#fair warning these blogs r a lot more for my personal archival use and like diary stuff. after a couple days im gonna be

[colorfes]

Hello Everynyan . Waves . I’m back on tumblr again @heatabnormal (non-vsynth interest and art sideblog is @autisticgirlautumn) please follow me there if you wanna catch up or talk at all or whateveeeeeeer ^__^~ missed my mutuals and friends woo

[jackalgirl]

Archive.org (the Brouhaha, recapped)

There’s been a post going around about archive.org, and a suit against it by four large publishers.  And there’s a lot -- I mean a lot -- of hyperbole going on about it.

I had a very constructive conversation here with @helenisfair (I had in fact bought into some of that hyperbole) and wanted to recap what I learned so far (I have more research to do).  Be warned: it is very long.

Claim #1: the Internet Archive scans copyrighted books and makes them available to everyone, which is illegal and robs publishers of revenue, and if the publishers are robbed of revenue, so are the authors.  Ergo, the Internet Archives is pirating authors’ works.

This claim plays on what it means to “make available,” and is strongly implying that this means unlimited digital copies of a physical book available for anyone to download and possess, always and forever.  It would be like me buying a book, then making 10 photocopies of it, and giving those photocopies to my friends (or worse, selling them).

This is not really true (but in the case of the lawsuit, it is kinda true, see below).

The Internet Archive claims to function like a library.  What this means is that, like a library, it buys or acquires (e.g., by donation) books.  It does scan them and make them available online, and this does include books that are under copyright.  Now here’s the part I don’t know yet: I don’t know if the Archive has a brick-and-mortar location where you can go and check out physical books.  I am operating under the pretense (for the moment until I know for sure) that it does not.  Therefore (again, I presume), it is not possible for the physical copy of a book and its digital copy to be loaned out at the same time.

Once the Archive has this scanned copy, it lends that copy out to readers using something called “Controlled Digital Lending”.  For example: if you have an IA account, you can “check out” the scanned copy into your account’s loan list for one or 14 days.  You can then read this book online, via web-enabled reading.  You can return it at any time, or, once your lending time is up, the file is released from your loan list and is now available for someone else to check out.

It is also possible, if you have the proper Adobe application, to download an encrypted ePub or ereader version of the book.  This allows people manipulate the display more appropriately for their needs.  I think that the function of this Adobe software is the same thing as the web-reader: after the loan time, it removes the file from your device and (presumably) notifies the IA that the book is free to check out again.  (I say “think” and “presumably” because I have not yet researched how the actual mechanics of this software work.)

The function of this is to ensure that extra copies of the book are not generated: one digital copy per physical book in the possession of the Archive (unless the book is no longer under copyright, that is), available to one person at a time.  So, under the “lending libraries should be allowed” presumption: no revenue is being lost, no author is losing money.

Claim #2: The Internet Archive is doing exactly what libraries do with their eBooks!

Well, no.  As I understand it, libraries license the digital copies of books from the publishers.  So they do pay.  What they get for paying is a number of digital copies that they can lend out that way -- entirely separate from any physical copies in their collection.

Claim #3: The Internet Archive made unlimited copies of millions of books under copyright available, and that’s why they’re being sued.

Well, actually the lawsuit only alleges 127 specific titles, to the “millions of books!” statement is an example of that hyperbole I mentioned earlier.  But if you’re a fan of writers being compensated for their work (which I am), it’s not the quantity of books being “stolen” that is an issue.  It’s the fact that unauthorized copies were available which could have, if they had been authorized, generated income for the original authors (or their estates).

And note my earlier statement about the idea of “copy”.  It was not unlimited copies, as in “files I can download to my computer and have forever”.  It was “multiple people potentially accessing the same digital copy of a physical book.”

So what actually did happen?

Well, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many libraries were closed -- or otherwise inaccessible to people with health limitations and/or concerns.  People were trapped at home, with no access to libraries.  So what the Internet Archive did was remove the 1:1 lending limitation for books in their library, calling it the “National Emergency Library” (it’s still not 100% clear to me whether this was all of the books in their holdings, or just some of them).  This meant that for every physical copy of a book, there could theoretically be an unlimited number of digital copies checked out at one time (again, though, no one would get to keep their copy).

