Uhm... I don't have time to read right now. Think you could maybe break it down for me what exactly got you upset with this fandom, so I have an idea?

Like are they charging writers to post there? How exactly are they making profit from fanfiction? How do they screw you over? Just the general stuff, doesn't have to be detailed. Thanks. =)

Dang it! I meant to say this "FanLib" not "fandom". *rolls eyes at self*

Sure, no problem.. it is a fair amount of reading.

So far, the money is simply ad revenue, as far as I know. However, there are parts of the TOS that refer to "fees" for members, but doesn't explain what. I'm not exactly sure how that will play out...

In the terms of service, they also talk about how they have the right to edit anything you post, and how they basically own it once you post it, and there's nothing you can do. However, if the copyright lawyers come knocking, FanLib will have nothing to do with it. All the blame shifts to you, and you are even expected to stand up for them, and defend them. Even though they pretty much own your soul. *angry eyes*

I'm partly unsure why this upset me so much, but there was just something about it that gave me a really bad feeling, that set off alarm bells. *shiver* It's not even the for-profit part that really bugs me... the biggest thing for me was probably the all-male BOD with no fandom connection. Arg.

Thanks for reading, though! I find it a rather interesting issue, so I hope you did too. :D

Hullo, I'm another one wandering LJ looking into this.

What really gets me about this FanLib thing is that they're looking for trouble with the copyright holders (I mean, they are putting out Publicity Releases! saying 'we're bringing fandom into the open) but not making any attempt to make it *safe* for fans to post there and putting all the liability on the fans.

Do you stand on the safe side of the fence enclosing a bull you've enraged, and hold out candy to a child to entice them into the field with the animal?

You're right, they are looking for trouble. The whole set up is just full of tricks and loops, and it just screams "we KNOW this is gonna cause problems, but our butts are covered, and we're making money, so who cares?!"

I love your metaphor, too. It really suits the situation perfectly. At least fandom is smart enough to recognize the trap. *applauds fandom*

I'm now referring to them as Pit of Weasels, or POW in my journal, ever since someone claiming to be their CEO (I do really think it was him) went around trolling people I know (including someone who put up ONE post saying pretty much the same things we all are thinking.)

Late last night they had 5, 181 fic combined. I'm going by the fanfic page where you can scroll down to content rating and have only 2 categories to add. One is 13+ (they apparently consider 13 year olds adult- their TOS says you need to be 13 to post) and the other is All (which seems to be what I'd call Gen).

Today they have 5207 so they are still growing. I suspect nearly all of their writers are newbies on the fringes of fandom. Poor little fuzzy babies.

Pit of Weasels, I like that, lol. I saw a bit of the trolling going on too... not pretty. Definitely interesting seeing how this is playing out.

I've been keeping statistics on the number of fics, users, etc. for almost two weeks now. It's kind of interesting seeing the trends - you can practically tell which days the anti-FanLib discussion hit which Fandom, because the number of fics drops like a rock. I plan on posting the stats someday soon. :D

I've been putting up vague stats every day for a while (vague partly because I'm a vague sort of person, and partly because it took a long time for me to realize I needed to turn off the adult filter in order to get all the numbers.)

I've also written a couple pink guy/blue guy fics. I actually rather like them. *grin* I heard a couple people posted pink/blue to POW and had them deleted. POW is really stupid, deleting the one fandom that wouldn't be subject to copyright fears.

Arg, the adult filter... that's probably entirely screwing up my stats. I've been keeping track of the top 20 fandoms and tags that are listed on the left hand side of the main page... and those don't include the adult fics, whether the filter is turned on or off.

I had noticed the whole filter thing a few days ago... and I thought I had turned it off, but it looks like I may have left it on after all... thanks for bringing this to my attention again. I thought I had it figured out, but apparently not, lol. I'll be checking out your statistics too... see exactly what I've gone and screwed up. :p

Also, yeah, I just discovered the whole pink dude/blue guy slash thing today... and I think it's AWESOME. Oh fandom, you amaze me with your creativity. *g*

Hi, here by way of metafandom.

