janecarnall's Journal

OTW: why I'm not supporting it
(Not quite randomly. I've been seeing entries on my flist all week.)

The Organisation for Transformative Works currently has (according to their website) five projects planned for sometime this year:

1. They're going to do an open-source software package for archiving fanfiction and social networking.

2. Once the software has been created for it, they're going to host a noncommercial and nonprofit fanfiction archive.

3. They plan to provide legal assistance to protect and defend fanworks from commercial exploitation and legal challenge.

4. They're going to publish a peer-reviewed academic journal called Transformative Works and Cultures.

5. They're going to produce a wiki about fandom aimed at the general public.

All discussion about these projects has been restricted to Livejournal (plus a few chat sessions recently). I've not been following it, therefore.

1. This is undoubtedly an interesting and a useful project. I have no idea how many experienced open source developers are working on it right now, but I haven't seen any links about it on or to sourceforge.net, Open Solutions Alliance, or, well, anywhere with respect to open source coding/development. This doesn't necessarily mean it isn't a known open source project - just that when I searched for it, I couldn't find any reference to it anywhere but on OTW-related news items, and no link to any information about its development.

2. A good fanfic archive is a great resource. OTOH: announcing you're going to have an archive and then not producing one is not the best of ideas.

3. This is a grandiose claim which is flatly unbelievable as it stands. How do they plan to defend a songvid using clips from Phantom Menace to Colbie Caillat singing "Bubbly"? (I just made that up. As far as I know, it doesn't exist.) Do they intend to restrict their legal defense to fanfic? In which countries? Will this include defense of fanfic written in book fandoms where the author or the author's estate actively opposes fanfic? What about RPF? Fanart isn't actually illegal unless the subjects it depicts are illegal. Are they actually thinking about defending written fanfic about TV or films?

4. That's nice.

5. There's no reason to delay doing this, except that there are multiple other fannish wikis and one would have to think hard to figure out why there should be a new one.

Current Mood: thoughtful