Apparently, the Archive had an “opt-out” option, wherein a publisher could notify the Archive that they didn’t want a book included in the “National Emergency Library” offering.  I don’t know if the publishers could say “nothing from us”, or whether they’d have to fill out the “opt-out” form or whatever for each individual title.

Personally, and this is just me here, I do not particularly like “opt-out” options.  If I’m going to take something from you, or collect something from you, or otherwise benefit from you, I think it is fundamentally shady for me to just start doing it and saying “but you can always opt out if you jump through these hoops”.  I think the Archive would have been better served by sending notification to the publishers that they were going to do this thing for the benefit of people during this emergency, and ask them to opt-in, and not "unlocked” the affected books under copyright until they had done so.

Anyway, the publishers (Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley, for the record) filed suit against the Archive for copyright infringement, at which point the Archive stopped the “National Emergency Library”.  As of this writing, the Internet Archive is back to what it was: 1:1 lending of the digital copy of a physical book in its possession (I think).

Claim #3: The Internet Archive did nothing wrong -- all of this is covered under “Fair Use”

That’s what IA is claiming in its response to the lawsuit.  However, this may not be a very strong argument.  The Mass Law Blog provides an analysis of this argument and concludes that the claim fails to meet most of the required prongs, or elements, of Fair Use doctrine (again many thanks to @helenisfair, who provided the link to this article).

Claim #4: By suing the Internet Archive, these publishers are trying to bring an end to the lending of books!

This is a claim made indirectly -- by refutation -- on the IA’s blog: “Copyright Expert on Publishers Lawsuit: 'The idea that lending a book is illegal is just wrong'”. Well, I can imagine a world in which publishers would, indeed, prefer to be paid for every time the contents of a book entered a reader’s brain.  However, it’s my understanding this lawsuit is much more narrow -- it’s about unauthorized copies, which (if correct) would make this claim is a strawman.

Claim #5: This lawsuit will utterly destroy the Archive, and thus remove a lot of material from being available, including its archive of US political shenanigans (particularly from 2016-2020), which if lost, will impact people’s ability to fact-check said shenanigans.

This may very well be true, and it’s a concern. There is a lot of material there that would benefit future historians (or any current people who are interested in fact-checking and primary research), and to lose it would be a tremendous loss (though it would absolutely benefit certain persons’ ability to continue to create “alternate truth”).

End conclusion: I personally think that, if multiple people had access to the same digital scan of a copyrighted book during the National Emergency Library period that yes, the IA did infringe on the copyright, and they absolutely should be held accountable.  I do not feel that the ends (helping out people during the pandemic) justified the means (essentially stealing from publishers and, by extension, the authors).  I feel all of this could have been avoided via an opt-in system.  I am also perturbed and annoyed by the hyperbole being utilized by the Internet Archive itself -- it has the feeling of handwaving, slippery-slope, and catastrophic-thinking arguments, to distract people from the issue at hand: did the Internet Archive make unauthorized copies of books available to its users?

I hope that the Archive can settle with the publishers for any actual copyright infringements that occurred, if they occurred.  I think we’ll have to wait for discovery to find out how many of the 127 titles were checked out by more than one person at a time during the “National Emergency Library”, but even one infringement could be pretty hefty (see the Mass Law Blog article for penalties).  

I personally feel that the Archive is incredibly useful, especially because it gives me the ability to access some very old manuscripts, and also books that -- while still in copyright -- still haven’t been digitized by their publishers.  For example: “The Architect of Sleep”, by Stephen R. Boyett, is an absolutely excellent book about a guy who falls through some kind of multi-words rift and ends up in a Florida in which the dominant, sentient form of life is a bunch of really large, upright-walking, sign-language-using raccoons.  This sounds like an absolutely ridiculous premise, but dear reader, the book is fantastic and well worth the read.  It is also out of print, not available as an eBook, and is contained within the collection of the Internet Archive, so if I have intrigued you but you don’t want to pay for a used copy, you can go check it out online.

