Burning Other People's Dreams for Profit

[chomiji]

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.)

Comments

[rroselavy]

Yeah, there's a lot of slime there. I mean, the owners of the archives made some money, too...

[chomiji]

Good point. And she seems to be going for his White Knight act hook, line, and sinker ... at least according to him.

[7veils]

I should be angrier about this, I suppose, except that Livejournal has made lots of money off the fanfiction posted on its site. It always annoyed me that they were making money off content I generated, which is why I deleted all my fanfiction from LJ, and only left the links to DW behind.

To tell you the truth, I think that fanfiction has done so much for various authors and television shows in terms of generating and sustaining customer bases, that it's just another form of marketing now. I'm starting to feel as though this merits some return, providing that the original author receives royalties. I don't know how that would be regulated, but I guess I've become a little less rigid about things which once seemed so concrete. Not that I have enough personal interest in the subject to initiate any sort of movement.

[kis]

Thanks for letting me know. I've reposted because I think a lot of people on my flist will be interested.

I hate the thought of Mander being able to buy things that don't belong to the seller. HowTF is that even legal? **gnashes teeth**

[chomiji]

I dunno, to me there's a difference between LJ, which has always had a clear profit-making motive behind its hosting services, and what these archives were claiming to be, which was fan-run for fans. So I don't think it's strange at all that the writers on the archives are upset that this has happened.

A lot of authors still don't like the idea of fanworks, and they don't see fanworks as advertising at all.

[chomiji]

Yeah, I think he's going to have his mind blown when the Tolkien attorneys show up.

[7veils]

The thing is, LJ did not have clear profit-making motives when it first started up. You could even get a basic free site without ads, as long as you were fine with limits on the bells and whistles. What I learned from the different sales was that owners sell out.

I realize that a lot of authors (and artists, and photographers, and dress pattern-makers, and patent-holders of a 100,000,001 different products) don't look on fanworks or any other kind of derivative work with anything resembling fondness at all. I'm not sure why that doesn't really upset me all that much anymore. I guess because I don't believe that the world operates as a meritocracy, or that there is an inherent fairness in any of this. I don't think that necessarily translates into 'screw the writer', but I think that we are getting to a point where capitalism is insupportable. I would be very surprised if it lasts another two decades. So, it seems to me that there needs to be other ways to help each other survive.