Fansplaining: The Money Question 2: The Appening

Podcast Episode
Fansplaining
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Episode Title:	The Money Question 2: The Appening
Length:	1:25:24
Featured:	Elizabeth Minkel, Flourish Klink, Earlgreytea68
Date:	March 4, 2020.
Focus:	Fandom and Profit, AO3 App Wars
External Links:	The Money Question 2: The Appening (includes show notes, audio, and transcript)
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Fansplaining: The Money Question 2: The Appening is episode 121 of the meta podcast Fansplaining. The episode discusses the AO3 App Wars and broader questions of fandom and profit.

Intro

"In Episode 121, Flourish and Elizabeth revisit the themes of an earlier episode about fanfiction and money in the wake of the recent brouhaha about apps like Fanfic Pocket Archive Library. They talk to fanfic author and copyright law professor Earlgreytea68 about “the AO3 App Wars,” digging into topics like the basics of U.S. copyright law, the AO3’s non-monetization policies, and the legal, moral, and ethical dimensions of who is (and who should be) permitted to make money from fanfic."

Links

• Episode, show notes, and transcript: 121: The Money Question 2: The Appening, ^{Archived version}
• Tumblr promotional post, ^{Archived version}

Some Topics Discussed

• AO3 App Wars
• Third-party apps such as Fanfic Pocket Archive Library
• Copyright and Fair Use
• Fandom and Profit
• TheoryofFicGate
• Archive-locking

Excerpts

[EGT]
Apparently the misunderstanding was because there was more than one app that people were talking about, and they were talking past each other, so there was one app, I think it was the Fanfiction Pocket? I don’t know. There was one app that was not hosting anything. There was another app that had—it seemed like they had copied the fics and they had put them into buckets, but it was harder to figure that out because you had to pay to see like, almost anything on that particular app. And that one’s, that one was gone fairly quickly, but there was a lot of misinformation about this Fanfiction Pocket app, Archive Reader, whatever it was called, that had a really long name, and the fact that it had the ads and it had the pay level and people really got upset about the fact that this app developer in their view was profiting off of their fics and had post—there was a lot of talk about how they had reposted them to this app without their consent.

[ELM]
Right, and I’ve seen blow-ups around that too where it’s people who truly don’t understand plagiarism and they don’t under—you know, so they’ll, there was one years ago when Wattpad was just hitting the zeitgeist, I remember, where people were like posting, they were just posting fics on their Wattpad accounts and they were like “What? I—I wanted to read it on my Wattpad account!”

[EGT]
I think that what they mean is that when you find out that there is something going on with your work that you had no idea was happening, and immediately they’re like “You didn’t have to ask me about that?” Right? It’s like, you figure out that there is a place on the internet where people are consuming your creative work and you had no idea, and I think they like, jump to “consent.” You must need consent to do that! Which isn’t necessarily true, right?

Like, Google is constantly linking to fics all over the place and that’s, you know, when you run a Google search Google does not ask all of those websites it links to when you get the results like “Is it OK, is it OK if I put the search there?” Because that’s not how that kind of thing works, right? So you don’t actually need consent for everything that’s happening, and I’m not sure—because they weren’t copying or wholesale pasting, they were just linking back to AO3 with a different skin, I don’t know that it really was about consent in that respect.

The ads are a different question, right? Like, there’s two things going on here and I think just the linking—like, it’s like rec lists, right? Like, people rec my fic…I just got a comment on a fic and the person was like, “This came up in a Twitter thread about things that make you cry!” And I was like “Oh! I would have liked to see that Twitter thread,” but that stuff happens all the time when you have no idea, right?

[FK]
There’s also the reality that people need to accept which is that if you have something that’s like, archive-locked, then that’s one thing, but if you have it just on the archive, that’s on the public internet, and I keep saying this to people! You know? Like, I think that there is a line and I think that like, I would not share something that had been only shared on a private mailing list or archive-locked or, you know, like—there’s a lot of stuff that’s behind passwords in the Jane Austen fandom, and I wouldn’t share that stuff on a syllabus? Like, I’m not gonna like go out of my way to make it available to people? Right?

[EGT]
So there’s those things. And then the third piece, my final piece, is the thing that I saw a lot of, which is very—what I would describe as a little bit, not concern trolling necessarily, but a sort of—like, “PSA! For the good of the community, so you all know,” like, “when an ad, when there are ads next to fic, that invalidates fair use.” I saw that written many, many times. And every time I was like, “I can’t just jump into these random conversations, but that is not accurate.”

[ELM]
But I think with the OTW’s case, going back to that, it does seem to me too that having a hard-line stance then minimizes the fact of having to make calls. Because there’s a huge difference between saying “give me a tip,” or like, “give me a dollar on Paypal” or whatever, and “Oh, you liked chapter one and two? Now pay for chapters three through ten!” You know? And “Oh, you liked this last fic? Now pay for the sequel by clicking here,” right? And that stuff is I think the stuff that could be truly problematic. Right? And especially if it was at scale.

Reactions & Reviews

"To all my friends who’ve ever published (or read) fic on ao3, I super recommend this podcast episode by fansplaining"

Rec by @mackerel_pizza