Wednesday Roundup
Aug. 8th, 2007 07:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neadodsI bought the all-star cast reading stories from "House on Pooh Corner" at Stratford (Fanfare Books, they had at least one more copy of both CDs) because it had Judi Dench (Kanga) and Stephen Fry (Pooh) on it, but the one who makes me laugh like a loon every time I hear him is Geoffrey Palmer's sardonic Eeyore. Highly recommended.
In honor of the Bollywood discussion the other day, I made a Bollywood exercise mix. The pace is quite slow - I did barely over a mile in 25 minutes - but it's a nice way to ease back onto the treadmill after a vacation. Only four songs, because Bollywood doesn't do short numbers:
1 - Kahin Aag Lage (Taal soundtrack)
2 - Chale Chalo (Lagaan soundtrack)
3 - O Rey Chhori (Lagaan soundtrack)
4 - Chaiyya Chaiyya (several soundtracks; mine came from Bombay Dreams)
FLIST ROUNDUP:
Fabulous Doctor Who Vid to "This is Not Your Year." Images for all new seasons. Downloadable here.
The Time Princess Sweet fluff of the Doctor telling his daughter a bedtime story.
Dark Aegis has a nice Britpick post for those of us who keep forgetting that there is no "gotten" in British English and that "pants" is considerably ruder on the other side of the sea.
THE LATEST LJ ANGST:
BubbleBlunder's open letter articulating the problems and questions the fans have with LJ
LJ's latest clarification/response (specifically mentioning the letter)
Nea's comment on the whole thing: nobody's really in the right here. LJ's team has done some real boneheaded things, *particularly* knee-jerk banning of legitimate expressions (breastfeeding icons) and in not warning and permitting people to take down stuff before lowing the banhammer. That one of their own has been mocking people is just the icing on the cow cake.
On the other hand, fandom by nature infringes on copyrights and trademarks, and "we've always done this sort of legally questionable thing and nobody complains" is not, in fact, a legal defense, nor is it an accurate statement. Cease and Desist orders were winging at fans who went over the line well before there was a world wide web; if the actors/copyright holders/Powers That Be bothered to dig us up when we were underground in the 70s and 80s, then it's all the easier for them to find stuff that's out in the open on the Web.
Do I think there ought to be a fandom exception? Hell, yes, I am a fan - I create and consume exactly the sort of things that they've been C&Ding and striking out for most of my life. But my "I want" doesn't change the law, and if I want it to, then I need to put my effort into *changing the law,* or arguing for a change in the rules based on specific precedents (of which there are many in the whole 6A thing; I knew the first set of strikeouts wouldn't stand because I'd been through the exact same thing with AOL back in the early 90s. The only difference is that the 6A thing happened faster than AOL's "ooops, we went too far" backdown.)
As for the seismic shift to other LJ-like forums... I'm not going anywhere. First, because I've paid to be here and I want my money's worth. Second, there is absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that GreatestJournal and InsaneJournal and Journalfen and whateverjournal won't do *the exact same thing.*
ETA: The Terrible Secret of Livejournal, a post that repeats much of my point. The terrible secret of Livejournal is that a lot of fandom material is illegal.
It's not just incorrectly classified as illegal. It doesn't just "appear" to be illegal to people who don't understand. It doesn't just "resemble" illegal material. It isn't just "illegal to show to minors but perfectly okay as long as you card everyone." It's not "arguably" illegal under hypothetical assumptions that haven't been tested in court. It's not just against Six Apart's terms of service. It's not just disfavoured by Barak Berkowitz's personal taste. There exists material that may be in a grey area, but a lot of it isn't. A lot of fandom material really is definitely illegal to distribute; sometimes even illegal to possess.
In honor of the Bollywood discussion the other day, I made a Bollywood exercise mix. The pace is quite slow - I did barely over a mile in 25 minutes - but it's a nice way to ease back onto the treadmill after a vacation. Only four songs, because Bollywood doesn't do short numbers:
1 - Kahin Aag Lage (Taal soundtrack)
2 - Chale Chalo (Lagaan soundtrack)
3 - O Rey Chhori (Lagaan soundtrack)
4 - Chaiyya Chaiyya (several soundtracks; mine came from Bombay Dreams)
FLIST ROUNDUP:
Fabulous Doctor Who Vid to "This is Not Your Year." Images for all new seasons. Downloadable here.
