probably the weirdest information about star wars i could give you is that the death star garbage compactor monster from episode 4 was sentient, was force sensitive, and it wasn’t trying to eat luke – it was trying to baptise him
to everybody wondering, no, im sorry, Omi did not escape the death star. she died when it was destroyed, just as she foresaw in her visions.
as a sort of silver lining, she seemed to accept her fate and wondered what she would be in the next life, as her culture believed in reincarnation.
elaborate on the baptism you say? sure! as an aquatic species the Dianoga venerated water, which they called “the Great Cleanser When It Was Time to Be Cleansed.” She baptized Luke because she felt their shared connection to the force, which she knew only as “It.”
“Force sensitive lesbian tentacle alien” was not something I could have ever come up with, but boy am I glad someone did
Four years ago, the owners of Scarecrow Video brought all their staff members together to deliver some bad news. Like video stores across the country, the business was struggling. Its rentals and purchases had decreased dramatically as customers flocked to online streaming services. The owners were writing their own checks just to keep the business running, but they couldn’t do it anymore. It looked like they might have to part with their collection of over 130,000 videos—one of the largest publicly available video archives on earth.
[…]
So the staff came together to pitch their own proposal. The idea was simple: They would keep the collection together, in the same space and open to the public, but transform the business into a nonprofit. After some back and forth over details, the owners agreed to donate everything in the store—the films and the shelves they were stored on—to Scarecrow Video, the nonprofit.
The result is something like a museum mixed with a video store. A team of 20 volunteers devotes hours each week to collect movie returns and restock the shelves. Most evenings, they hold one of their many community outreach programs for the public, such as the Children’s Hour, an event with the public library across the street that features a series of stories, videos, and activities for kids that center on a specific theme.
[…]
Four years later, Scarecrow Video hasn’t just survived, it’s done quite well. It took the staff less than a week to raise the $100,000 they needed to get the nonprofit off the ground, with donations coming from as far away as Australia, Japan, and Bulgaria. And each year when they ask for more money, they’ve been able to get it from a band of loyal patrons.
This is interesting–libraries (at least around where I live) often carry DVDs as well as books and Internet access, but this is the first time I’ve heard of a museum specifically for movies and TV that’s focused on being as open to the public and accessible as possible. Places like these will only become more important as time goes on!
So I just read up on some copyright laws and found out fanart and fanfic are technically illegal. Now I’m laughing at the thought of someone getting sued in court for writing smut about their favorite character 😂
THIS IS NOT TRUE!!!!!
Fanworks are not illegal. Most all fanart and fanfic are “transformative works,” which fall under the protection of Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law, the statute of fair use. Fair Use allows you to use sections and elements of copyrighted material to critique, expound on, or create using that material as long as you’re creating something new. You can read about fair use here: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-use/. And learn about how to decide if something is fair use using this simple guide of the four factors of fair use: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/.
Why is AO3 built by the Organization for TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS???? Because it stands by fair use and creators of new, unique fanworks.
FANWORK IS NOT ILLEGAL. READ ACTUAL COPYRIGHT LAW.
Also know your fandom history Anne Rice used to literally sue our asses over this shit which is why old school LJ fanauthors used to always have the “don’t own not mine just playing” disclaimers on their shit
fwiw, I wrote my thesis on this and fic is neither illegal nor illegal – it’s a legal grey zone that has never been tested in any court (in the US, unless there’s an explicit law about something, we function in a common law system, meaning most of the rule of law in our country is a mish-mash of court precedents, differing and debating between jurisdictions, like this this case). There has never been a lawsuit by the copyright holder of a commercial, fictional work, against someone producing a non-commercial, derivative fictional work; thus, there is no case law about fanfic and we’re all living in the grey zone. There have been a few lawsuits from the copyright owners of commercial, fictional work against commercial, fictional derivative work; one lawsuit from the copyright owners of commercial, fictional work against a commercial, non-fictional derivative work.
But the fanwork we all make every day *may* be protected under fair use; fair use is the right the hire a lawyer, being an affirmative defense, and is rarely tested. The other affirmative defense folks might be familiar with is self-defense in the case of a murder – you say ‘yes, your honor, I did murder him, but it’s ok for x, y, z, reasons.’ Then the trial is about deciding if x, y, and z, reasons are good enough, not if you did the murder (since you had to admit it to use the affirmative defense). Using fair use is like saying, ‘yes, I did infringe on their copyright, but I believe it was acceptable’ and then you have to pay lawyers about it.