FanLib definitely makes my teeth hurt. I don't think they'll help any fandom one bit. As of right now, the fic on the site is pretty bad and doesn't showcase much talent. I could be wrong, though, and it's still pretty new. I hope it doesn't catch on, but I can see it doing so with a very specific part of fandom. The ones who like its sparkly poo-ness, all the contests, and the media recognition. People outside of fandom will not have an accurate representation of us, their opinions could worsen.

That's not even touching the seriously scary TOS death trap they have set up and the non-fandom, all-male BOD.

It annoys me that it will be successful to some extent and it will make money off of our work because of certain people. Until, at least, the shit hits the fan and someone gets sued. I didn't see an Anne Rice or Laurell K. Hamilton who I know don't allow fanfic of their works so I guess it's just authors who've given the ok or not explicitly said no? I don't know.

If they were willing to fight for you if an author sued, then maybe some good could come of this by trying to legitimize fandom in outsiders' eyes and making fanfic legal. But it isn't. It's just shining the spotlight on us and waiting for the lawyers to come knocking.

I hope it doesn't catch on, but I can see it doing so with a very specific part of fandom. The ones who like its sparkly poo-ness, all the contests, and the media recognition.

You're absolutely right about this. It makes it look like any other website that's trying to market a product... a lot of flashiness with not a lot of substance. It's like "Fandom for Beginners" because it introduces people to the idea, but doesn't even come close to covering the depth and complexity that fandom has.

I admit that, had this site been up a couple years ago, I would probably have been completely on board, because I didn't know better at that time.

FanLib smacks (to me at least) of the fanfic version of what Creation Con did to kill fan-run conventions, taking the convention experience from something that worked (both gloriously and profanely) for 30 years and changing ti to something that isn't even a shadow on the landscape any more. For fans who remember fan-run conventions at least.

*sad face*

Evolution, unfortunately, sometimes leads to extinction. Great Whites and Gators seem more the template fandom should be taking.

Fan-run conventions are still around and thriving. My husband and I are going to BayCon next weekend; this year is its 25th anniversary. WorldCon is in Japan this year and I forget where NASFIC is. WesterCon is still around, LosCon, NorWesCon, NorEasCon, Boskone -- all the old-timers; I haven't heard of any of them folding up their tents. SiliCon and TimeCon (in the SF Bay Area, as is BayCon) have been on-again-off-again for years, as their organizers go broke and then get it together again and pass them on to other organizers who go broke who pass them on to others who know what they're doing, and I don't know what they're doing right now but if they're not on this year they probably will be next. [wry smile]

The fan-run conventions are still around, definitely. We're not restricted to the festering pit which is CreationCon, no matter how badly CreationCon corporate would like us to think so. They work quite hard to ensure that their customers don't hear about the (cheaper and better) fan-run conventions but word still gets out. :)

Angie (from <lj user="metafandom")

Sorry ... over generalized my term there. Should have said the diversity of fan-fun conventions, in particular, the smaller ones.

True, true that many of the larger, more-established, long running fan-run conventions have been able to survive the CreationCon invasion (thank God), especially in traditional fandom hotbeds like SF and Baltimore. But it puts me to a melanchology when I discuss fandom and conventions with, in particular, younger fans (meaning those who made entre PC ... post-Creation) only to realize they think a two hour driveby under a Creation logo is what a "convention" is.

Because I spent my fandom heyday predominantly in smaller fan-run venues (included some of the biggie fan-run ones now, which used to be more intimate then), I spent an inordinate amount of time actually chatting with the folks I went to see, and that pretty much defined the convention experience for me (as well as influencing many of my career choices later). Though fan-run conventions are always better at allowing such opportunities than pro ones will ever be, many of the fan-run that have survived are the creation invastion are, by necessity, so large as to make such interactions virtually impossible unless you have a dutch uncle on the con committee.

And this is one of the things I most mourn about the fandom in which I came of age. Anyone with enough ambition and enough hope could put on at least one-fanrun convention before they realized what an overwhelming amount of work it was, and many of those small venue conventions are the epitome of the spirit of a fandom now put to stone as little more than an impression made.

And this is the future I see foretold in something like this infecting fanfic. The opportunities inherent to fanfic, and the freedom to explore those opporutnities without having a 20 year resume at your back or deep pockets of the ilk which few fans possess when they first jump into the game ... those are the things I see going extinct here, much as the convention landscape of old has been stipped of virtually all saplings in growth, leaving no one to take on the mantle when the ancient redwood eventually succomb, as all living things do.

