customers' expectations. Because there's plenty of Hollywood execs who would cheerfully nod and agree with the sentiments and tone of that brochure.

Fanlib never should have posted that on the 'net. Allowing that brochure on the 'net, in and of itself, makes me suspicious of their opinion of the collective intellect of fandom. They are seriously underestimating fans on many levels.

Posted May 22, 2007 8:43 PM by Leva

A couple further thoughts:

1) Henry Jenkins has written an excellent summary of the situation and what makes it troubling.

2) Even though FanLib's CEO was "too busy" to answer fans questions, he's agreed to be interviewed by Prof. Jenkins for publication in the blog (several people -- including me -- have already commented how symptiomatic this is of FanLib's disconnect). If you have any questions for the FanLib management, send them to Prof. Jenkins via the link above.

3) By this point, most of the experienced fanfic community seem to want no part of FanLib. People are warning one another. Unfortunately, that may leave the newbies and starry-eyed kids most vulnerable to getting burned. Any tips from dealing with some of the other vanity publishing scams on how to warn folks if this turns as sour as it's smelling?

Posted May 22, 2007 9:08 PM by Lis Riba

From the peanut gallery:

I've run out of peanuts. Back soon...

Posted May 22, 2007 9:16 PM by Soon Lee

JESR @ 78 - That was one of the questions I put to the FL staffer on Fanthropology. It was one of the nine questions she *didn't* answer (or at least, one of the nine she hasn't answered to date - must remember to prod her for answers to those...). As an Australian, (and a non-lawyer one at that) my understanding is that if an IP owner gets sufficiently narked about some of my fic, I not only face the Australian copyright laws, but possibly also our libel laws (degrading the reputation of someone), and those are modelled on the British ones, which means they're *nasty*. The only reason I'd be safe from the child pr0n laws is because I write what is described as "genfic" - and that's mainly because I'm lousy at writing sex scenes.

Another Damned Medievalist @100 - Again, this is one of the unanswered questions I asked. (The list is here, at my journal, along with the answers I've received). I wanted to know whether *any* of the profits FanLib are hoping to make would be seen by the original content creators - would J K Rowling see any of the money made through the Harry Potter fanfiction; would the Tolkien estate receive any money from the LOTR fanfiction etc. My own suspicion, given what I've seen so far, is that if FanLib ever *do* make more than is required to cover costs (web hosting, salaries, business essentials like yachts and so on) it will vanish into the pockets of the large media conglomerates (Oh Mr Murdoch, we have a cheque for you...) and very little will reach the original creators.

That, to me, is a pity, since the one thing I'd be more than happy to see if money absolutely *has* to be made from fan fiction (and please note, I don't agree that this is the case) is the profit effectively going directly to the original creators who inspired the fanwork. After all, it's their ideas that the fanwriters and fanartists are playing with - it seems only fair that if there's money going to be made there, they should get the lion's share.

Clifton Royston @ 101 - what's the case when the shareholders *are* the board? The strong impression I got from the answers I received was that these people had pretty much put in the money, and that they'd chosen the CEO through drawing straws. Either that or he supplied the treehouse where they're putting the site together (complete with the "No Girls Allowed" sign near the doorway).

Posted May 22, 2007 9:17 PM by Meg Thornton

Clifton #101, yes, the Board "oversees" the company. But the Board also runs the company. Aside from the IRS and, if the company is in specific fields, appropriate licensing authorities, nobody else gets to see "inside" a private company.

Posted May 22, 2007 10:24 PM by Seth Breidbart