Likewise, I’d really like it if the ability to access the Wayback Machine, and also to fact check shenanigans, were as readily available in the future as they are now.  In short, I would hate to lose the Internet Archive, and will continue to support them (provisionally; I sure hope they don’t try to pull another “opt-out” stunt in the future).  If you’d like to do so as well, there’s a donate button on their main website at archive.org.

[leilas-digital-scrapbook-blog]

Giving Love a Bad Name – Confessions of a Fanfiction Writer

I know we’re supposed to blog about our major projects this week and I promise I will get to that soon, but I’d like to go off book for a moment to address something that’s been bugging me since last Thursday’s class. As someone who’s always tried to engage with fandom in as creative a way as possible, I hoped a class on user generated content would offer a fresher perspective than the usual amount of prejudice and self-righteous superiority that sadly seem to accompany the subject of fanfiction even amongst people that make stories and their passion for it their bread and butter.

Guess I should have known better.

In the world of professional writers, fanfiction is still a filthy word. It sums up everything that’s wrong with the people you’re sharing your stories with: the obsessiveness, the entitlement, the disregard for boundaries, the penchant for making everything about sex. Worse, gay sex, as unspeakably dirty as it’s hilarious. Be warned, writers: if you make it big, your stories will inevitably become a free-for-all at the mercy of those people. A worse fate than even George R. R. Martin could wish on his own characters.

I’m used to seeing the world of fanfiction belittled and disparaged, of course, and I’m the first to admit that the community is often its own worst enemy. But for some reason it still hurt a little to sit in class and listen to people I’ve come to like and respect during these past few months buy into every bad stereotype associated with the form. Not because I felt called out (though yes, I do write fanfiction from time to time, and I happen to quite enjoy reading it too), but because of the underlying assumptions that 1. something that’s not 100% original cannot be art, it’s a violence in fact, especially if it twists someone else’s creation into something it was never meant to be (in this case, queer representation); and 2. there’s something wrong with creating exclusively out of love, without ever expecting to be paid for it. And I have Strong Opinions on that.

So let’s talk about fanfiction.

Actually, scratch that, let’s talk about my favorite subject – yours truly. As you may have gathered by now, I love fanfiction. A whole fangirly lot. My gateway drug into it was my obsession with Lost about 10 years ago and its pesky habit of offing every character I was foolish enough to get attached to. But lo! Someone was keeping them alive through their stories! I felt blessed. I got to spend more time in a world I loved, and I stopped flirting with the idea of giving up on the show every time another character I liked bit the dust. Everybody won.

Even more than as a fan, though, I appreciated the world of possibilities that fanfiction opened up to me as a non-native speaker. I come from a small town in the north of Italy; the access I had to foreign books in their original language was limited, and if I wanted to read something in English I’d have to spend quite a lot of money on one of the very few novels (usually chunky airport bookshop thrillers or housewife romances – not exactly my preferred genres) that shared a single shelf in the bookstore with German, French, Spanish titles. But fanfiction was free, accessible, and there was so much of it. If I didn’t like a story, all I needed to do was move on to the next. Suddenly there was an infinite library of engaging stories to help me make my English better. True, they didn’t all read like a published novel would – there’s a lot of unpolished, error-plagued, stream-of-consciousness-y material out there. But there are also so, so many beautifully written works, and believe me, even for a non-native speaker it’s very easy to spot the difference.

Fanfiction also gave me the chance and motivation to practice my English writing in a way school never could have done. I’ve been writing my own stories since I could hold a pen, but I didn’t dare write in English until I was a fanfiction-loving teenager. It was a marketing decision, really – my first foray into writing fanfiction was for a fandom so small that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out I’m the only Italian representative, so if I wanted any kind of feedback on my work I’d have to suck it up and try my hand at writing in a language that didn’t come natural to me. I would never argue that the feedback I got on my works made me a better writer – contrary to popular opinion, the fanfiction community is made up of the nicest, most supportive people, and alas, you’ll never get a comment on everything you did wrong with your structure or even just pointing out common grammar mistakes from them (though I was lucky enough to have someone explain to me how dialogue punctuation works differently in English than in Italian, so I guess something can be learned even from the Internet). It did motivate me to keep writing, though, and that made me a better writer. If you think I’m being too dramatic, dishing out this monster of a post nobody asked for just to declare my eternal devotion to fanfiction, it’s because it’s personal to me. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been told that I write in English as well as native speakers, and fanfiction is a big part of why that’s true. I doubt I would even be in this course if it wasn’t for it.