Fandom being a living entity, donchya know. ;)

I don't know that I'd blame Creation on the relative lack of new or small conventions. The heyday of the 300-person con was the late 70s and early 80s. The economic squeeze of the later 80s drove a lot of smaller cons out of business, because the people who'd been running them had never had all that much of a head for managing money. When the economy tightened, those who couldn't cope with having less margin for expensive mistakes went bust.

Example: TimeCon, which was (and still is?) a fan-run media con, was founded by a guy who, so I heard, had a bad habit of inviting five or six cool actors as guests and then trying to figure out how to accommodate that $$$$$ into his con's budget for the year. He usually failed -- TimeCon was hardly ever in the same hotel twice because they rarely paid their bills, and they owed money to a number of other local fan groups as well, on equipment rental which wasn't always paid. TimeCon regularly "went bankrupt" (whether they filed or not -- they claimed they were going to in order to get other fans to forgive various debts), then somehow recapitalized and started over at a new hotel with a new slate of expensive guests, repeat. IIRC, they actually "died" there for a while in the late 80s or early 90s, before being taken over by some folks who actually had some intelligence. I don't know how they're doing now, but their financial woes had nothing to do with competition or anything else from Creation.

Small cons also don't have the economies of scale to help them out. You need certain equipment for showing a film program, for example, whether you have 50 people watching it or 500. A con with 2000 attendees is going to have more budgetary slosh than one with 200, and more room for absorbing mistakes or unpleasant surprises. As the economy became harsher, it's not really surprising if most of the smaller cons just couldn't manage.

The late 80s was also when conventions started to split off and specialize, and it might well have helped kill some of the smaller multi-cons to lose chunks of their programming and audience. BayCon had one of the few large-scale Japanimation programs and gave away a highly coveted translation guide free in every program packet -- guides which were sold for hundreds of dollars after the convention, because there just wasn't much available along those lines back then. But when the Anime fans got organized enough to start putting on thier own conventions, the multi-cons gradually dropped their anime programs; there just wasn't the demand for it anymore.

Masquerades at the general conventions also got smaller and less elaborate at that time. Master costumers who'd spend hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours on costumes and take them up the circuit -- on the west coast that might be BayCon then WesterCon then WorldCon -- either dropped out of the hobby all together or focused their efforts on CostumeCon, where they got more of the kind of programming they were looking for, as opposed to the single track or scattering of panels a more general con could offer them; and could compete against the best, with the financial savings of going to only one convention per year rather than three or four. WorldCon still has a good masquerade, although it's nothing like it was in the early- to mid-80s. Remember the '84 WorldCon in LA and their seven-hour masquerade? :)

I think the economy has more to do with the dearth of small conventions than Creation, honestly. Throwing a convention is more expensive than ever. Even a well-run (from a financial standpoint) convention rarely makes money its first few years and it's harder to find both 1) seed money, and 2) fans with the requisite skill at money management who aren't already working an established con. I don't think there'd be many of those little local conventions around anymore even if Creation Inc. had never existed.

Fanfic, on the other hand, doesn't have those problems. Anyone can get a free LJ and post stories -- there are no start-up costs and no financial pitfalls. Assuming FanLib's publicity campaign doesn't result in all of us being C&Ded into non-existence (or at least underground existence) I think there'll always be plenty of free fanfic around.

Angie, keeping her fingers crossed

(via metafandom)

Yeah, that ad shows they don't have the slightest idea who their target audience is. Not to stereotype, but how likely is it that a fan writer is a skinny (or not) geek, or indeed female, and how likely is it that he is a buff bodybuilder?

Exactly. They just don't seem to have a clue. They don't know who they're targeting, and they don't know how to appeal to the audience they THINK they're targeting anyways. It's completely backwards, and it drives me nuts.

You know, that ad is really interesting. I think it explains a lot.

