#research for this book that started as a polemic against copyright is turning me into the joker

[ezrazone]

copyright abolition / post-fandom thoughts dump bear with me if these are half-baked riffs cuz they’re half-baked riffs:

i think the reasons people actually share work on ao3 and attribute it to fandoms are more complex than many people realize. i speculate that many people are more afraid of potential copyright strikes than they realize, which reveals how much of a cudgel IP actually functions as. people want their work to get *read* and they want to express where something “came from” / what inspired it, which is a fine impulse, especially when the alternative seems to be coy about where your projects began and even to make a career out of producing “original work”, which is so fucking loaded as long as IP is the foundation of our creative pursuits.

i think we’ve all seen fairly wild/interesting work that we wouldn’t know is related to an existing IP without the author identifying it as such lol. and we’ve certainly seen “bad fanfic” where stuff’s out-of-character in less… shall we say… engaging ways! so what actually motivates people to place their work under a protective legal model that would (theoretically - ao3 is not necessarily actually safe but that’s another post lol) prevent copyright holders from coming after them so long as the work is not monetized? is it that all of this work falls neatly under a “fanworks” umbrella, or does a lot of different kinds of work get crowded into opposite sides of a binary created by intellectual property as a pillar of modern capitalism?

what attitudes has IP instilled in us regarding iterative / transformative works? what iterative work do you love and consider original, and what socioeconomic circumstances did it come out of? what if it had been released on ao3 first, would that make you uncomfortable and suspicious? i speculate that a lot of discourse around subject matter and “problematic” source materials actually boil down to knee-jerk copyright defenses (think abt tumblr discourse disavowing the locked tomb series every few months bc the author once posted homestuck fics). like do you hate this new work because it resembles another work that’s bad (notice you perhaps do not have the same energy for the source material that is allegedly so toxic that everything that touches it is diminished) or do you hate admitting that all art, in some way, is iterative? would admitting that make you realize that IP is a completely arbitrary system of domination and exploitation?

derivative art is made every day lol. there is no meaningful way to “fight against” derivative art. but we can ask what socioeconomic circumstances actually produce it (why are we gonna keep seeing trailers for movies that look like other movies? it’s not because filmmakers are stupid or smart - it’s because there’s never actually been a problem with IP passing hands or transforming so long as it does not disrupt the economic order that IP enforces). something something osgood perkins can rip off the silence of the lambs for millions of dollars but tsotl “fans” are just cringey babies with their hannigram smut (while NBC hannibal couldn’t even use the character clarice starling bc she was already owned by another network. yes the estate of a dead author is split between television networks. are we ok with this?)

so then maybe we can ask why new work is so demeaned by ever passing through the Fandom label. is it perhaps that fandom itself is an economic label and not some fantasy of spontaneous heartwarming community founded on mutual interest lol? is fandom actually a source of freedom, or is the label confining the limits of your imagination?

idk how to tell you this but much of what constitutes modern fandom that ao3 claims to uniquely protect is actually completely legal via any number of channels that might actually threaten copyright as a censorship tool. you are allowed to produce porn parodies and that isn’t necessarily “fan” behavior. you don’t have to be a “fan” to stick your hands into work that you love. you are allowed to do media criticism. you are allowed to remix any number of images and shapes. you can copy and trace and fucking steal if you can get away with it and your fear of doing so only allows intellectual landlords to get away with charging rent for more and more creative possibilities — names, faces, logos, fucking styles — and you’ll cheer and clap as what is considered “real art” gets narrower and narrower, mistakenly thinking you’ll be next in line to copyright your dipshit characters or be exploited in service of the next legal iteration of your favorite property.

it made me crazy when steamboat willie entered the public domain and everybody was drawing the rat getting fucked. you could draw the rat getting fucked before! parody and criticism are protected forms of expression! you can draw mickey getting fucked right now, but you won’t cuz you’re scared shitless of disney and even if you’re not worth financially ruining the “let people enjoy things” fandom liberals do the social leg of their dirty work for them!

copyright is the modern enemy of expression, and fandom is a honeypot for young artists to misattribute their best urges and ideas to their inspirations, mistakenly making a faustian pact with the assholes who are holding the art that they love hostage. what are we left with when our home movies get taken down because a song was playing in the background? our hair and our fucking teeth?

our dreams are made up of everything we see in our waking lives, and putting “universal” original art on a pedestal (fucking joseph campbell everything’s-a-hero’s-journey horseshit nonsense) while degrading referential art is an incredible way to never see anything new. what you are thinking about as fanfic/fanart right now can actually be something else - something better than another “original” property that will subjugate someone else with the “fan” label. it’s available to us right now actually. you can take it.