May 19th, 2007
by
Yonmei
Yesterday, a fanfiction archive launched with $3M of venture capital and its very own domain name: www.fanlib.com. (No link. Intentionally, no link.)
Apparently it was founded about five years ago by three men, none of them with a history in fanfiction: Chris M. Williams (his handle at the SixApart place is mimbo, and yesterday, as news of FanLib hit fandom, he was cut-and-pasting angry spam across a dozen livejournal discussions); David B. Williams, and Craig Singer. According to their press release, Singer “conceived of the storytelling process that inspired FanLib’s unique collaboration technology”.
Ever read a book called Women of Ideas And What Men Have Done To Them, by Dale Spender? The “storytelling process” Craig Singer lays claim to having “conceived of”, is apparently that fans of a show can now write stories based on the show: they can read, rate, and review other fans’ stories: and this “brings in a great way for communities to sprout around pop culture, and become more involved with their favorite storylines at a very deep level.”
What a good idea. How amazing that it took till 2002 for Craig Singer to think of it. And now everyone who’s ever wanted to do that only has to register with FanLib and they have a place to publish their “fan fiction”, as the press release tells us it’s called. As a writer on BusinessWeek, commenting on the press release, notes “The genius of FanLib is realizing that fans can be happy just being recognized. ”
None of the names on the board are female: none of the people named as having founded or financed FanLib have any known connection with fandom. Apparently FanLib is employing fans at a scutwork level – one employee was showing up on discussions at the SixApart place yesterday and defending it.
The chutzpah of this goes way beyond privilege into delusional arrogance. It’s almost funny. It’s almost sad.
I’ve seen it happen before – and doubtless it will happen again: fans do something for fun, for free, to share with other fans; someone thinks of a way they could make money off this fannish activity providing the fans are willing to do what they do for free for this person’s profit: and shortly after this business model is published, there is a wordy explosion across fandom of fans declaring themselves unwilling to do anything for that corporation.
But sometimes it sort of half works. If the people running the business can figure out something fans want, and some way to set up their business so that the only way fans can get it is via their business.
Is it possible that FanLib could do that?
As several other people noted (I’ve been reading fan posts about FanLib today) no, it’s not possible that FanLib could persuade those of us already into fanfiction that we should go over to FanLib. (Their TOS are extremely dubious. They’re quite blatantly in this to make money by exploiting fans. Their answers to what they’ve claimed are Frequently Asked Questions are mostly brush-offs, and ignore some questions that people really are asking about their website and their intentions. And their CEO is already angrily spamming fans who are critical of his business.)
What FanLib might be able to do is persuade people who are fans of shows and who have no previous connection to fandom to write fanfic for them. (Chris Williams apparently found this model worked very well with fans of The L Word.) That is, people who don’t know (and FanLib has no intention of helping them find out) that there’s a whole Internet full of free fanfiction out there, and FanLib is not the only place they could get published. In this light, FanLib are just another vanity publishing house, though it’s been pointed out that they may plan to have fanfic writers make money by becoming their affiliates.
Besides the links above, there’s also a linky post at metafandom, including one (Get the popcorn!), which points out that Fanlib’s TOS explicitly require:
For example: The site has no standards for posting but claims full rights to the posters’ fics–to edit them or even reproduce and distribute them without the authors’ permission, as they see fit. And even though they’re the ones making the money off of this venture, if someone sues . . . then it’s the fanfic author’s duty to legally defend them.
Put succinctly: “We’ll make the cash and piddle with your fic if we feel like it–and by the way, anything you post here is ours . . . but if something goes wrong, you’re the one getting burned at the stake.”
Need I spell out that this site needs to be avoided like a flesh-eating zombie-creating supervirus?
Well, yes.
But: some of the people who are funding FanLib, and who have apparently given their permission for their copyrighted work to be made use of in fanfiction published on FanLib’s site, own serious copyrights. What could seriously damage fanfiction would be if the shows which have major fanfiction archives decide that from now on, they will allow people to write fanfiction if and only if they publish on FanLib, but will harass with C&D notices any other fanfiction archive based on their show or film or novel. C&D notices certainly work to drive fanfiction underground: we’d see a return to pre-Internet days, when finding fanfic was something you could only begin to do when you had built up a connection with fandom and other fans knew you were to be trusted. So, FanLib might – though as pointed out above, they don’t promise nothing – be able to offer the negative value of Not Getting C&D Notices.