They've quite obviously got it all wrong- as well as the fact that you can tell it's ads on an extreme budget, using stock photos and sucky gradient backgrounds, it looks far more like it's aimed at fanBOYS rather than fangirls. The whole pink and blue thing, as well as the obvious masculinity slant- "you need a REAL man, girls!"- seems to be far more appealing to a male audience in that they'd most likely pick the muscular guy because they'd want to emulate him.

Whereas I, and I suspect most fangirls, would rather have the skinny, cheeky-looking guy than the beefcake with a stick up his ass if we had to choose between those two. Whoever did this clearly failed Fangirl Psychology 101, as if they'd spent any time at all in our culture they'd know we like pretty boys! Well, predominantly, anyway- I'm not claiming to speak for everyone here and it's cool if y'all like muscular guys, but purely in terms of physical types I have noticed that fangirls tend to go towards the less butch end of the spectrum. Except perhaps in wrestling fandom.

Another clue is that the site owners seem to have a background in fan films. This, to me, is a typical fanboy activity. I think the site owners have participated in a fanfiction culture, but it's a male-oriented one where slash and thing don't get much of a look-in. So they THINK they know all about fanfiction, but it's their sort of fanfiction, not the sort that the writers they're trying to lure to the site write.

seems to be far more appealing to a male audience in that they'd most likely pick the muscular guy because they'd want to emulate him.

I think you're wrong there. To appeal to a het male audience you show girls. Not men, and most definitely not a bodybuilder with a shaven chest that screams "gay now!" to my average bloke senses. It's not homophobia; we just don't identify with someone like that any more than we would identify with an Emperor Penguin. Anyone to whom girls are not the centre of the universe is an alien species to us.

No, this is an incredibly badly-judged attempt to appeal to women. Or to gay men, perhaps, but that's a pretty small target audience AFAIK as I really don't think that gay men get involved in online fandoms much. Certainly the only person in my fandom who I thought was a gay man turned out to be a woman after all.

They forgot the fundamental rule; women's magazines are full of pictures of women, and so are men's magazines (except for men who are covered in oil and are doing something technical to a car). PC Format magazine (the UK nerd bible, devoted to graphics cards and RTS games) is beside my PC right now; the cover shows the best-looking girl in a bikini that I've seen... since the last issue of PC Format came out.

Yeah, I think I phrased it badly. What I meant was that I know it was meant to appeal to women but it really wasn't working because they clearly knew nothing about the target audience. But I was thinking it'd probably appeal to men more by accident (if it wasn't about fanfic),

I guess cos it kinda reminded me of those things you used to get in the back of old comic books/magazines, you know, the Charles Atlas dude with the whole "YOU could have a body like THIS if you just try X supplement/course". There are still a lot of mens magazines devoted to that sort of thing, and they aren't all gay ones. I guess it's pretty niche, and not something your average guy would do, but there's obviously a market for it, right? Plus there is more media pressure these days for guys to have "the perfect body".

I didn't mean that this ad was intentionally appealing to men, I'd have to be pretty dumb not to realise you use pictures of women for that (but hey, I guess it already looks like that, so I'll just keep digging, shall I? *g*). Just that that audience was the only one I could think of who might actually get something out of such a poorly-constructed ad, and even then not really, because how many bodybuilding fanfic writers do you know?

because how many bodybuilding fanfic writers do you know?

I used to do serious weight-training and martial arts while also writing 'Modesty Blaise' fanfic (well, not really at the same time, I'd have dropped the weights on my foot when I turned a page) thirty years ago. So, one. Except that it was strength training, rather than the showy body-building for definition and pose value, and I'd never have dreamed of shaving my chest.

If they really wanted to attract women from my section of fandom, they would've put up a picture of Sean Bean. :p

Thank you for summing the ad up much better than I could. I was so frustrated with it that I couldn't really express what it was that I was trying to say. But yeah, what you said. :P I kept looking at it and going "Ummm, they put the text on the wrong sides." The left-hand side was the one that I preferred, but the message didn't match! Heck, for the longest time I had "skinny nerdboys" on my interests list on my LJ profile! I only removed it so as not to exclude the non-skinny nerdboys.

Linking to this post, if that's okay. Sheesh. How insulting and dim-witted can they get? :;rolls eyes:;

It's definitely okay. :D I never thought anyone beyond my flist would ever read it, so I'm absolutely thrilled that it's gotten this much reaction! Thanks!

