Into the Omegaverse: How a Fanfic Trope Landed in Federal Court

Video Essay
Title:	Into the Omegaverse: How a Fanfic Trope Landed in Federal Court
Creator:	Lindsay Ellis
Date(s):	Sept 3, 2020 and Oct 23, 2020
Medium:	online
Length:	1 hour, 4 min, 34 seconds
Footage:
Fandom:
Topic:	the Omegaverse Litigation
External Links:	Into the Omegaverse on Youtube
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Into the Omegaverse: How a Fanfic Trope Landed in Federal Court is a video essay by Lindsay Ellis published to Youtube on September 3rd 2020 related to the Omegaverse Litigation between Addison Cain and Zoey Ellis. As of November 1, 2020 it has over 1,200,000 views; 107k likes; 600 dislikes; and over 21,000 comments. The video summary reads

The romance novel nightmare that didn’t exactly rock the courts but was a hot mess regardless.

The video served as a commentary on the Omegaverse Litigation case and a primer about the scandal for viewers not in the know; a critique of the “petty fandom bullshit” that Lindsay argues underpins the dispute between the authors. Lindsay also pointed out that while intellectual property claims and fandom tropes are centered in the controversy, these were of lesser consequence for creators than the legal precedent about 'owning tropes' that might be set by the case - which Lindsay argues would actually hurt current or future authors.

Into the Omegaverse, also had an unexpected sequel; a video essay entitled Addison Cain's lawyer e-mailed me, and it only got worse from there.

The Video

Summary

Topics included:

• An explanation the trope of Omegaverse
• Initial details about the Addison Cain vs Zoe Ellis cases
• A cameo by Devin of Legal Eagle regarding DMCA notices and why platforms often remove content without doing independent analyses to check whether the takedown notice is legitimate
• A comparison of plot points of Cain and Ellis’s books
• Examples of other times Cain has gone up against other authors claiming they plagiarized her
• A summary of the litigation between Cain and Ellis
• An explanation of why Blushing Books offered a complete settlement to the Oklahoma case
• Details of Cain’s post about the Virginia case results and an argument that the way Cain portrayed and framed the Virginia case was not accurate.

Lindsay's source material included a short excerpt read aloud from Addison's novel, a consultation segment with LegalEagle, another Youtube essayist; and a timeline based on a relevant podcast episode by ALAB She gave credit to individuals from a school of law and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) at the end of the essay, along with a number of other YouTube video essayists who contributed voiceover talent.

Excerpts

Timestamp - 2:44. so a few months ago there was this article in the New York Times with the title: A Feud in Wolf-Kink Erotica Raises a Deep Legal Question, subheader: "What do copyright and authorship mean in the crowdsourced realm known as the Omegaverse", and I gotta tell you this article doesn't even come close to scratching the surface of how coconuts this whole thing is. So where to start? Okay, so there was this lawsuit surrounding some works of fiction that

incorporated the fanfic trope known as A/B/O or Omegaverse and one thing led to another and before you know it the New York Times gets to explain concepts like estrous cycles, claiming bites, forced impregnation, knotting, which is, um, well, it's like uh... (blows up a balloon) apparently it's a feature of wolf anatomy.

It's got everything! Sock puppetry, falsified documents, violent heat cycle, perjury, spurts of, well... it's like the Tiger King of wolf porn.

Timestamp – 59:06. so she's (Cain) trying really hard to frame this as an I was right all along and this is a win for authors and I’m helping you actually when in reality after the details of her involvement and malice and subsequent perjury were revealed to the court in the Oklahoma case… her publisher settled because their author perjured herself and Cain got to walk away with effectively no consequences from that, while the other lawsuit against her in another state fizzled and died for completely unrelated reasons. And that is how it ends...

…so if you were reading this as an invitation to go harass this woman, first of all what the hell is wrong with you? And also why are you even watching my channel? Second, don't. But this is less a cautionary tale of one vindictive author. The New York Times article claims that it raises a deep legal question, but it isn't really a deep legal question about who owns ideas. If there is a deep legal question it is how can people without the resources of giants like YouTube protect themselves from bad faith DMCA claims?

