[Research] Keith Mander, kindly stop ruining commercialization for the rest of us

[unjapanologist]

So, a Mr. Keith Mander bought up a Lord of the Rings fic archive with the express intention of making money out of it. Well. The relationship between Mander, LotR fic authors, and unfortunate legal reality as personified by the Tolkien estate is best summed up by this beautiful parable. boundbooks uses Mander's own quotes to relate how the sorry tale began and to show that, while he claims he intends to make the website in question "better" for its users, Mander is actually astoundingly clueless about what fans want. Nothing bona fide to see here. When the OTW posted a quick overview of the incident and its ramifications for the fic authors involved, Mander showed up in the comments to mansplain his plans and contrast them rather hilariously with what he refers to as the OTW's "vision" and their execution of it (he can do better because the OTW are just volunteers. Someone please point him to the Wikipedia entry for open source).

In short, train wreck. A very large part of me is too tired and heat-dead right now to do anything but snigger and microwave more popcorn, and Mander has already been told everything he needs to know directly and also indirectly by the many awesome posts about his antics currently gracing the internet. elf  is keeping track of links to said awesome posts.* But rambling is fun, so I'm going to try and make a point or two about what does really irk me about this beautiful technicolor fail.

It's no great shock when some ignorant individual or entity tries to monetize fic; all this has happened before, etc etc. Doomed outsider attempts to monetize fan activities, like Fanlib and ManderFail, are good cautionary tales on what not to do. They show very clearly how commodification of fic should not happen. They're useful in that sense. But mostly, they're just so obviously appalling to fans and copyright holders alike that they make the entire idea of commodifying fanwork look bad, impossible, or even unthinkable.

In the great scheme of things, that's just counterproductive. I think that some form of commodification of fanwork is inevitable in the long run, and I think this is a good thing, because we're nearing a point where technology and economic circumstances will allow individuals to commodify their creative works in whatever way they please. It would take some extra legal change to ensure that creative works that are "derivative" can be commodified as well, but I don't think that kind of change is impossible, or even very unlikely.

Imagine the possibilities that that kind of legal change would bring. It would mean that fans could commodify their works on their terms, not have them commodified by ignorant outsiders who don't realize what makes fandom valuable for the people in it. It would mean commodification could be organized so that it happens without harming the things that makes fandom great. We could write the rules. People could chose to participate in commodification, or not, and change their minds or do different things with different works they create -all according to personal preference. We could be really adventurous and stipulate that "commodification" can be something different than "you pay, you get access to my work, and I get all the money". There are so very many possibities between that traditional view of making a profit and the gift economy that we all know and love. Commodification by fans could help actually preserve and protect those aspects of the gift economy that are essential to fandom. For instance, if fans get to decide how commodification of fanworks should work, there could be a rule that you can sell stuff for money if you want, but that you always need to make a free copy available to the community as well (see open source again). I don't think we're capable of imagining all the (beneficial and harmful) possibilities of commodification on fannish terms until we've actually had a chance to try it.

(Disclaimer: I know I'm being massively vague here and not explaining what I mean properly, especially regarding things like legal change and how commercial and gift economies can work together. Typing everything out would make this post gargantuan, and it's already twice as long as I meant it to be by this point. All I wanted to do was shoot off a short message to say that I don't like what Keith Mander got up to :P Anyway, I'm so fascinated by the possibilities of commodifying fanworks on fannish terms that I wrote up an even more tl;dr version of this argument, which will be published in the November issue of Transformative Works and Cultures. That text will hopefully provide more context. Please forgive the general incohorence of this post. It's late, it's hot, I haven't eaten, and all I can think of are the pancakes that my flatmate promised to make me.)

Carrying on... There are plenty of real-world examples, such as the Japanese dojinshi market, that suggest that some or even a significant degree of commodification isn't poison to a fandom, can go hand in hand with a gift economy, and even provides economic benefits to rights holders, besides awarding financial compensation to those fans who might sometimes prefer to get some of that along with the kinds of emotional compensation that is more generally associated with gift economies. This can be win-win for everyone. Except, notably, for people like Mander who are neither fans nor rights holders of the source works that fans like to create stuff about. The assistance that these outsiders so graciously want to provide to hapless females who can't see the gold they're sitting on would not be needed at all, because fans could do everything they can do, and better. I will play my tiniest violin to lament their exclusion. People who don't contribute anything to either the source work or the fanworks don't deserve compensation, in my book.

Anyway. I believe that commodification, for those fans who wish it and on their terms, can be a great force for good for fandom as a whole. That's why I want Keith Mander and others like him to stop throwing around their outdated, belligerent, and invasive ideas about how monetization should work and what counts as "profit". Their way is not the only way. But it's such an appalling way that they manage to make every suggestion at commodification sound suspect and inherently wrong. This isn't just incorrect, it's also dangerous. Poisoning the mere idea of commodification in the minds of fans is like holding open the door for commodification that will not happen on fannish terms. Corporations are already busy pushing the sort of commodification that most of us do not want, and that trend isn't going to go away if we ignore it.