They don’t, however, appear to be offering any positive benefits. They seem to be operating on the model that fans write fanfiction for recognition, and if they provide a website that will let fans do that, the fans will come. (This reminds me irresistibly of what happened when the owner of a well-known slash archive was not reminded to renew her domain name, and the company sold it out from under her to a porn company, who had evidently been slavering over the volume of traffic her website was getting. The porn company set up a site that mirrored her structure exactly, only with standard commercial hetero porn instead of slash, and the first few visitors clicked, read, were startled…. and promptly sent out warning messages that got posted and cross-posted all over the fannish internet. Everyone took their links to that site down. No one went there. I mean this happened within hours of the porn company taking over. Presumably they still got casual traffic via search engines, but the fannish grapevine ensured they didn’t get the mass of regular visitors they’d bought the domain name for. I wonder if they ever figured out what happened?)
If they offer positive benefits – if publishing at FanLib.com gets you ad revenue, but not publishing there gets you C&D notices – will they get the fan writers they expect?
Still no. Fans have been operating under the radar for decades. It may get tougher, but we’ll still do it. (Cupidbow’s essay, How Fanfiction Makes Us Poor, is worth reading in this context.)
What if some really good writing starts getting published at FanLib?
This is actually the toughest question, because there is the addiction factor. When I get hooked on a show, when I’m looking for fanfiction about it with real urgency, I’ll look anywhere. If a rec’er I trust linked to a story in one of my fandoms at FanLib and said it was really good, would I go read it? Of course I would.
But: really good fannish writing doesn’t come out of nowhere. Ellen Fremedon writes about this in Fanfic and Authorship: how reference to “fanfiction” as a kind of folk art de-authors it. But within fanfiction, within our tradition, we know our writers; authorship matters. The fanfiction community strongly polices plagiarism, even though many stories are usually published under pseuds (and though some writers pick one pseud and stick to it for a fannish lifetime, others change pseuds with each fandom, and the use of journal “names” has caused another layer of confusion). The model used by FanLib seems to be fanfiction.net, where anyone can publish, where it’s impossible to ask in advance for someone to beta or edit a story before it’s published, and where (I suspect) “reviews” are supposed to be positive (“if you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all”) not critical. There is a strong current in many fanfiction communities against public criticism of a published story: negative comments are, in these communities, supposed to be the function of the beta-reader before the story’s published. But there’s also a strong tradition among fanfic writers to help each other get better: to point out what worked and what didn’t work, to suggest how sections of a story can be tightened up or where the writer needs to do more explaining. Fanfiction writing has a history, 40-odd years of it.
FanLib intends to discard all that. FanLib isn’t there to help beginning writers get better, or mediocre writers learn more: it’s meant to make money for its venture-capitalist founders. For all I know, Craig Singer may actually believe the story in the press release, that no one ever wrote fanfiction before he got the idea and showed fans how.
Astolat suggests that what fanfiction fandom needs is An Archive Of One’s Own, which I link to out of completism: because I think that the last thing fandom needs is more centralisation. It’s already way too much on livejournal, wholly owned by SixApart.
Update: Cesperanza makes the useful point that fanfiction is not illegal:
This race has not been called, and so IMHO we shouldn’t act like it has until it HAS.
Now, until it has, there’s good reason to exercise some–some!–caution, in that most people don’t want to be the test case. (That doesn’t mean we won’t win the test case, just that you don’t want to get into it without corporate money or a nonprofit institute backing you, cause lawyers charge by the hour.) But there’s a big difference between backing down to a C&D (and a C&D doesn’t mean they’re right; it just means they have a lawyer and you don’t) because you don’t want to be bothered getting into a mano a mano with some second-rate novelist’s lawyer, and backing down because you think you’re doing something genuinely illegal. I don’t believe you are, ok? I believe that you are exercising your free speech. I believe you are transforming mass media because you have ideas that are worth expressing and protecting.
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Yonmei at
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Filed under Cons & Community, TV & Film, slash | Comments (25)
I feel sick.
