introducing other panelists in "The Money Question"

Copyright law is designed to incentivize creativity, "to reward authors for being creative."

Lawyers think about financial repercussions of creativity/copyright, but fans tend to not focus on finances as reason for engaging in fanac, esp. fic.

Copyright law suggests that people require the financial incentive to be creative, but fans demonstrate there are many other motivations.

If we know people will be creative with motivations other than financial, then what is copyright law accomplishing if the incentive assumption is flawed?

Is copyright blocking creativity because it is too restrictive?

If $ enters a space where previously it wasn't part of the motivation/incentive structure, how do copyright considerations change once $ is introduced to the space?

When fans demand compensation, it gets stickier because they are creating within the world of somebody else's creation. Fanworks, however, are protected by fair use, "a really messy doctrine," with market harm as one of the explicit factors evaluated to determine if it's fair use.

We want to protect public good with copyright, not private gain. If you're making $, you can presumably afford to license intellectual property.

Copyright exceptions for news reporting & education, for example, promote the public good.

Fair use doctrine doesn't provide ability to exploit EVERYTHING, some things are reserved for creator.

If you aren't making $, copyright holder has a harder time arguing you're affecting their market/bottom line, but if you are charging, now it looks like you're siphoning $ from copyright holder.

THIS DOES NOT MEAN EVERYTHING DONE FOR FREE IS OKAY UNDER FAIR USE DOCTRINE. Some free stuff is still copyright infringement! eg music & video piracy

But also NOT EVERYTHING DONE FOR $ IS NOT FAIR USE.

"Keeping things noncommercial is the safest way that lawyers can see for protecting fan activities." & this is why AO3 has lots of rules about noncommercial use.

$ attracts attention, so copyright holders are more likely to sue if $ is involved.

We are seeing more ways that fans monetize their creations & Stacey is curious about non-lawyers' thoughts.

[quick disclaimer, Kimberly Hirsh is not A lawyer and Stacey Lantagne is not YOUR lawyer.]

What about when copyright holders claim that they own rights to fan work? Platforms that are monetizing fan labor?

Let's talk about LARPS! Daria came from fashion & media studies & is new to fan studies in the past ~6 mos.

LARP = Live-Action Role Playing.

LARPing is an event and a game, often based on/inspired by media products, appeals to fans, utilizes physical assets like props, costumes, food, accommodation. Can't be 100% free.

Is LARP a commercial endeavor or not?

LARPs aren't always medieval/fantasy themed. Other examples: wizarding, Downton Abbey/Upstairs-Downstairs "Fairweather Manor," Star Wars, Westworld.

You can't participate in a LARP without spending $ on accommodations, tickets, costumes, props.

LARPs also have merchandise.

College of Wizardry LARP originally used Harry Potter terms, but received contact from legal (at WB? JKR estate?) & subsequently changed names.

Case study - Star Wars Saberfighting - you can pay to take lightsaber fighting classes, which resulted in a market for unlicensed light sabers.

There is a relationship between embodied fanac like LARPing & $, which creates tension btwn fan creations & licensed merch.

Studying Game of Thrones fan experiences, analyzed brand, good brand due to fan loyalty & HBO branding work, with particular visual identity & brand image.

Distinction between official merchandise, licensed (like Monopoly), and unlicensed (like fan-created). Some fan creators do it just for fan love, some for career/biz, and some creators of unlicensed merch aren't fans.

3 types of GoT on Etsy: reuse/distory/mock HBO features, inspired by GoT, GoT for SEO purposes (not actually GoT related)

Fan-made items tend to cost 2-3x less than similar official items.

While reappropriation items often are similar to official/licensed items, "inspired by" items - for example cosplay items - are filling a gap, as this kind of thing isn't usually offered through official/licensed channels.

Fans in places where official places don't ship (eg HBO doesn't ship outside of USA) must choose either to purchase resold items that will ship to them or fan-created items that will ship to them.

Surveyed fans in English, French, & Spanish. About 1/5 of fans purchase exclusively fan creation, 70-80% prefer official, 50% or so buy both.

Fan tourists & cosplayers purchase more items than other fans. Fans mention Etsy as place to purchase

Fan consumers often like to purchase fan-created artifacts in order to support other fans.

Conflict btwn fans' stated support of fan creators and actual purchasing habits which when possible they prefer to buy official products.

introducing #FanLIS - fans are information workers par excellence

Leisure interests are important to study because they are what we choose to do and are no less important than any other aspect of our lives: work, health, etc.

Fan information work is a subset of fun information work.

How can we harness the passion fans have for solving the problems of LIS? Can we?

#FanLIS seeks to explore the liminal space where fandom, fan studies, and LIS interact and can hopefully learn from each other. What do we know? Where should we go next as a field of research?

They examined methods reported in Journal of Fandom Studies & Transformative Works and Cultures. Used computational analysis to scrape all keywords for both journals & inductively analyzed sample of 50 abstracts. Compared with a similar study in journalism.

20 most often occurring keywords tended to focus on research setting, media or media type, phenomenon investigated

Top theory keywords include gender, ethics, participatory culture, cultural theories, feminism, CRT, queer theory, and more. Significant overlap between theory keywords in fan studies & journalism but not in overall keywords.

