Organization for Transformative Works

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a non-profit, fan activist organization. Its mission is to serve fans by preserving and encouraging transformative fan activity, known as "fanwork", and by making fanwork widely accessible.^[3]

OTW advocates for the transformative, legal, and legitimate nature of fan labor activities, including fan fiction, fan vids, fan art, anime music videos, podfic (audio recordings of fan fiction^[4]), and real person fiction.^[5][6] Its vision is to nurture fans and fan culture, and to protect fans' transformative work from legal snafus and commercial exploitation.^[7][8]

The Organization for Transformative Works offers the following services and platforms to fans in a myriad of fandoms:

• Archive of Our Own (AO3): An open-source, non-commercial, non-profit, multi-fandom web archive built by fans for hosting fan fiction and for embedding other fanwork, including fan art, fan videos, and podfic.
• Fanlore: A wiki for fans from a wide range of communities whose published mission is to provide a platform "to record and share their histories, experiences and traditions"^[9] in fandom and fanwork history.
• Open Doors: Preservation of fannish historical artifacts, such as zines and Geocities websites
• Transformative Works and Cultures: A peer-reviewed academic journal for scholarship on fanworks and practices
• Legal advocacy to the fandom community, addressing the legal issues with fan fiction and other fan works, including defending fans' fair use of copyrighted material.^[10]
• Vidding (2008): a series of six short documentaries on vidding, in combination with participatory-culture academic Henry Jenkins and the New Media Literacies project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[11]
• Fanhackers: A directory of information and resources to help fans, academics, and activists, including good meta (metadata, or information, analysis, and discussion about data).^[12]

Legal activism

The OTW provides legal assistance to the fandom community, addressing the legal issues with fan fiction and other fan works. Rebecca Tushnet, a noted legal scholar on fanfiction and fair use in copyright and trademark law, works with the OTW's legal project. In 2008, the OTW (in coordination with the Electronic Frontier Foundation) successfully submitted requests to the Library of Congress for further exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow the fair use of video clips for certain noncommercial uses such as video remixes, commentary, and education, as well as to protect technology used for such purposes. The exceptions were also successfully renewed in 2012.^[13][14]

The OTW has also submitted several amicus briefs to the courts in several cases involving intellectual property law:

• In Fox vs. Dish, the OTW (in coalition with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge) submitted an amicus brief which argued in defense of digital recording methods used by Dish Network, claiming that "The popular fanwork genre of noncommercial videos (“vids”) uses clips from television shows or film, reworking them in a way that comments on or critiques the original. The Copyright Office has held that substantial numbers of vids constitute fair uses. But the creation of fan vids requires intermediate digital copying and processing in order to produce the transformative final product. OTW thus believes that intermediate copying performed to facilitate fair use constitutes fair use."^[15]

• In the case of Ryan Hart vs. Electronic Arts, the OTW (in combination with the Digital Media Law Project and the International Documentary Association) submitted a brief arguing that Electronic Arts's use of factual information (such as the height, weight, and jersey number of football players) in creative works (in this case, video games) is protected by the First Amendment.^[16]

Fandom archival projects

The OTW has also instituted several projects for preserving fan history and culture. One such project was the creation of Fanlore, a wiki for preserving fandom history. The Fanlore wiki was first revealed in beta in 2008, with a full release in December 2010.^[17]

The OTW also has several "Open Doors" projects dedicated to the preservation of fannish historical artifacts. These projects include The Fan Culture Preservation Project, a joint venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa^[18] to archive and preserve fanzines and other non-digital forms of fan culture, and The GeoCities Rescue Project, which attempted to preserve content originally hosted on Yahoo's GeoCities by transferring that content to new locations on the Archive of Our Own or within the Fanlore wiki.^[19] Other miscellaneous artifacts and collections are stored on the OTW's main servers in the Special Collections gallery.