I actually think the most likely thing to happen with FanLib (which seems to have done an awesomely bad job of recruiting fanwriters even before it officially opened) is that it’s going to go bust.
Hopefully, before anyone gets sued.
hmm – just to also quickly followup on cesperanza: Even if there is a case which does find a piece of fanfiction to be copyright infringement (IMO, an unlikely scenario for various practical reasons), that’s just one case. Copyright infringement, and copyright defenses like fair use, are fact-intensive. Fan fiction employs original material in a wide variety of ways, so any one finding of infringement (or fair use, for that matter) would only go so far to evaluating all the other kinds of fanfic, and the original source material it’s based on. (For instance, use of characters versus use of original dialog versus use of plots etc. Plus there would be analysis of the original source material, too.)
… As for fanlib’s indemnification clause, it’s nice wishful thinking on their part, but, I’m not sure how enforceable it would be. I’m sure they had a good lawyer draft it up, and all, and I’m always worried about consumer rights, but I personally wouldn’t bet a lot of investment $$$ on the watertightness of the indemnification clause.
… Yonmei, you say fan fiction has a history, 40-odd years of it. forty? since the 60s? pardon my ignorance, but I understood fanfic began in the 70s. are you using a different def of fanfic? or am i missing something?
I wouldn’t worry too much. Every so often some idiot comes up with a great idea about how they can make a fortune out of fandom. It never works very well. Look at Creation Cons, for example. Some people lap them up, but many others laugh at them, and they haven’t destroyed fan-run conventions. These latest hopefuls won’t make a fortune out of their web site, and they won’t stop people writing fanfic. Probably once they realize they haven’t got it made they’ll give up and move on to some other whacky scheme.
Oh, and I have no proof, but I bet there were people writing Sherlock Holmes fanfic in the 19th Century. We just don’t know about it because it was all done in longhand on paper.
Oh, and I have no proof, but I bet there were people writing Sherlock Holmes fanfic in the 19th Century. We just don’t know about it because it was all done in longhand on paper. –Cheryl
Although paper (especially 19th century paper) is an incredibly durable medium, much more durable than CDs or bytes, so it may have survived! …. I’m sure you’re right. I would love to dig through various diaries and letters of women from 19th century and see what they wrote about when they were done reading the latest thriller. I bet that’s a lot of what Jo was writing up in her attic. And I’m sure the Brontës did fanfic. … Now I want to imagine the Brontës writing fanfic … who were they reading?
(But I was just wondering if I had missed something of the “official” modern def of fanfic. By my standards, I’m somewhere between a tourist and a low-power user of fanfic. (Although I was writing it back in the early 80s before I knew there was a name for what I was doing.))
Laura: (But I was just wondering if I had missed something of the “official” modern def of fanfic.
I agree with Cheryl that Sherlock Holmes is the first modern fandom as we think of “fandom”. But when I said “40-odd years” I was thinking of the start of Star Trek, 1966 – the first Trek fanzine was published in 1967, including some fanfiction, so it’s a dead certainty that people were writing fanfiction before then.
Cheryl: Look at Creation Cons, for example. Some people lap them up, but many others laugh at them, and they haven’t destroyed fan-run conventions.
Well, no – though it’s been getting more and more difficult (so I gather from friends who work on concoms) to find hotels that will accept fan-run conventions. And there are apparently a lot of fans who came into fandom via the Internet who think that Creation Cons are what all cons are like. They are a reasonably successful business, I gather, making money out of fans.
These latest hopefuls won’t make a fortune out of their web site, and they won’t stop people writing fanfic. Probably once they realize they haven’t got it made they’ll give up and move on to some other whacky scheme.
It will be interesting to see who posts on FanLib. Apparently you can post “adult” fanfiction there (and, as usual, all slash counts as “adult”) providing all participants are over 18. The fact that people who are already writing fanfiction won’t be suckered in, or not for long, doesn’t affect their business plan: their plan is to try and get people to register on their site who don’t know about the fanfiction community, who think that FanLib is their one way to share fanfiction.
I have a lot of faith in people’s ability to find information if it’s available. If people get hooked on fanfic, I really doubt that one website is going to hold their loyalty to that extent. Even if newbies come onto fanlib and establish a scene there that draws in established folks, there are already a lot of preexisting spaces and communities, and people will find those when they’re ready to.