Wide variety of methods employed in fan studies. Of those named specifically, ethnography is most frequent, then terms referring to specific methodological techniques (interviews, content analysis, etc). Only methodological perspective present aside from ethnography & its subtypes is case study

Dominant perspectives are sociology, culture, economics, language, history, technology

Most studies don't cite a specific theoretical perspective but many theories are used in the ones that do.

Abstract often lacked reference to specific research methodological approach. Ethnography & case studies. Discourse analysis & textual analysis dominant as well.

Conclusion: explicitly naming theoretical & methodological approaches in keywords & abstracts makes fan studies more visible to other disciplines. We should tag our research as carefully as we tag our fanfic.

Using IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) format for abstract increases likelihood of paper being read.

discussing project to explore possiblity of taking data generated by enthusiast communities and creating knowledge graph for researchers to use

Examples of visual media enthusiast data repositories include Visual Novel Database, AnimeClick, Anime Characters Database

Enthusiasts had positive response to project, wanted to cooperate to make data available with an intermediary who can bridge expertise between enthusiasts and researchers.

Used RDF format of Entity - Property - Value.

Each community has its own data model. Goal is to examine all of these, which vary according to domain (manga vs anime vs visual novel, etc) and create data model that can be used across domains.

Custom web front end allows researcher to retrieve data. Human-readable labels appear instead of actual data which makes exploration easy.

Can identify identical entities mentioned in multiple enthusiast data sources. Goal is to combine them into single entity.

All data is linked to original enthusiast source, enabling researchers to verify info and even interact with enthusiasts.

Want to maintain specific source ontologies rather than trying to impose a particular perspective on enthusiast data.

Share Alike requirement in CC licenses present a challenge. (I'd love to hear more about this. Would applying a CC license to the knowledge graph handle this?)

Project website: https://jvmg.iuk.hdm-stuttgart.de/

Using lenses from fan studies and platform studies to look at the rise and fall? and preservation of Twitch Plays Pokemon.

Twitch Plays Pokemon is a crowd-sourced set of commands being sent to control Pokemon Red. Fans created a narrative/meta-text around the game on other platforms.

Twitch Plays Pokemon moved on to other games after Pokemon Red and inspired Twitch Plays Street Fighter and Twitch Plays Dark Souls. Big decrease in participation for Twitch Plays Pokemon over time.

RQs: What are the affordances that allowed the TPP community to emerge? How did the fans act as archivists?

Qual research including looking at user-generated content, observation of stream and chat, and interview with anonymous streamer who established TPP.

Brum's affordances of produser communities present in TPP: open participation, unfinished, meritocracy & heterarchy, communal property. (Did I miss one? Regardless, this reminds me a LOT of Gee's affinity spaces.)

argues that lack of holding to accepted Twitch standards and choosing to improvise contributed to decrease of participation.

Fans served as volunteer curators, while official channel administrators mostly focus on technical content and don't engage much with metanarrative.

Conclusions - this is a hungry culture, not originally designed for expansion, small passionate group of fans remains, visiting past gameplay & nostalgia factor brings community together/revitalizes.

What if we used fannish platforms to publish scholarship?

Brainstorming doc at https://docs.google.com/document/d/19PbNM8WwUVR8J4PDkm2w0Y9cLHa6sVoRt02ivgGdj9A/edit#heading=h.ihz2vfxozzxq

The open access workflow and results are v. similar to for-profit workflow and results. "We recreate a mirror image of for-profit scholarly publishing."

We're constantly trying to prove that open access can be high quality. (What if we actually reimagine scholarly publishing? What if we make something so different it doesn't invite comparison?)

Fan publishing and academic publishing have enough in common that fan publishing can help us reimagine scholarly publishing.

Talking about affect and its centrality to fanfiction. (Making me think of my #NSFEITM work with @marijel_melo and @theartofmarch and I'm wondering how widely affect is present in LIS research in general.)

talking about fanfiction and info seeking behaviors of young adult readers

suggests that methods for fanfiction info seeking can illuminate creation of library services & support

RQs: How do YA find fanfic to read? How do they find fiction to read? How do those methods differ between each other? Are there differences between experienced fanfic readers and new fanfic readers?

Pilot study with YA ages 18 - 23. Semistructured interviews. 90% of participants began engaging with fanfic & online fandom in high school.

50% found fanfic via serendipity (Tumblr, Google, etc) and 40% via friends. (This connects with the importance of friends in my research on cosplay information literacy.)

AO3 is clear winner for fanfic reading among participants. Apparently podfic has migrated to YouTube?

None of participants went to librarians for book recs. (Oh my heart is breaking!)

On Adventure Time: "As you can see, the show makes total sense." AHAHAHAHAHAHA

Using analytic autoethnography. Sometimes gets flack from others who perceive autoethnography as not being rigorous.

importance of roles and hierarchies in determining how to include/cite sources in wiki articles; how to

Talking about individual as library & librarian and individual as archive & archivist

In a time of collapse (like now), we need to think about how people will preserve media and visual culture. The people doing this work are more likely to be pirates than institutional actors.

Critics & legal opponents of archives are not framed as individuals, but are instead described as communities, collectives, and corporations.

Oof the rhetoric of using libraries as stealing if you're not too poor to buy books. Yikes.

Individuals feel responsibility for cultural preservation and distrust institutions to do it; systematic disinvestment in public preservation institutions fuels this.

Academic libraries should learn from pirates' and fans' examples. Reject exploitative pricing models.

Fans should take their fandom and love really seriously and think about whether they can be archivists or want to be archivists.