Posts in Vidding
OTW Secures DMCA Exemption from U.S. Copyright Office
The OTW is proud to announce an important legal victory for fan vidders and other makers of noncommercial remix videos, achieved in conjunction with our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: the Register of Copyrights has recommended that the Librarian of Congress maintain the vidders’ exemption from certain provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). As you probably know, the OTW is committed to the legal position that fanworks, including vids, generally represent “fair use” of their source material under U.S. copyright law. Although this theory has not been tested in the courts yet, it means that vidders ought to be able to use… Read more
OTW Staff in the News
These past two months have seen a spike in interviews with OTW staff by various media outlets. Here’s a rundown on some of the places online where you can read their discussions about fandom, fanworks, and the OTW. Geek Girl Con did an interview with Anna Zola Miller, who serves on the Open Doors Committee. Anna talks about her increased perception of fandom history, the challenges the project has faced, her favorite archived item, and what she’s feeling fannish about. Board member Francesca Coppa wrote Fandom: Open Culture Vs. Closed Platforms at OrgZine which also brings up the work of Open Doors and looked at… Read more
OTW at the Library of Congress for DMCA
Legal chair Rebecca Tushnet and Vidding committee members Francesca Coppa and Tisha Turk testified at the Library of Congress’s Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) hearings on June 4, 2012 in favor of a renewal and expansion of the DMCA exemption for Noncommercial Remixers (like vidders and other fan video makers.) Rebecca Tushnet has been liveblogging all the hearings, including the OTW’s testimony, and Tisha Turk is putting her notes and recollections online as well. You can also find copies of our Reply Comment as well as our various exhibits – our revised Test Suite and an Image Gallery comparing DVD-ripped and screen-captured images– linked from… Read more
Fan Video Diversity Showcase
Fan videos have been of interest to the Organization for Transformative Works for a long time, and last year various video and multimedia projects came to fruition. We have revamped the Fan Video and Multimedia project pages on the official OTW website and expanded our scope beyond the media fandom vidding tradition, to make it clearer that we aim to be inclusive of diverse traditions, and to be useful to a wide range of fan artists, be they vidders or AMV editors or fan film directors or remixers or any other involved creators. 2012 has already been an exciting year for the Fan Video &… Read more
Extending the DMCA Exemption for Noncommercial Remixers
Legal and vidding committee members Rebecca Tushnet, Rachael Vaughn and Francesca Coppa have collaborated with the EFF on a proposal (download the .pdf) to the Library of Congress to renew and extend the DMCA exemption for Noncommercial Remixers. The current exemption gives noncommercial remix artists – like fan video artists and political remixers – the right to rip DVDs, breaking their encryption, for the purpose of making a fair use video, and the request covers that as well as using sources like Amazon Unbox where material isn’t available on DVD. The papers were filed December 1, 2011 and contain statements from and interviews with a… Read more