OTW Legal and our allies have been active in fighting on fan-unfriendly legal proposals in the EU. Since these proposals were introduced in 2016, OTW Legal has submitted comments opposing them and has joined in calls for action against them. We’ve managed to hold them off so far and encourage some revisions, but a key vote will be happening in the European Parliament’s JURI committee on 20/21 June that could have a significant impact on the Internet and fan sites. In particular, two provisions of the current proposal would be bad for fans. Article 11 would impose a “link tax” that would make it more expensive for many websites to operate, and Article 13 would impose mandatory content-filtering requirements on websites that host user-generated content. These provisions have been hotly debated and revised a bit since the last time we reported on them. (For more on recent revisions and debates, see these discussions by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Hogan Lovells Firm) But despite revisions, they’re still bad deals for fans. Importantly, they don’t preserve the “safe harbors” that websites rely on to operate, and they don’t include user-generated content exceptions.
Without safeguards for user-generated content, Article 13 would require your favourite websites to implement systems that monitor user-generated content and automatically remove any content that could potentially infringe upon copyright, giving publishing giants the power to block your online expression. Sites like YouTube, Tumblr, GitHub, Soundcloud, etc., could be required to block the upload of content based on whether it has been “identified” by big corporations, rather than based on its legality. The law is still being debated, and it is difficult to predict how it would impact the OTW’s projects, including the Archive of Our Own, if it is passed. Regardless of how this vote comes out, the OTW will work as hard as we can to keep the Internet fan-friendly. But we need your help. The most effective thing you can do right now is contact your Member of European Parliament. You can use one of these tools to e-mail your MEP or call your MEP to tell them that having user-generated content on the internet is important to you.
Here’s what you can tell them: Without safe harbors for user-generated content, Article 13 of the Copyright Directive would stifle free expression on the Internet. We don’t want mandatory filtering. Algorithms don’t understand limitations and exceptions to copyright like parody, public interest exceptions, fair use, or fair dealing, and we don’t want our non-infringing videos, website posts and art blocked because of a biased algorithm created by big corporations. We want the law to protect user-generated works, not harm them.
OTW Legal will keep fighting for fan-friendly laws!
Please signal boost if you can’t help directly!
If any of my followers are in Europe, please help protect the AO3 (and other fannish archives as well)!
I am disgusted by the insistence of some younger fans that AO3 be made child safe and fit to be an electronic babysitter. AO3 was dreamed up and built out of the ashes of the ff.net purge, Strikethrough, Boldthrough, and any number of smaller scale attempts at silencing us, isolating us or making us create less than we can. It was built by adults for adults from the ground up. It’s entire purpose was to give fandom a hub nobody else could drive us from.
And now these young folk, some of them well-meaning but misguided, but too many of them just thrilling on the ‘power’ they think comes from their pseudoactivism, are demanding that we abandon what we made and why we made it, and turn it over to their control, in the fine tradition of the lawsuit-happy lazy parents and homophobic fundamentalists before them.
They could go to ff.net, there’s still plenty of traffic there and the work of content limitation is half done. They could revive something tame as they like on LJ. They could even learn to code and build their own damn site if they really cared to. But no, they’d rather have AO3. Because it’s the cool place. The place with all the views. With no thought to how long it would stay the cool place if all the adults moved on like they think we should. Who’s paying for the servers and tweaking code? Not them. Who’s making that crowd they want to be viewing their works? Not them.
The censorship and fake activism was bad enough but this attitude of theirs, that they’re entitled to what we built and what we made, entitled to change it for their purposes and profit while we get fuck all, but that we should still stick around and do the heavy labor behind it for them of course, that needs to be driven the hell out of these little neo-colonizers before they start trying it on a bigger scale. Had quite enough of that already, children. Stop.
Current annoyance: I keep clicking kudos button on AO3 and then that fucker announces:
I don’t care. Some things just deserve more kudos.
Comments are also effective…
I just thought of something.
A lot of people say they don’t leave comments because they can’t think of anything to say other than “I liked this” and they think it’s dumb or something.
So how about… You leave a comment that says “This is an extra kudos” because you can leave as many comments as you like, but you can only leave a max of two kudos (one logged in, one logged out). You can do this on every chapter if you want! “Extra kudos in comment form!” You get to express your extra love in an introvert-friendly way! 😀
This is an amazing idea, and this post needs ten thousand notes.
AO3, fanfiction, and comments: the system isn’t working.
Fic authors have a problem with feedback – or rather, with the lack of it. Fanfiction has a notoriously low ratio of comments to hits, and many of us have expressed our frustration that we can get a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, even a thousand views on our stories, but only a handful of readers will leave kudos, let alone comments.
Unfortunately, this only gets worse for long, multi-chapter stories (aka, the longfics we know, love, and would sell our souls in a second if it meant an update), which also happen to be the stories that authors need the most support to continue and complete. Law of diminishing returns, y’all, and it sucks.
We’re not here to guilt you into leaving comments.
We want to address the problem by changing the format, and we need your help to do it.
The goal is to increase the amount of feedback authors get from readers, especially on stories with multiple chapters, and to make it easier for everyone to show how much we love fics. We’re opening a discussion with ao3 to figure out how/if any of these options can be implemented, but first we need options to present!
Some of our current ideas:
Ability to leave a form of kudos on every chapter, instead of only once on the entire story: this lets authors know that you’re here and you’re reading their updates, so their hard work isn’t getting tossed into the internet void.
Comment templates: suggested comments that can be customized or posted as-is. Many of us draw a blank or get nervous when we try to think of a comment, so having pre-made options will both increase the total level of feedback and serve as practice, making it easier to leave more in-depth comments in the future.
Upvoting/leaving kudos on comments themselves: positive reinforcement makes giving feedback more fun and rewarding, and it lets the author know that readers are present and agreeing with other comments, even if they don’t leave one themselves.
We’ll contact AO3 to discuss the possibility of adding any of these as native features, and if that won’t work, we’re looking into creating and sharing a user script.
What you can do to help:
As a reader, what would you like to have? What would you be most likely to use? New ideas, opinions on ideas that are listed here, they’re all good.
As a creator, how would you feel about each of these options? Can you think of other ways of receiving or encouraging feedback?
Pros and cons of these (note: our thoughts on this are discussed in this google doc)
GET THE WORD OUT! Reblog this post, send it to your friends, link to it from your stories. We need as much input and support as possible to get this off the ground.
Feedback makes for happy authors. Happy authors make for more stories. Let’s keep this part of fandom alive!
More details about our thoughts, discussions, and ideas can be found inthis google doc.
Loki is the Philosopher King 