The only thing I want right now is for fans to feel like the idea of commodification of fanworks is something that can be reclaimed. It's not the exclusive little brain disaster sandbox of random idiots like Keith Mander. It's a territory that many fans are approaching or have already stepped into, and it can be our territory, given some time and effort. I strongly suspect that grabbing control of how fanworks are commodified will turn out to be a necessary step that we'll have to take, in the near or not so near future, if we want to continue to own our works the way we want.

Personally speaking, my fic and art is a labor of love, made for my own enjoyment and to make other fans happy. I want fandom to have as much control over my stuff as possible, because it's supposed to belong to fandom. Not to corporations, to venture capitalists, or even to me -it should belong to fandom, and fandom needs all the control it can get to defend it. Fandom managed to get its own servers** when corporate-owned servers turned out to be unreliable. If corporations and other outsiders keep pushing for commodification at fans' expense, and it looks like we have to resort to getting our own shops in order to keep control of our works, then we should damn well get our own shops.***

If I have to spend my time defending Castle Fanfic from Manders, I'd much rather throw chickens at them from the battlements than stand on the outside of the walls and fight them off from an unfavorable position.
 

Okay, I feel better now. I may have been a little more pissed off at this guy than I originally thought.

 

*All links in this post were found via elf, ithiliana, and starlady. Many thanks to them for keeping us informed.
**By which I don't mean to imply that the AO3 is the end-all of fic archives -it's one among many. I just happen to like the philosophy behind it very much.
***Shops being used as a methaphor for commodification here. I don't know what form commodification of fanworks might eventually take, although I have some favorite ideas, but I doubt it would resemble a "shop" in the traditional sense.

Comments

[elf]

I don't know what form commodification of fanworks might eventually take,

haikujaguar's business blog at The Three Micahs has a lot of thoughts in that direction, including a post on Un-slimy marketing ("Our problem then, is figuring out what separates the 'okay' marketing from the 'hate them never want to hear from them again disgusting used-car-salesman ick' marketing so we can stay on the good side of the equation.") and Enlisting the Aid of Your Inner Customer ("As a businessperson, do the stuff you wish other businesspeople would do for you.")

The final post of the 99 cent E-book series covers a lot of ground about how to sell creative works in different ways, many of which would apply to fanworks if they were fully legal to sell. (Some of the suggestions would be legal to sell now; a lot of artists sell fan art drawings, prints, t-shirts etc.)

[unjapanologist]

Oh, thanks, I'll check those out. I'm filling a big wall of post-its in my office right now with different ways in which fanwork commodification could work, what might crash and burn in a fannish context, etc. The concept of derivative works in general as "open source cultural goods" (discussed by these guys, for instance) fascinates me in particular. And I've found "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" to be a very helpful mind-jogging device. Its discussion on the problems with micropayments and the examples of free-based business models are especially interesting.

[franzeska]

Oh, wow, those links remind me of so many experiences with zines, I can't even tell you.

(And, as an aside, it makes me sad that ire over slimy marketers tends to not only pollute the idea of fannish things for profit but also the idea of asking people to help defray costs. Zines are a common target, but anything involving money, up to and including nonprofits doing fundraising drives, will sometimes come under fire.)

[unjapanologist]

anything involving money, up to and including nonprofits doing fundraising drives, will sometimes come under fire

Yes! And not just from fans themselves. I've seen non-fannish people wave around examples of money in fandom as "proof" that fandom is somehow not as "innocent" and harmless as it pretends to be, and that makes suspect pretty much any thing fans do (from creating fanworks to illegal downloading of episodes).

The most recent example that comes to mind is when comic book artist Nick Simmons turned out to have traced loads of images from the popular manga Bleach. Bleach fans were up in arms about how unethical this was, but there were some "mainstream" manga bloggers who jumped in and started saying that fan art was no better, and fans should get off their high horse because they watch most of their anime illegally, and they sell their fan art at conventions and such, so they can't claim that their fan culture is entirely non-commercial (as opposed to Nick Simmons' work). I didn't see anyone point at zines, although they probably would have been mentioned if the people lambasting fandom had been aware that they're also sold at cons.

(At least, they used to be, at manga cons. I'm still very much in the learning stage re:zines and don't know much that goes beyond what was in your excellent post. I just own a couple that I got at a manga con ten years ago, but I haven't been going to cons much since then.)

Apart from the conflating of downloading with drawing fan art as if those two are part of some package of (semi)criminal behavior, what struck me in those discussions was how fans' insistence that their activities never involved money was immediately turned against them by people going "But wat about artists' alley at that con? Hah!". The commercial/non-commercial binary did not work in fans' favor there, at all.