The Time Princess Sweet fluff of the Doctor telling his daughter a bedtime story.
Dark Aegis has a nice Britpick post for those of us who keep forgetting that there is no "gotten" in British English and that "pants" is considerably ruder on the other side of the sea.
THE LATEST LJ ANGST:
BubbleBlunder's open letter articulating the problems and questions the fans have with LJ
LJ's latest clarification/response (specifically mentioning the letter)
Nea's comment on the whole thing: nobody's really in the right here. LJ's team has done some real boneheaded things, *particularly* knee-jerk banning of legitimate expressions (breastfeeding icons) and in not warning and permitting people to take down stuff before lowing the banhammer. That one of their own has been mocking people is just the icing on the cow cake.
On the other hand, fandom by nature infringes on copyrights and trademarks, and "we've always done this sort of legally questionable thing and nobody complains" is not, in fact, a legal defense, nor is it an accurate statement. Cease and Desist orders were winging at fans who went over the line well before there was a world wide web; if the actors/copyright holders/Powers That Be bothered to dig us up when we were underground in the 70s and 80s, then it's all the easier for them to find stuff that's out in the open on the Web.
Do I think there ought to be a fandom exception? Hell, yes, I am a fan - I create and consume exactly the sort of things that they've been C&Ding and striking out for most of my life. But my "I want" doesn't change the law, and if I want it to, then I need to put my effort into *changing the law,* or arguing for a change in the rules based on specific precedents (of which there are many in the whole 6A thing; I knew the first set of strikeouts wouldn't stand because I'd been through the exact same thing with AOL back in the early 90s. The only difference is that the 6A thing happened faster than AOL's "ooops, we went too far" backdown.)
As for the seismic shift to other LJ-like forums... I'm not going anywhere. First, because I've paid to be here and I want my money's worth. Second, there is absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that GreatestJournal and InsaneJournal and Journalfen and whateverjournal won't do *the exact same thing.*
ETA: The Terrible Secret of Livejournal, a post that repeats much of my point. The terrible secret of Livejournal is that a lot of fandom material is illegal.
It's not just incorrectly classified as illegal. It doesn't just "appear" to be illegal to people who don't understand. It doesn't just "resemble" illegal material. It isn't just "illegal to show to minors but perfectly okay as long as you card everyone." It's not "arguably" illegal under hypothetical assumptions that haven't been tested in court. It's not just against Six Apart's terms of service. It's not just disfavoured by Barak Berkowitz's personal taste. There exists material that may be in a grey area, but a lot of it isn't. A lot of fandom material really is definitely illegal to distribute; sometimes even illegal to possess.
Re: PS
Date: 2007-08-17 05:05 pm (UTC)And I'm also agreed with the point about the very different attitude fans have post-internet -- in my first two online fandoms (which were also the first fandoms where I was actually interacting with other fans rather than just telling the stories to myself in my head and not sharing them with anyone else) we all knew about the former fans (and even at least one former ficcer) who made it to the shows in question to become actual scriptwriters. One of the pieces of "conventional wisdom" shared with newbies was that the people actually working on the show didn't dare make any public acknowledgement of reading fic (even in the cases where we knew or strongly suspected that they did) because of the potential lawsuit coming from a fan who saw an actual episode that seemed suspiciously like a story they'd written. We felt benevolently neglected and allowed to go our way in peace. It would have been a very different environment if we were more aware of the things you've seen closer to hand -- you're mentioning things that happened in fandoms I've never been in and the stories from them weren't well-known in my own fannish circles. (And my first online fandom was in Star Trek, so we did have a few old-schoolers from the zine days.)
Re: PS
Date: 2007-08-17 11:25 pm (UTC)It's certainly happened, which makes George Lucas' open involvement in fandom a bit surprising.
(To loop back to another thread on another post, one of my favorite scenes in We'll Always Have Parrots is one where all the actors in a cult show are acting out bad fanfiction.)
Trek is the granddaddy of fans making good; there was even a series of novels published once that were the best of one of the semi-pro fanzines. The line between fan and pro is always a wavering gray one (just ask Rusty!) - but when in doubt, I've always felt it best to keep one's head down and one's distribution system hard to trace.