Burning Other People's Dreams for Profit

A person named Keith Mander, who apparently has made most of his money by getting people to pay him for fluffing up their Google search positions by providing repetitive crud content, has bought a couple of fanfiction archives: LOTRFanfiction.com and a Twilight archive. He's talking out of both sides of his mouth, on the one hand claiming that he is going to improve the sites out of the goodness of his heart and on the other hand boasting about how he is going to make money from them.

The prospect of the arrival of lawyers from the Tolkien estate asking why he's making money off their clients' intellectual property apparently holds no dread for Mr. Mander.

There's more coverage on this from esteliel at Dreamwidth, and the Organization for Transformative Works is offering AO3 accounts and and import services for the authors whose work is posted at the two archives. The writers reportedly do not have the ability to cancel and scrub their accounts at these sites.

I know that there are certainly worse things happening in today's world, but this has still got me major-league ticked.

(via neotoma.)