… Certainly, if fanlib is successful, there will be the same kind of issues we see with LJ, Second Life, and other commercial entities that provide space for people to host/post/play: They’re making money, they restrict content sometimes for various arbitrary reasons, there are revolts, they protest that they’re really good guys … but in the greater scheme of things, as long as people have other options, it’s less troubling to me.
What *does* trouble me is this business of hotels refusing fan-run cons? …
Wow, that is clumsy so far beyond my own clumsiness a couple of years ago… How annoying! I do think, though, that publishers are about to start changing their tune on fanfic, fan art, movies, and related issues. So there will be a lot of weirdness like this as entrepeneurs try to cash in. I would guess the point in their eyes is to “capture user generated content” and then sell to some big media company and persuade them that fanfic should be part of a project from the beginning… so that when disney releases Little Mermaid #9 or whatever, they will provide places for fanfic to happen… maybe they’re already doing it. If anyone’s doing this already I wonder if anyone is doing it “right”?
Last weekend I talked with some people from uberbabe, a comic book which is trying to set up with its own community… their model is for there to be a wiki and blog where anyone can post. Then there is (or is going to be) a voting system where the community votes up particular characters, content, or plot lines. Stuff that is voted up has a chance to be blessed by the editor/creator of the comic book, included in official canon, and the fan writer will get a royalty payment or some other remuneration to be determined… I’m pretty curious to see how this will work, and I think that other bigger companies may start adopting similar models.
I agree with what astolat said. But I think what is likely to happen is a bunch of variants of “exploitation of UGC” (user generated content).
Liz: I wonder if anyone is doing it “right”?
Yes. We are. ;-)
The thing is, though, that even if there’s company-sponsored company-approved fanfiction, there will always be fanfiction outside that area of approval. Especially if Disney decides to move in on the field. Because if the company that owns the copyright gets actively involved, there will be storylines and situations that will be not permitted.
We can be absolutely sure of this because it is pretty much what happens when authors have decided to “let” fans of their work write in their universe – Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey, Jacqueline Lichtenberg, etc. And Disney are a lot more possessive of what they own than any individual author – and have a lot more political/legal muscle. (Disney’s determination to keep the Mouse has changed copyright law round the world: Disney’s determination to decide for customers when they get to see a film on DVD release has resulted in the idiotic malformation of DVD players. Etc.) This despite the fact that The Little Mermaid film is itself a “transformation” of the original story, changing the characters, the point, and the ending – a corporatefic.
Re: the history of fanfic
I am quite certain that fanfic was written before 1967, because I wrote early Avengers stories to amuse myself before that. By 1967, I was trading Star Trek stories with a group of three schoolmates.
The problem, of course, is that fanfic in the 60s and earlier (likely much, much earlier) was, like my own early efforts, either a solitary pursuit, or one that was informally shared and never documented. But I have a firm belief that fanfic is as old as fiction itself.
And I suspect that if this attempt to regularise fanfic succeeds on the surface, it will only create a second wave of non-regularised fanfic.
Actually – if authorized fanfic communities become a big deal, that might ultimately impact copyright and fair use analyses for non-authorized fanfic communities. … Again, however, I have a lot of faith in the unregulability of information and people’s desires to do what they want to do.
Morgan Dhu: But I have a firm belief that fanfic is as old as fiction itself.
Depends how you define fanfic. Looked at in one way, Northanger Abbey is fanfic: just as Villette is a Mary Sue.
I think that sensibly, we can only say fanfic came into existence with modern fandom: and I think that fandom by definition requires community. Maybe the women who read and shared novels were the first fandom, but there’s not much evidence of it. (I would be delighted to be contradicted in this, by the way – I’m speaking from the little I know of Jane Austen and her times, nothing more.)
What I mean is – fanfiction could not exist until the concept of intellectual property existed. Because before that, there wouldn’t have been a division between fanfiction and any other kind of fiction. Indeed, providing you only write fanfiction about material out of copyright, there still isn’t: T.H.White wrote The Once and Future King as fanfiction on the The Morte d’Arthur which was itself fanfiction on the Matter of Britain… &c.
