it’s not *for* you.

Apart from the ONTD report and the Fandom_Wank summary, I have read no fandom takes on the JKR-Lexicon suit whatsoever.

But I really, really hope that all of you guys in HP fandom (and fandom at large) are saying the same thing, because if there is anything I feel fandom should be unified about 100% of the time, it’s this:

Playing with someone else’s creation is a privilege, not a right. When that person or their estate is still profiting from their creative works, it becomes even more of a privilege of the fan who interprets that work however they choose.

From everything I have heard about JKR’s interactions with the high-profile organizers of TLC and the Lexicon and so forth, she seems to have held them in great affection, to have seen them as guardians of the spirit of the HP books. I am completely disgusted that one of them has not only taken her trust and abused it, but also, in doing so, jeopardized the incredibly gracious relationship HP fans have had with Rowling for so long.

I think it is possible for fans to get so caught up in the idea that we own a piece of what we love that we see ourselves as having free reign over it. But no matter how much you invest of your own creative energy in fandom, you are still doing so by the grace of the person who originally wrote the work you love so much. No matter how much time, energy, page-flipping and bookworming Steve Vander Ark may have genuinely invested in the Lexicon, the product of that investment is ultimately still no more or less “his” than Love Under Will is mine, or any fan author or artist’s work is “theirs.”

Yes, it is theirs in spirit. But in terms of copyright law, Vander Ark, and every single one of us, produce and distribute our work in the shade of infringement. That we do it and get away with it is solely by the grace of the original author - in this case an author who has been exceptionally benevolent, gracious, and generous to the HP fandom. She has encouraged us to make her world ours over and over again. She has taken fandom to heart and listened to the many things her fans have said through their own creative works.

But that is her prerogative and her move to make, because it is her world we play in.

It sort of routinely boggles my mind that fans still forget this - the cardinal rule of being a producer of fan work: it is not legally permissible for you to profit off of works you create, if those works deal with a previously produced and still-copyrighted source. It doesn’t matter that SVA thinks his hard work and effort negate the fact that he is exerting that work cataloguing and archiving someone else’s writing: it’s still illegal. The Lexicon still, just as we all do, operates by the grace of Jo Rowling. What allows it to exist is its not-for-profit status.

When fans seek to change that status into something they can capitalize on, they jeopardize the give-and-take relationships fandom is forming and strengthening with authors and publishers, and they damage the tenuous trust that exists between us. Fans trust the author to understand that we do what we do out of love for the canon they’ve given us; the author trusts us fans not to attempt to infringe upon their hard work and their own efforts at producing that work for us to enjoy.

This lawsuit is an extremely bad scene for all of us, fans and authors and publishers alike. HP fandom has been tarnished by this. The industry is going to be watching the outcome of this case very carefully, because the outcome could have a huge impact upon how authors and publishers deal with online fanworks. There is just no way for this to end well.

I hate that one fan with an ego has put us in this position. I am extremely grateful at the moment for the Organization for Transformative Works, because at the very least, its ideas and its methods are helping to counteract the kind of appropriating fan Vander Ark is turning into, the kinds of fan publishers send C&D letter after.

No matter how you look at it - ethically and legally Vander Ark is in the wrong. That he initially asked for and was refused permission to go through with the book and did it anyway shows clearly that, however he started out, he is more a fan of Steve Vander Ark than of Jo Rowling and Harry Potter.

And ultimately that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it: respect for the author and their universe. SVA has shown that he has neither. If he did, he would have respected that “No, you cannot profit off what I have created” means exactly that: profiting from your fan works is illegal.

It’s also reprehensible. HP fandom, I hope you do not support the Lexicon in this endeavor in any way. It is a slap in the face to JKR, and it is a slap in the face to every fan who has ever gratefully toiled, invested, and slaved over a fan project purely for the love of the canon.

Not for profit.

so tonight i’ll sing a song for all my friends

ways in which i am cheating my livejournal ban:
- continuing to use semagic to write entries in because it’s endlessly better than a browser script of any variety
- answering people when they ask stupid questions on rackets, it’s like i just can’t stop myself even though i handed the group over to Wonapalei and company. :/
- uploading pictures to my picture account, because Semagic makes that easier than anything else on earth. And someone told me it would just be depriving LJ of bandwidth because I’d only be hotlinking from other sites anyway.
- RSS feeding ljs even though this is still confusing and scary, and even though commenting is out.

I think I forced myself to leave LJ because I needed a disconnect and I wanted one. And now I have one. It is making me restless and fidgety. To say that I am feeling avoidant is a major, major understatement - I have 59 unanswered emails in my inbox and at least 3 communit - no, 4 - fandom projects i’m deliberately hiding from.

This all looks, on the surface, like so much immaturity and emotional distress. I know that. But it’s not. It’s turbulence, rather - a change happening inside me for once rather than being done to me. At some point this will all straighten itself out and I will know where to go from here, and what I want.

In the meantime, PICSPAM :D.

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you were sleeping next to me - i might as well have been alone

my life is so hard.

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stupid gifs for stupid people

can i backdate this? skladfs i should probably backdate this.

i like tribbles! do you like tribbles?

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