I believe that fair use for non-commercial works should be assumed, and the burden should be on the copyright holder to prove harm and infringement, rather than on the non-commercial producer to prove they are covered by fair use.
But, given that there’s no case law, and no explicit laws, tons of high-powered lawyers for commercial content producers like to make stuff up, like to send scary cease and desist letters, like to threaten fans who don’t have the money to fight back. Most major content producers have decided that terrorizing their fans is Bad Business Practice and they’ve stopped calling us all pirates and thieves and are instead madly catering to our whims (often, not always); but that’s a marketing trend, not an indication of any actual change in the status of fan works.
If you’re interested in supporting folks working to change copyright law or protect fans within it, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Organization for Transformative Works are excellent places to spend a bit of money, if you’re flush. Our current copyright system isn’t fulfilling its constitutional mandate to encourage the arts and sciences, since some of the most amazing creative work in both spaces is happening in exactly the grey zones we all operate in, which is not how it used to be and not how it should be.
</copyright-soapbox>
The thing about law, it’s not some Black Box you push Facts in, and you get a Decision out – it follows certain rules that you can easily study and go over yourself.
Common law countries like the US make this more difficult through the vagaries of a system based on precedent and pontification by judges; civil law countries make this more difficult through judges being biased and on power-trips and refusing to read statutory law in the abstract way it is meant to be read, that is: applied to real life at this moment in time, not in their heads, or a distant past.
(Ya, judges. Can’t live with them; can’t live without ‘em.)
Either way, worry not about your fanfic if you do it the classic way, i.e. if you don’t sell it. There’s a longer reasoning behind that, but I’d consider that the lynchpin reason.
Speaking as one who was affected by the Anne Rice thing when it happened – which was WELL before LJ was a gleam in a Russian bot’s eye – I’d like to clarify that it never got as far as a court of law. She had her lawyer send Cease & Desist orders out to various high-profile members of the fanfic side of fandom. Some of those C&Ds implicated the private businesses of the people involved. Because all of us were poor, we didn’t challenge the C&Ds. Instead we took our stuff off of the websites they knew about and hid the fic away.
Also to be clear: we had warnings on our fic WELL before that (edited to add: I mean the “not mine, no profit made” type warnings). We did that as common courtesy in the fanfic world at the time. And long as I’m going down memory lane and spilling tea along the way, I’m gonna point out that many of us who got those C&Ds also worked hand in hand with Anne, her publisher, and her family business to promote her books and business dealings purely for the love of the fandom. I, personally, left a part-time job at a web company when they asked me to do what amounted to allowing them to profit off of Vampire Chronicles fanfic. When I told them that legally and ethically I could do no such thing they said I could do it or they’d find someone else. I said see ya. (AFAIK they never found someone else).
So the amount of respect those of us in fandom had for Anne’s work and right to profit off of her material was large. What changed in our case was when 1) Anne got some of the rights back to her characters which meant she could profit off of them in ways she couldn’t before and 2) she realized us fans and our fanworks made for GREAT free market research into what her personal company could try to profit off of. The most perfect example of this, and how Anne’s greed ruined so much, was the Talismanic Tour company which was created by fans, worked with Anne and her official biographer to come up with walking tours of New Orleans based on things from Anne’s life and books, fully had Anne’s blessing, then, once it proved successful, Anne gave THEM a C&D and created her own tours at ridiculously jacked up prices.
Karma being what it is, nobody wanted to pay for that bullshit and Anne’s tours ultimately failed. But since she used her lawyers to scare the fan business out of running this then became another example of why Anne is the reason the fandom can’t have nice things.
(Can you tell I have so much tea from the VampChron days? Oh Anne. Bless your fandom-destroying black heart.)