[franzeska]

Wow. I didn't realize zines were sold at manga conventions. (Not doujinshi? Zine zines?) The way I hear it, sales of zines at most types of convention have declined rapidly over the last ten years, but I haven't been to enough cons to say.

There are definitely some mismatched attitudes about how ok money is in different fannish practices. People who freak over zines often have no problem with doujinshi or fan art.

[unjapanologist]

I've never been much of a con-going person either, so no idea about how zines at manga cons have been evolving. It was 1998 or 1999 when I bought a couple at a con in Paris. My memory is very vague here, but there was definitely at least one that was purely textual fic, in French, about one or several manga series (Rg Veda, perhaps). It's in a box somewhere in my parents' attic, so I can't check the title.

Freaking over zines is kind of hard to imagine for me. Is this because I'm a semi-old fogey who has actual memories about the time when fanclubs communicated and sent around club zines by snail mail? Or do older fans who remember the days of postage and club dues also have problems with the idea of zines?

[franzeska]

It seems to be people who've never heard of zines and think they're the same thing as Russet Noon or Another Hope. I think it's partly that people usually find zines on ebay, and they're often quite expensive. I've seen people suggest that, because the internet is available, any current zines must be done for nefarious profit-making purposes. (Which is interesting because I'll bet some of those same people prefer print books to ebooks.)

[unjapanologist]

Ahh, now I see how people might end up with that idea. Will pay some more attention to fan comments about zines from now on.

Oh dear, Russet Noon. *sigh*

[cesy]

*draws hearts around this post*

I would love to have more discussions around commercialisation of fandom, and money within the gift economy. For instance, there are some very fine lines between fannish charity auctions, where people donate money to a big international charity in exchange for fic, and individual original-work authors auctioning work with the money going to the author to pay their bills, and when someone who has done both professional and fanfic writing makes more money off their original work because people like their fan work. And then there is fannish hat-passing when someone is in need, which is a lovely sign of the gift economy, but also clearly works better when a BNF with popular fic posts about it.

I love it when cons have a "scholarship" for a fan to attend who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it. I like when a fannish con runs for enough years that they can rely on breaking even, maybe give profits to charity, but still be affordable for most fen.

I'd also like to keep talking about the Creative Commons licenses, and which of them could be put on fic or art or vids, and what combinations are missing that would be relevant to fans. I'd like to add a feature to the AO3 to label each work with a CC license if you want.

[unjapanologist]

More talk about money within the gift economy, like all those examples you describe, would be an awesome way to start discussing what commercialization of fanworks means and could mean. If it has to happen, I'd rather that it happen in a way that empowers fans. It shouldn't just be companies graciously allowing fans to write fic (so long as it's not fic with sexings or men kissing, of course) and reaping the benefits of the extra attention and extra income that fanworks bring to rights holders. If a fan wishes to ask for some compensation for her creative labor, she should be allowed to do so.

How about if we could let some money flow to "scholarships" for fans who need it to attend cons/pay server costs/etc! Okay, deciding who actually gets any of the money could be a total nightmare, but I like the general idea ;)

Licensing is hugely important. I suspect that neither companies nor fans would feel comfortable making a workable "hybrid" economy for fanworks if it's not supported by an easily understandable and legally valid way of making clear who can ask money for what. Creative Commons is a good start, and a good way to familiarize fans with how licensing works. I'd definitely like to see it on the AO3! (It isn't going to be enough to allow for workable commodification in the end, I think - but this is just a comment so I'm not going to do an expose about wild licensing theories. Insert long ramble about William Fisher bla bla open source licensing bla bla CC BY bla bla to infinity.)

Anyways, I suspect that in the end, it may come down to everyone having to accept a little less control over the things they make. Companies obviously aren't too good at that yet, at least not in Europe or the US. But I think fans are sometimes a bit overprotective of their creations as well. I understand the impulse - hell, I wouldn't like it if someone used parts of my precious fic to make something new that I find hateful or disgusting. But part of giving a gift is surrendering control over it, right? ;)

[cesy]

Yeah, CC isn't the answer, but it's a good step in the right direction, and it'll get people thinking. Even for the fans who don't want their work to be remixed, I'd love for more people to say that explicitly, rather than assuming it and then getting offended when someone comes from a different area of fandom with different etiquette.

[unjapanologist]

*nod nod* I think a lot of fans (self included) tend to forget just how disparate 'fandom' really is. People who don't want their stuff remixed, people who wouldn't mind if it came up, people who've really thought about it and concluded that reuse of fanworks should be allowed on principle, people who distrust any sort of company involvement in fandom, people who really don't mind company involvement at all... There are so very many brands of fan etiquette/ethics. This isn't a problem in and of itself, not usually, but it is important that people aren't quite aware that those differences even exist when they talk about fan etiquette.