Archive of Our Own

Created by the OTW, the Archive of Our Own (AO3) is an open-source, non-commercial, non-profit archive for fan fiction and other transformative fanwork. The Archive is built and run entirely by volunteers, many without previous coding experience.^[20] The Archive was publicly launched into open beta on 14 November 2009,^[21] and has been growing steadily since.^[22]

Time magazine included Archive of Our Own on its list of "50 Best Websites 2013". Time said that AO3 "serves all fandoms equally, from The A-Team to Zachary Quinto and beyond," and also called it "the most carefully curated, sanely organized, easily browsable and searchable nonprofit collection of fan fiction on the Web...".^[23]

Fans post, tag and categorize their own works on AO3.^[24] Volunteer "tag wranglers" link similar tags so readers can search for works in the categories and types they want.^[25] The tagging system allows easy compilation of statistics (stats). Destination Toast, fan and statistician,^[26] compiles and analyzes unofficial fandom statistics, especially stats from Archive of Our Own, which she said is "the most easily searchable archive I know of."^[27]

Fan fiction ranges in length, from stories with fewer than one thousand words (flash fiction, or drabbles) to novels of hundreds of thousands of words. According to an article on fandom statistics published on the Daily Dot newspaper in 2013, AO3 hosts more very short works than long ones, but readers prefer the longer works. The average very short story received fewer than 150 hits, while novel-length works are more likely to receive around 1,500 hits.^[28]

A writer who posts a story on AO3 can record its word count on the story’s header, along with other information such as the story’s fandom, romantic pairings, and other tropes. Writers can also note if their story is finished or a work in progress (WIP). ^[29]

As of 2016, the archive hosts more than 2 million works in more than 20,000 fandoms.^[30] Destination Toast, fan and statistician,^[31] compiles and analyzes fandom statistics, especially stats from Archive of Our Own, which she says is "the most easily searchable archive I know of."^[27] In January 2016, she posted "2015: A (Statistical) Year in Fandom." It includes statistics from two other large fan fiction archives, FanFiction.Net (FFN) and Wattpad as well as the popular microblog platform Tumblr. The post shows that the most active fandoms on AO3 in 2015 were (largest first) Supernatural, Dragon Age, Harry Potter, The Avengers, Teen Wolf, and Sherlock.^[32]

A review shows that an large percentage of the work are 'crossovers' where one or more book-based universes or characters are conflated; secondly, that the readership for many genres is very low.The fandoms with the most stories include popular movies, television shows, and books including Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Sherlock, Doctor Who and The Hunger Games. The review for the FanFiction site reveals much the same set of comments.

References

External links

Wikinews has related news: FanFiction.Net adult content purge felt across fandom two weeks on

• Organization for Transformative Works
• Archive of Our Own (AO3)
• Fanhackers
• Fanlore (wiki)
• Open Doors
• Transformative Works and Cultures
• Legal advocacy
• Vidding (6 short documentaries, directed by Francesca Coppa)
• OTW Fanzine and Fan Fiction Collection at the University of Iowa Libraries

  Intellectual property Issues and debates Copyright infringement Copyright infringement of software Digital rights management Gripe site Intellectual property Legal aspects of file sharing Mashup videos music Music piracy Orphan works Patents Public domain Software patent debate Patent trolling Concepts All rights reversed Alternative compensation system Anti-copyright notice Business models for open source software Copyleft Commercial use of copyleft works Commons-based peer production Free content Free software license Infoanarchism Libertarian positions Open content Open design Open Music Model Open patent Open-source hardware Open source software Share-alike Video on demand Movements Access to Knowledge movement Anti-copyright Cultural environmentalism Free culture movement Free software movement Organizations Copyright Alliance Creative Commons Electronic Frontier Foundation Free Software Foundation Open Rights Group Organization for Transformative Works The Pirate Bay Piratbyrån Pirate Party Students for Free Culture People Rickard Falkvinge Lawrence Lessig Richard Stallman Peter Sunde Documentaries Steal This Film (2006, 2007) Good Copy Bad Copy (2007) RiP!: A Remix Manifesto (2008) TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard (2013)