And then, of course, there’s the gay thing. I’m not going to argue about how heteronormativity sucks and representation matters because I’m sure everyone’s as sick of talking about it as I am, but please try to understand how it felt for a gay person like me, used to be depicted in media as a plot device or token secondary-character representation if at all, to be able to step into a world where queerness was the default for once. Where queer protagonists had meaningful queer love stories and queer friends and got to save the world from the Apocalypse too. Or to fight the Empire or go to Hogwarts or everything else fictional straight people have had a right to do since the dawn of storytelling in addition to romancing the hottie of their choice. I’m not asking you to feel as passionately about it, of course, but (especially if you’re straight) you might try and empathize the next time you think a fanart of two boys kissing is something deserving of your amused contempt.

I hope I’m not coming across as the person that screams “homophobe” at everyone who disagrees with her because I guarantee that’s not what I’m trying to do here, but I think the general distaste for slash says a lot about the way our society sees heterosexual relationships as love and homosexual relationships as sex. Yes, there’s a lot of gay porn in the world of fanfiction. But you know what you’re most likely to find? Romance. Not in the saucy literary sense of the word, but in its simpler, most literal acceptation. Fanfiction is just one more way for humans to express themselves, after all, and love has always been front and center in our art. Love, not sex – even if it’s gay. In fact, explicit material doesn’t even make up the majority of what you’ll find on a fanfiction website. Don’t worry, I don’t want anyone to taint their souls by visiting one of those dens of iniquity so I pulled some stats myself. Here’s the number of works for each rating in three of the most popular fandoms on Archive Of Our Own, the current go-to website for the fanfiction community (sorry Fanfiction.net) – Harry Potter, Supernatural and the Marvel Cinematic Universe as of 9/3/2019:

Even counting both Mature and Explicit works as straight-up porn (which I don’t think is quite fair, but that’s a discussion for another day), they only make up less than 1/3 of the material. Kinda disappointing, for a medium that’s supposed to be all about filthy graphic gay sex. Imagine if only one in three musicals actually featured singing and dancing, or superheroes weren’t in the majority of superhero movies. They’re lucky fanfiction is shared for free, or I’d be screaming for my money back.

Maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by SJWs, though, and this has nothing to do with my being an immigrant or a lesbian. Maybe my inability to see what’s so bad about appropriating someone else’s intellectual property for your own amusement is a cultural thing. I apologize – as mentioned, I’m Italian, and we all know Ancient Roman culture was basically just a ripoff of everything those inventive Greeks came up with. It’s in our blood. Hell, our 2€ coin, the biggest, has the face of Dante Alighieri on it, a writer most famous for having written 14.000+ verses of self-insert real-person-fic in which the girl he fancied as a teenager, his favorite author, and God himself all fall over themselves to tell him how awesome he is and he gets to prophesy an eternity in Hell for his political enemies. Talk about wish-fulfilling entitlement. Not to mention all those creatively arid Renaissance “artists” celebrated for stealing characters from the Bible and Greek mythology (seriously, the fact that Greece hasn’t unleashed an army of lawyers on us yet is nothing short of a miracle) and putting them in their cheesy paintings. Other countries can rely on a much stronger moral backbone and endless imagination – I’m sure Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, those creative geniuses at Disney and countless others never had to resort to something as cheap and despicable as borrowing other people’s characters to tell the stories they wanted to tell.

Either way, I can’t help it – I see the prospect of creating something that will resonate with people so strongly that they’ll make it a part of themselves, that it’ll compel them to make more art, to reach out and connect with other fans, as something incredibly beautiful rather than scary. Maybe this is my usual naiveté speaking, and I will come to eat my words. It’s certainly disturbing that a bunch of entitled fans bullied the Mass Effect developers into changing the series’ ending, and sending actors explicit fanart of themselves is straight-up harassment, but is fanfiction really the problem here? Or is it social network culture, with its power to destroy all barriers and foster hive mind? To give resentment a platform to spread and be heard? I promise that the average fanfiction writer wouldn’t campaign to get an ending changed. They’d just roll up their sleeves and write a better one themselves.

