Welcome to This Week in Fandom, the OTW’s roundup of things which are happening! Before we start: Vanity Fair‘s Infinity War photo shoot and article. Tag yourself, I’m Hawkeye.
There’s been an interesting happening the mashup music fandom recently. According to a TorrentFreak article, the Canada-based website Sowndhaus had its domain delisted by its registrar following a DMCA-based complaint of copyright infringement made by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
There are two big reasons why this is interesting. The first reason is that, according to a statement made by Sowndhaus, “Our service, servers, and files are located in Canada which has a “Notice and Notice regime” and where DMCA (a US law) has no jurisdiction. However, the jurisdiction for our .com domain is within the US/EU and thus subject to its laws.”
Despite otherwise operating entirely within Canada and Canadian law, Sowndhaus’ domain registrar, DomainBox, is ultimately owned by GoDaddy, a US-based company, meaning it is bound by US law and is therefore required to respond to DMCA-based complaints of copyright infringement under the Safe Harbor provisions.
The second reason is that, while Sowndhaus’ statement claimed that it was operating in compliance with Canadian copyright law, it is also possible for mashups to fall under US fair use law, thus making them an exemption to DMCA-based takedowns. The statement touched on that, too:
However, we respect transformative works that utilise copyright content in new and creative ways to form new works of art and will defend their legal rights under [Canadian law] and with “Fair Use”, “Fair Dealing”, “Parody”, and similar copyright exemptions already existent in many jurisdictions worldwide.
Ultimately, Sowndhaus did not choose to challenge the delisting of its domain, so there was no review to determine wether fair use applied in this situation. Instead, Sowndhaus removed the mashups under contention and relocated its entire site to a new domain, sowndhaus.audio.
Elsewhere, there’s a book being released in 2018 titled “The Fandom” by Ana Day. The book is based on Day’s short story, “The Gallows Dance,” but with a twist: the book is about fans of the story who get transported to its world. The idea for this came from Angela McCann, a winner of The Big Idea Competition. According to Day, writing the book was a learning experience:
After initially panicking that I knew very little about fandoms— followed by the inevitable elation of getting my first publishing deal—I set about what sounded like a fairly simple task: cutting and pasting, adding some new characters, and a bit of a re-write. It makes me smile to think how naïve this was. The Fandom was written from scratch, word by word, like most books out there.
If you could choose to write about fans being transported to the world of a story (or if you’d like to be one of those fans!), which world would you choose? Let us know in the comments!
Lastly, there’s a newly popular ship on The Walking Dead: Carzekiel. Check out this Insider article for analysis, fan art, and reactions. Then why not go write about it on Fanlore? That’s what cool dudes do.
We want your suggestions! If you have a story you think we should include, please contact us! Suggestions are welcome in all languages. Submitting a story doesn’t guarantee that it will be included in a TWIF post, and inclusion of a story doesn’t mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.