Making this more fandom general, the points to take away here are a few:
Sometimes it’s not about law, or what the law “should” be. If a well known author, or TPTB from a TV show or a movie studio sent you, personally, a C&D letter for your fanworks, would YOU have the ability to thumb your nose at it? Do you have the resources for that lawyer battle and possible court case? Or are you like us Anne Rice fans were, living meager paycheck to paycheck, and not having it in you to even put up the fight with your ISP, let alone a millionaire’s legal team?
The blessing of the original creators means nothing. They love us until they don’t. Relying on their goodwill to keep fanworks safe is like relying on the skills of the person driving you around to keep you out of an accident: sure it’s possible, but you wanna put that seatbelt on and hope the car has airbags just in case.
Appreciate and support those who have done the work to explain WTF fanworks even are, let alone why they should be legally allowed (so let me repeat the earlier links to Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Organization for Transformative Works ). If you can donate money to them, great. If you can’t, at least appreciate and be grateful to the teams of people who took the risk of putting their real names out there (C&Ds are another reason many of us write under pseudonyms) at all, let alone on legal documents, and appeared before the US government in person to defend your right to make fanfic and fanvids.
If you ain’t got eleven dollars, talk to your local and they should be able to work something out.
You can join the IWW even if you’re unemployed, and even if your labor is exploited in prison.
When they say one big union for everyone, they really mean it
Subminimum dues for the Wobs are six bucks
Seriously, join the fucking IWW. Message your local on Facebook if you don’t know who to turn to. They’d love to have you and they’ll meet with you in person to talk about it and sign you up if you want. It can and will only lead to good things for you.
For real guys, I can’t recommend this enough. Join your local union.
I worked at a union job years ago. Best job I ever had. Fair pay–they’d negotiated us danger pay from minimum wage; full benefits (Canadian so we had health care anyways but they covered most of our prescriptions, and glasses, and dental work); got paid holidays starting at two weeks when you started (I think the first year was just the two weeks off, but after that it was paid, and increased regularly with seniority); regular pay bumps to keep up with inflation; sick days; PLUS when management were dicks they’d sort them out.
Like this one time, I had a machine that was cleaning some extremely dirty grain (our wheat was full of peas, which we didn’t handle, so our machines just dumped it as oversized garbage along with pieces of stalks etc), and had this really heavy sack (because it was a regular burlap sack but now it was full of fucking peas) that the peas were going into that usually would be emptied maybe twice a shift or so, and we had so many peas coming out that it was needing to be emptied like every ten minutes. And by the time you lugged this like eighty-pound bag of peas to the other side of the floor to dump, and then cleaned up the mess the machine dumped on the floor while you were doing that, it was damned near time to dump the peas again.
So it’s getting time for my lunch break (mandatory half hour, plus two coffee breaks, also mandatory), and there is no way in hell I can leave it; the peas will pile up high enough that there will be a fire risk from them rubbing against the machine.
So I call my supervisor and tell him my lunch is almost due, and he should either get someone to spell me off or else shut the machine down so I can have my break (which I desperately needed at that point, as you can imagine).
Well, they had a shitload of wheat to clean all the peas out of, and didn’t want to shut the machine down. So first he told me to let the machine just overflow and clean it up after; and when I told him that would likely start a fire with how many peas were coming out, he told me to “just take my break between emptying the sack.” Which, like, does not actually count as taking a fucking break from it.
So I called down to my union rep and told him what was up, he talked to the supervisor, and then him and the supervisor came and had a look at how many peas were coming out (so many that we were joking that the peas were contaminated with wheat), and then grabbed a couple of guys off sweeping to empty the bag while I ate.
And then put a second body on the floor to help handle all those peas because omfg.
Unions are the best. Remember that in the mid-Eighties, almost half of all jobs were unionized. It was Reagan catering to corporations that got all the workers’ rights that people quite literally had fought and died for almost a hundred years previously rolled right back.
Bring back the unions!!
What if your job is under the table? Can you still join a union?
Yes! The IWW is an explicitly anticapitalist union and recognizes *all* labor as worthy of respect and representation. They collect minimal data on individual members and prefer to collect dues in cash and in person for exactly those reasons. All you really need is a local officer to jaw at, a name (doesn’t have to be real), and eleven dollars.
I forget the number, but there’s even a sex workers’ industrial.
You know, I really need to look up what exactly it means to be in a union if you are at a non-union job/workplace
Hauntedlattesbackup 