DMCA counterclaims do exist as a barrier, and Zoey Ellis did use them, but clearly that wasn't enough because Cain and Blushing (Books) steamrolled right through them and kept issuing takedowns for months. So a lot of the focus on this case was on the weird fanfic subculture, and not the fact that cases like this can and often do set important legal precedents. To me this is less about a “Too Horny on Main” train wreck as much as it is a good example of how laws designed to protect giant corporations are written in presumed good faith and assume that everyone is going to play by the rules.

(Cain quote) “I tried to protect authors”

Well as a fellow USA Today best-selling author who writes extremely niche trash involving questionable use of non-human anatomies, um, I cannot say I feel protected by this. If she had won this thing, which she didn't, that would have meant despite her claims to the contrary that you can actually own genre tropes which would make creating that much more difficult and give bad faith actors that much more arsenal to attack their fellow artists. And in cases like these we do kind of need to say something when bad faith actors try to use this sort of thing to their advantage, and it might inadvertently strengthen already draconian copyright law pushed by the likes of the Walt Disney company and all for your petty vindictive bullshit.

So this attitude is bad. Don't do it. You can't own tropes.

Discussion and Response

Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples.

The video was circulated on a number of platforms including Tumblr, Livejournal and Reddit.

On September 5, whencartoonsruletheworld posted a summary explaining why fans should watch Lindsay Ellis' video. By November 2, this post had over 54000 notes with fans discussing both Into the Omegaverse and later, the follow-up video.

why you should watch lindsay ellis’s “into the omegaverse: how a fanfic trope landed in federal court”:

• she has to explain a/b/o to her audience
• she managed to get TWELVE other youtubers to voice act for reenactments, including hbomberguy, jenny nicholson,todd in the shadows, sarah z, princess weekes, and an entire legality segment with legaleagle
• every time she has to explain knotting she just blows up a balloon that, unfortunately, has sonic the hedgehog on it,
• she says the word “superwholock” about four and a half minutes in
• absolutely insane amounts of legal fights over het a/b/o including perjury
• within the first 24 hours after upload lindsay was already sued for it

While Lindsay was not sued, the post above is indicative of rumors in fandom at the time. Within 12 hours of posting her video, Lindsay Ellis retweeted a cropped image of an email she had just received from Addison Cain's lawyer. Interest in Lindsay's video may have been encouraged by her tweets during the month of September; many of which hinted at legal trouble behind the scenes. On 22 September, Lindsay tweeted that she had been on the phone to lawyers all day, encouraging fans to believe that Cain was threatening litigation again.

this video is exceptional, but she has actually yet to be sued! She did receive an email from the author’s lawyer essentially objecting about the video and making some vague but not legally meaningful complaints about it. The author DID attempt to make a copyright claim against the video (which of course she did!) which lindsay has contested, and the author has about a week to either take her to court over it or admit that she had no right to make the copyright claim. #There is also a follow up video in the works already! #which i am EXTREMELY looking forward to

thebibliosphere posted the video on Tumblr, and it gained over 4000 notes.

The video also received significant additional attention after Lindsay published a second related video, Addison Cain's lawyer e-mailed me, and it only got worse from there on October 23, 2020. A bulk of fannish response to these video essays also proceeded from the sequel.

Further Reading

• A full video outline of the Omegaverse legal battle. And it's every bit as wild and full of petty drama that anyone would imagine, posted by u/ClancyHabbard, discussion at /r/fanfiction (Sept 4 2020)
• The Fan Fiction Author Threatening to Treat Genre Writing as a Crime(archived link) by Rose Weatherly for medium.com. (Sept 4 2020)
• Addison Cain Really Doesn't Want You Watching This Video About Her Attempts To Silence Another Wolf Kink Erotica Author, ^{Archived version} by TechDirt (Thu, Sep 10th 2020)
• [Erotic literature/fanfiction] Into the Omegaverse: a tale of lawsuits, author slapfights and kinky wolf sex a post at /r/HobbyDrama by u/purplewigg (Sep 23 2020; dead link)