(here via dodger_winslow)

I've been reading about this and the more I read, the more pissed off I get. Like they give a crap about fanfic. I think it's just a case of them surfing the net and saying "Hey, fanfic! How can we make some money off this?"

I'm all for competing archives, etc., but the fact is, we already have archives, wonderful ones that have had a lot of work put into them. The best thing we can to do fight FanLib is to shut them out. Don't participate, don't give them your fic so they can turn around and make a buck off it while exposing YOU to all the legal consequences and themselves to none. We put our heart and soul and passion into the fic we write, and we do it out of love, so why the hell should they get anything for it? They'll never make one thin dime off my back, I can guarantee you that.

There's a lot of us out there. If we stay away in droves, then they're dead in the water. I say we treat them like the pariahs they are. Without the fic, what have they got? Nothing.

I just hope some lazy journalist doesn't go Googling for fanfiction one day to write an article about it and end up thinking, "Oh cool! Those guys are experts!" *headdesk*

I am definitely all for shutting them out by not participating. When I was writing this, part of me wanted to explore the site more thoroughly, in order to build a better argument against it. However, a larger part of me refused, because I didn't want to increase the hit count any more than it had to be. They don't know that I'm only in there to try to bring them down.

When I was first there, I copied and pasted the list of top fandoms and tags from the left side of the page, which has the number of fics in each fandom. Today, I checked back, and was pleased to discover that the numbers are already down. People are apparently removing their material. I just hope the trend continues.

It's their unbelievable arrogance that gets me. It would be one thing if some of us came up with this idea, and I still wouldn't like it, but to have a bunch of people who wouldn't know a fic if it walked up and slapped them in the face decide they're going to do us all a big favor and "bring fanfiction into the mainstream"? Uh, yeah. FOAD, please. I can only speak for myself, but if I wanted to be in the mainstream, I wouldn't be writing fanfic. I'm quite happy being subversive, thanks. And I'm very particular about where my fic goes. I've never made a penny off it, nor should I, and there's no way I'd ever post a word of my stuff on that site.

I took a look around, too...what did they have, 21 X-Files stories, in a fandom that probably has hundreds of thousands that have been written? I don't know who any of those people are who are posting. Probably newbies, and quite young, who don't know what they're getting into.

I think those of us who know better will give it a wide berth. When it goes nowhere and they start losing money, it'll sink to the bottom where it belongs.

Here via janedavitt's LJ.

I am thinking that you are very right about what you have said. This is of concern.

I see that one of your readers has compared this to the corporate fannish bottom feeder that is Creation Con, and I would tend to agree - though as another pointed out, fannac and cons in general are certainly still alive.

I think that we who write fic will survive this. However, if these folks don't go down soon, they could make things a lot worse than having a few websites C&D'd by corporations guarding their copyrights.

Fortunately, they already seem to be going down! I had copied the "top fandoms" list from the left side of the page the other day. Comparing the numbers from it to the numbers from today, it looks like there are users removing their material. Unfortunately the numbers have still gone up in some fandoms, but as we spread awareness, maybe that will turn around. :)

This is showing itself to be A REALLY BAD THING the more I read about it. Sure, it would be nice to have mainstream love for fanfiction--but this isn't the way to do it. And let's face it, as long as homosexual love and sex continues to be a big black mortal sin for most religious groups, corporate sponorship will never fly. Especially with *all male* powers that be. What are you left with? Tame het fic?

I now feel a need to make anti-FicLib icons.

We need to show the copyright holders that we honestly are in this only for pleasure and not profit--unless it's with their blessing--not FanLibs

Yeah, they're going to get a rude awakening when they find out what really goes on in fanfic. As of right now there appears to be:
-5200 fics total
-132 tagged 'slash' (largely by a small handful of writers)
-141 Supernatural fics
-2 tagged 'Wincest'

Now, knowing the SPN fandom, that is obviously not very representative. And while Wincest may be one of the more extreme cases, I'm guessing that there are going to be a lot of fics that will never make it within 100 miles of FanLib.

I'm up for anti-FanLib icons, too. I was reluctant to even post that FanLib ad to my Photobucket. It felt so wrong and dirty.