Yonmei: though it’s been getting more and more difficult (so I gather from friends who work on concoms) to find hotels that will accept fan-run conventions
It goes through phases. When hotel capacity is short and business is good they don’t want bottom feeders like us. When there is over-capacity and business is poor they welcome us with open arms. You can see that more clearly in the US where certain regions or even cities may go through a difficult phase, but elsewhere in the country everything is rosy.
Yonmei: And there are apparently a lot of fans who came into fandom via the Internet who think that Creation Cons are what all cons are like.
Sure there are. Some of them will be overjoyed to find out how much better fan-run conventions are. But don’t forget that for some of them Creation Cons will be want they want. Everyone has different tastes. My favorite example is the folks who really hate it when we run our events so well that they don’t have to queue. Some of the people who like Creation Cons apparently want to have to queue for ages because it makes them feel like they got something special.
The first convention I went to was corporate-run for-profit, with massive queues everywhere. (Fortunately, I’d brought my own lunch.) Never having been to a convention before, I had no notion what they should be like, and was very happy with the really excellent conversations I had in the queues. I can actually see why someone who knows no one to go to a convention with would enjoy a CreationCon. (A lot of conventions, I find, are set up on the basis that everybody knows everybody and there will be more time spent off than at the official programme. Such conventions can be appallingly lonely when you don’t know a lot of people – and I try to avoid them now.)
My most favorite comment on FanLib so far is from Lizbee:
That last sentence made me chortle aloud for several minutes.
I don’t intend to speak globally for all ficcers – my own reasons for being in fandom have shifted over the years, as I am one of those who has been around for a few decades and participated in varying degrees. One of the things I like about fandom is in fact that it is not corporate or business-y – it’s an escape. Participating in any way in Fanlib takes away from that, which is why I glanced at it and went away. The other being that there are easier ways to get your work on the internet.
There are as many reasons for writing fanfic as there are ficcers, but I’d guess at the bottom of it all is an emotional reaction to the source material. Love, hate, anger, wanting to make out with or punish or “fix” the characters… whatever. Writers have emotional ties with what they write, regardless of their end goal, after all. Fanfic just sits closer to the bone than “real” fiction, because it can. Probably 99% of the ficcers never expect to get anything but adoration in feedback, or at least some feedback, or clicks on the hitcounter – and along comes the Fanlib gang offering — what? Just another place to post fic along with the dubious benefit of them getting paid for your work. The biggest tipoff that they “just don’t get it” is the misunderstanding of why most people write fanfic, which appears to me to be why fandom is so united in rejecting their business model — fans understand they don’t own the copyright, but in their hearts they have relationships with the characters that they filter onto the internet in doses of varying quality and polish, and to post on Fanlib is to become a prostitute to their pimpin’ website. No one wants to turn relationships into a money-making scheme. FanLib doesn’t get that they sound condescending and that their ads are confusing and insulting. I don’t want to be a hairless bodybuilder; I’m quite content being a forty-something woman with an inner geek. I don’t want to be a Fanlib author, not that I was invited, because I just don’t care to be exploited for something so intertwined with my personal history.
Whether fanfiction is copyright infringement or not, trademark infringement would be a lot more clearcut. If J. K. Rowling, her publisher, and Warner Bros wanted to take someone down, I have no doubt they could.
So could the big comic book publishers, or Disney, or any of the other big companies with trademarked characters being used on this site. Though I see some listed there as ‘partners’.
Henry Jenkins weighs in
Alice Roy – your comment has been deleted. We don’t approve of outing.
[...] Feminist SF – The Blog! Yesterday, a fanfiction archive launched with $3M of venture capital and its very own domain name: [...]
i joined fanlib when i got the evite, thinking it was just another archive, as i am in several. then i took a good look and ran for the hills.
there’s no way i am ever coming near it again.
as to the case of good fic being stored there, i imagine that, as it happens with ffnet, it would be the last resort. after posting in your lj, and in comms and other archives and in ffnet, you may post in fanlib.
i support the idea of an archive of one’s own cause i figured, if they’re going to keep doing it, we should fight back.
[...] FanLib is objectionable to fans because FanLib explicitly wants to take an activity that fans do for free, to give away to other fans, and make money out of it. (See Fanlib: our wannabe corporate overlords.) [...]
[...] of course there were the bright lads at Fanlib who really did seem to think they’d invented fanfic for their own [...]