[bobbiejelly]

An ongoing list of general Grey's Anatomy Fanfiction sources:

Standard disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.

Disclaimer copied from LJ for reference.

This post is designed for people to share places to access and interact with Grey's Anatomy fanfiction. For simplicity's sake, these links are all related to the main GA-Canon and links for it's derivative shows fanfiction sites (for Private Practice, Station 19, B-Team, RPF etc. might be made later in the comments).

The rationale for posting this is that fanfiction is one way to interact with a series especially during times where Canon is not airing such as now, or if one wants more, or something slight's Alternate Universe (AU), or wants to ship (imagine a pairing together) that is not seen together in canon (the show as it airs).

This is not a paid or sponsored endorsement of any or all of these sites; I'm just the messenger here sharing what I know to be places people can read fanfiction if they so choose.

Heads up, these sites often contain spoilers in the summaries of works, they might have M/F, F/F, M/M, Gen, or Friendship pairings. They might contain weird things or things that require content warnings. They also might contain excellent stories that are as great as some published books. Some fanfics often do have explicit content, which is generally shown in the ratings - heads up!

Any and all of the above things happen on fanfiction, and this is a way to explore a fandom with like-minded fans like Reddit in another way alongside this - though I know I'm risking something here by posting this because when I bring up fanfiction in posts it often gets very downvoted. Huh?

I have the utmost respect for the story authors. Authors put A LOT of work into creating and publishing and archiving for free, and generally all they ask for in return are some kind words of encouragement in the comments, and/or 'likes,' and at least not negative comments or 'flames'.

I'd ask as a personal request for all authors that if this post is not allowed please a mod can contact me I'm okay with that! But it is and users interact with it, feel free to suggest fics you like, even self-promote your own. But please I ask not to criticize or add negative comments about a particular work here. That kind of thing is very hurtful- someone worked hard and put themselves out there by publishing! If you don't like fanfiction, don't read it, or stop when you've reached your limit.

Fanfiction sites generally do have age requirements, so I hereby advise everyone to follow those.

Leap forth at your own will:

***

ONTO THE LIST AS I KNOW IT, Feel free to comment with more ideas:

Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Grey's%20Anatomy/works

FF dot net: https://www.fanfiction.net/tv/Grey-s-Anatomy/?&srt=1&r=10

Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/search/grey's%20anatomy

LiveJournal, GA-Fic: https://ga-fanfic.livejournal.com/tag/

LJ, GA Fic Recs: https://ga-ficrecs.livejournal.com/

Dreamwidth: https://www.dreamwidth.org/interests?int=grey%27s+anatomy

DevientArt: https://www.deviantart.com/search?q=Grey%27s%20Anatomy

Ralst (all F/F femslash): http://www.ralst.com/storiesGA.html

Spirit Fanfiction (mostly in portuguese/spanish, some english): https://www.spiritfanfiction.com/categorias/greys-anatomy

Ficbook (Russian only): https://ficbook.net/fanfiction/movies_and_tv_series/grey_s_anatomy

Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/search/grey's+anatomy+fanfiction

Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=grey%27s%20anatomy%20fanfiction&src=typed_query

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/

Realm Of The Shadow, which currently has no GA fics right now but other femslash:

https://www.realmoftheshadow.com/

Anyway, that's all I know right now about general GA Fanfiction, there's also more sources on LJ too. And also, if you google GA fanfiction some might pop up on some people's private blogs or sites too!

Take care everyone, and there's also a Fanlore page about Grey's Anatomy here:

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Grey%27s_Anatomy

***

Good luck readers and writers, and enjoy your fanfiction journeys :)

- A Grey's Anatomy Enthusiast

- Yes, I am a Fanfiction author in my own right and I also love reading, commenting on, and engaging with fanfictional works but I'm not going to link my own profile here.

- Let's see how this post does, I have no idea. I'll try to keep it up as long as it's permitted no matter how popular or unpopular it becomes :D.