Category: Spotlight

OTW Guest Post

OTW Guest Post: daffodeela

Claudia Rebaza 1 Comment

Every month or so the OTW hosts guest posts on our OTW News accounts. These guests provide an outside perspective on the OTW or aspects of fandom where our projects may have a presence. The posts express each author’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. We welcome suggestions from fans for future guest posts, which can be left as a comment here or by contacting us directly.

daffodeela is a fanfiction writer who has published her fanfiction on FFN, AO3, and Wattpad since 2011. She was a crew member for a fanwork contest called Banjir TomatCeri from 2015 until 2017 and also for the annual fanfiction event, Indonesian Fanfiction Awards, since 2018. Today, daffodeela talks about fanfiction communities in Indonesia.

How did you first find out about fandom and fanworks?

My best friend in junior high school was the one who introduced me to the world of fanworks. She told me things about fanfiction and how fun it was to read them all. My first fandom was SKET Dance, a slice of life, comedy anime that I loved (still love) so much. I couldn’t get enough of its official content so I was so glad when I found out there was a thing called fanworks!

I had a ship in SKET Dance and I wrote fanfiction for it. Then I thought about another anime I watched and enjoyed, Naruto, then went to dig some fanfiction on it. I was really shocked over how many fanfiction stories were written for Naruto! I ended up enjoying my time in Naruto more than in SKET Dance because of the lack of fanworks in it. I also had some ships in Naruto and felt delighted reading them all.

I was alone in the fandom and didn’t interact much with other people until I found a community of my ships and Indonesian fanfiction on Facebook. That was the start of me sinking deeper into the fandom world and I had another fandom to dig for.

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Five Things an OTW Volunteer Said

Five Things Julia Santos Said

Claudia Rebaza Leave a comment

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today’s post is with Julia Santos, who volunteers as a Tag Wrangling staffer.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

As a Tag Wrangling volunteer, I help sort through and organize tags so it is easier for users to find what they want to read or filter out what they don’t want to read! This means making tags canonical (filterable), connecting tags to already existing canonicals, checking on the growing number of tags that express the same fandom concept, and discussing the best formats to canonize tags. \o/ Wranglers always try their best to make tags intuitive so Archive users have an easy time browsing through fics and finding what they are looking for.

As a Tag Wrangling supervisor, I also help with recruitment and training of new Tag Wrangling volunteers, check in on progress, and lend a hand and/or help coordinate other Wrangling projects when needed.

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Copyright and Fandom: An Update on EU Article 17

Silas ONeill 2 Comments

This post is guest-authored for OTW Legal by Julia Reda, a German researcher and politician who represented her country as a Member of the European Parliament between July 2014 and July 2019. She was a member of the Pirate Party Germany, part of the Greens-European Free Alliance, until 27 March 2019. You can find her on Twitter as @Senficon.

Article 17 is a new EU copyright rule that will make some for-profit online platforms directly liable for copyright infringements by their users from June 2021. In order to protect themselves from liability, those platforms will need to filter new uploads for potential copyright infringements in works that have been registered with them by rightsholders. These automated filters are notoriously bad at recognizing the difference between blatant copyright infringement and fan art, which is often legal under the copyright exceptions that apply in Europe instead of US fair use – such as caricature, parody, or pastiche (the use of existing materials and creatively combining them into something new). The likely result will be more frequent blocking of fan art and other forms of everyday Internet culture such as memes, reaction gifs or lipsyncs. Experts such as the UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression have warned about the danger of Article 17 for our fundamental rights.

Thankfully, fully non-profit platforms such as Archive of Our Own will be excluded from the upload filter provision. Still, Article 17 poses a huge threat to the broader online culture ecosystem. It’s unclear whether small forums that generate some advertising revenue but are commercially insignificant when compared to YouTube or Facebook will still be considered for-profit platforms that have to apply the onerous new rules. Additionally, EU countries have a lot of freedom to adopt national rules that would help prevent the automated blocking of legal content such as fan art. Read More