Wow, that ad is really dreadful. I'm snagging it to show because it encapsulates so very much about what's wrong with that.

It really, really is. I had tons of thoughts about it, but it was just soooo bad that I couldn't even form the words. It just left me speechless, and not in a good way. *shakes fist*

hehe, the ad really sucks.
why would anyone want to look like a frakkin wwe wrestler?

if you did, you'd be at the gym working out, not at home reading fics.

Exactly! It just makes NO sense! They're completely targeting the wrong audience, in the wrong way, and the message just comes out all confused and illogical. I wanted to write more about it in my original post, but I was so frustrated by it, and couldn't even figure out what they were trying to say with it, that I just settled for going "WTF?"

This is an excellent break-down of the issue. To quote my inner geek, "I have a bad feeling about this." Change can be really scary, especially in our little niche community, but the attempts of a BOD (who are *not* members of our community) to capitalize on our joy and push it further into the spotlight is genuinely problematic. I think that most of the fan fic that will be posted on the site will be much like the dregs of ff.net, and won't be the best of what fandom has to offer because the TOS are so off-putting to many of the more mature members of fandom. So the stuff on fanlib - the stuff that their BOD is offering "the world" - is not writing that outsiders will admire or respect.

I want outsiders to respect our hobby, and as we gain more visibility I don't think we'll be aided in this by fanlib's efforts. When I try to bring someone into fandom, I don't drop them into ff.net and in the future I won't point them in the direction of fanlib.com.

Oh, sigh. Like you, I've been kicking around for awhile. Did most of my growing up in fandom. It's my safe space, where I finally found people like me. And as a female space, too, it's been so important to me - it's possible to get the geekiness without the sexism. I don't like to imagine losing that.

Maybe this will all turn out all right in the end. There are so many educated, intelligent people in fandom that I like to believe we're going to make it through all right.

First off, I wanna thank you for showing me that original meta. I would never have figured out what was going on with this on my own. :p But now, I get to be impassioned, and have a cause to fight for! I get to defend fandom, and contribute to it in some way, which I've always wanted to do!

For an earlier comment reply, I had been perusing the fic tagged 'slash' and found that most of it is written by a small handful of people. I haven't read any of it, but no matter how well (or badly) written it is, there's no way it represents fandom as a whole. As it sits right now, ff.net is looking almost shiny.

I'm just glad that there's already a rebellion of sorts, before FanLib really does too much damage. Some of the numbers are already dropping, fandoms like Harry Potter, Stargate (both SG-1 and Atlantis), Supernatural, and Firefly have fewer fics posted today than they did a couple days ago. To me these are the really hardcore fandoms, and it appears as though the cause is already spreading throughout them. :D

Yeah, the stuff on FanLib is not representative. I keep having to suppress the urge to troll around the site and leave reviews with links to all the discussion we've been having. Beginners find LJ difficult to navigate, and maybe they just don't sense the danger inherent in getting involved with these guys. And the thing is, the danger isn't just in the C&D stuff, but with the possible end of the Fandom Free-For-All that we all love so much.

Fandom is our community, and we don't want anyone to *capitalize* on that. It's threatening and worrying and I can only hope that this attempt will fail.

Have you seen any of the blog/news articles on this? Apparently FanLib has "3M in funding and big media sponsors" and "is one niche site that has a lot of support and will do well capitalizing on existing communities around media for an extended period of time" (http://mashable.com/2007/05/18/fanlib/).

It's really hard to say how fandom will evolve as a result of this. Bottom line, though, I think, is that those of us in fandom love what we do. And to be completely sappy, love is a powerful force. Right? Right? *nudges you enthusiastically* If, somehow, FanLib manages to send us back a number of years instead of "bringing fan fic into the light," I think fandom will survive it. Perhaps we shall even emerge STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE! You know, united against the outside force etc. etc. There's already been a multi-fandom reaction to this.

Aren't I all optimistic. *crosses fingers*

Are you still keeping track of the numbers over there? FanLib's only a couple of days old and growing fast. And they're very, very good at getting the word out. You can embed link-backs in your e-mails and blogs now, I think.

And just to clarify a couple of things, when I say 'female space' I mean that before I found fandom, my interest in sci fi, for example, tended to be dismissed in real life because I was a female. Fandom offered a place where my gender was unknown and/or didn't matter. *That's* the 'female space' I was talking about, so after some though, by 'female space' I really meant 'space where gender was less stringently defined,' and that ties into the whole slash issue, as well. I think I'm more sensitive to this issue than I would be normally due to the "MJ statuette" kerfluffle that's been going around.

My wording isn't the best. Hmmm. It's hard to set this down in words. All right. I'm okay with the BOD being male. Fans come in all shapes and sizes, and while females tend to make up the largest percentage of fan fic writers, there are males present in our community and that's always been fine. Also, I think that as people use FanLib (and they *will* use FanLib) the guys in charge will continue to gather more information and evolve to help suit the fannish community.

As for the profit thing, well, I'd be a lot better with that issue if the first idea seemed to be "Archive for Fans" rather than "Money-Making Archive for Fans." And we still have the question of fan fic legality - there are strong arguments on both sides, but for me fan fic still operates in a grey area of fair use, and making money off of it tips it a lot closer to the line.

In conclusion: after some serious thought, I'm gonna sit back and see what happens with FanLib. The TOS are still the most concerning, I think.

Here from Dodger_Winslow

Have to say that having been in some form of fandom since the late 70's, I've been around to observe the changes that have been wrought by the intervention of the "Greed is Good" principle or Fandom for Profit.

To use them as an example, Fan conventions have virtually disappeared in our neck of the woods. Not wholly, however they are few and far between and when they do happen they are expensive and guest based, rather than the 3 (or more) strands of programing old style conventions used to offer. Now based on one day attendances for a guest "talk" rather than a 3 day orgy of meeting up with friends from other states, all night room parties, costuming, art shows, fiction comps, model shows, or to put it in a nutshell a community coming together to celebrate their common and not so common interests, Conventions seem now to be designed to feed the hysteria for the cult of personality over the joys of community.

Whether that is the cause of poor management or overwhelming competition is up for debate. I believe that both have contributed. What has also contributed is the proliferation of Fan based retail now available. There is no longer the imperative to create your own product/fun when so much is produced and is ready to be sold to you. Fans hungry to be involved can get their fix from the local retailer with lunch boxes, pencil cases (worst case I admit) etc, but the premise of involvement and participation is not encouraged. It is almost actively discouraged. There's no money to made off an active and creative community who create their own fandoms, who contribute for the benefit of their community and other fans. Corporate Media producers want passive fandoms that they can control and present with "fait accompli" product. That guarantees the financial success of their figurines, the novelisations, their tie-ins. Things they can create "hype" about owning. And while most fans enjoy that kind of thing, [even I own the Lord of the Rings Argonath book ends. Who could resist? :-)], it doesn't in the long run excite fans to produce anything unique.

Having said that I should also say that Fen also have to accept responsibility for their own non participation.

But that is what I miss. Fan participation. The uniqueness of the interpretation. It's one of the thing's I have rediscovered in SPN through fanfiction and lj and through that the other aspects that can shared online. The community.

If something like FanLib (even the name is designed! Do they really believe that we will think they are liberating fans?) can make inroads on Fanfiction like Corporate Fandom has on trad Fandom then we are doomed.

I don't think I'm being Chicken Little about this...human nature being what it is I'm almost fatalistic, however I really, really hope that Fans will stay away and that this site/archive will vanish into the oblivion it so richly deserves.

Just My Humble Opinon,
Noir

Came here via janedavitt's entry. Hello all :-)

God, if this fanlib stuff weren't so sad and potentially harmful to fandom overall (not because they might attract all that many fandom members but because they aim at representing fandom to the "outside") it'd almost be funny to watch their complete lack of professionalism, common sense and plain knowledge of what they are doing. Gosh, they don't have a f*ing clue about their potential customer base, do they?

The pink one is cute.

I am using a bit of your post in an essay on blogging and the social norms of the blogging community that I am writing for school. When it's all said and done the essay will be posted to rememberbefore. This should be next Wed. If you have a problem with this, please let me know.

That's perfectly fine with me, I'm honoured that you're using my post, so thank you for that! Hope it all goes well, and I look forward to reading it!