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Organization for Transformative Works

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Organization for Transformative Works
AbbreviationOTW
Formation17 May 2007; 18 years ago (2007-05-17)[1]
Typenon-profit
Main organ
board of directors, elected annually
Websitewww.transformativeworks.org Edit this at Wikidata

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization. Its mission is to encourage transformative fan activity, known as "fanwork", and make certain fanworks widely accessible.[3]

OTW advocates for the transformative, legal, and legitimate nature of fan labor activities, including fan fiction, fan videos, fan art, anime music videos, podfic (audio recordings of fan fiction[4]), and real person fiction.[5][6]

OTW has 1,010 volunteers, net assets of $2.5 million and at least 15,810 paying members according to its annual report in 2021.[7]

Services and platforms

The Organization for Transformative Works offers the following services and platforms to fans:

  • Archive of Our Own (AO3): A non-commercial, non-profit, multi-fandom web archive built by fans for hosting cetain allowable fan fiction and for embedding other fanwork, including fan art, fan videos, and podfics.
  • Fanlore: A wiki for fans from a wide range of communities whose published mission is to provide a platform "to record and share their histories, experiences and traditions"[8] in fandom and fanwork history.
  • Open Doors: Preservation of "fannish" historical artifacts, such as zines and Geocities websites, as well as transferring fanfiction to Archive of Our Own from other websites when they shut down.
  • Transformative Works and Cultures: A peer-reviewed academic journal for scholarship on fanworks and practices
  • Legal advocacy to the fandom community, addressing the legal issues with fan fiction and other fan works, including defending fans' fair use of copyrighted material.[9]
  • Vidding (2008): a series of six short documentaries on vidding, in combination with participatory-culture academic Henry Jenkins and the New Media Literacies project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[10]
  • Fanhackers: A directory of information and resources to help fans, academics, and activists, including good metadata (information, analysis, and discussion about data).[11]

The OTW provides legal assistance to the fandom community, addressing the legal issues with fan fiction and other fan works. Rebecca Tushnet, a noted legal scholar on fanfiction and fair use in copyright and trademark law, works with the OTW's legal project. In 2008, the OTW (in coordination with the Electronic Frontier Foundation) successfully submitted requests to the Library of Congress for further exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow the fair use of video clips for certain noncommercial uses such as video remixes, commentary, and education, as well as to protect technology used for such purposes. The exceptions were also successfully renewed in 2012 and expanded in 2015.[12][13][14] The OTW, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and New Media Rights submitted a new petition for exemptions in 2018.[15]

The OTW has also submitted several amicus briefs to the courts in several cases involving intellectual property law:

  • In Fox vs. Dish, the OTW (in coalition with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge) submitted an amicus brief which argued in defense of digital recording methods used by Dish Network, claiming that "The popular fanwork genre of noncommercial videos ('vids') uses clips from television shows or film, reworking them in a way that comments on or critiques the original. The Copyright Office has held that substantial numbers of vids constitute fair uses. But the creation of fan vids requires intermediate digital copying and processing in order to produce the transformative final product. OTW thus believes that intermediate copying performed to facilitate fair use constitutes fair use."[16]
  • In the case of Ryan Hart vs. Electronic Arts, the OTW (in combination with the Digital Media Law Project and the International Documentary Association) submitted a brief arguing that Electronic Arts's use of factual information (such as the height, weight, and jersey number of football players) in creative works (in this case, video games) is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.[17]

Fandom archival projects

The OTW has also instituted several projects for preserving fan history and culture. One such project was the creation of Fanlore, a wiki for preserving fandom history. The Fanlore wiki was first revealed in beta in 2008, with a full release in December 2010.[18] In June 2018, there were approximately 45,000 articles and 800,000 edits to the wiki,[19] and it passed a million edits in January 2021.[20]

The OTW also has several "Open Doors" projects dedicated to the preservation of "fannish" historical artifacts. These projects include The Fan Culture Preservation Project, a joint venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa[21] to archive and preserve fanzines and other non-digital forms of fan culture, and The GeoCities Rescue Project, which attempted to preserve content originally hosted on Yahoo's GeoCities by transferring that content to new locations on the Archive of Our Own or within the Fanlore wiki.[22] Other miscellaneous artifacts and collections are stored on the OTW's main servers in the Special Collections gallery.

References

  1. ^ Organization for Transformative Works (2007), Annual Report 2007, vol. 1, p. 4, retrieved 2 October 2021
  2. ^ Organization for Transformative Works, Official website for the Organization for Transformative Works, retrieved 8 February 2016
  3. ^ "What We Believe | Organization for Transformative Works". transformativeworks.org. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  4. ^ "Wiki editors debate audio fiction's place in fandom". The Daily Dot. 25 September 2012. Retrieved 12 February 2016.
  5. ^ Ulaby, Neda (25 February 2009). "Vidders Talk Back To Their Pop-Culture Muses". NPR. Retrieved 28 November 2009.
  6. ^ Hill, Logan (12 November 2007). "The Vidder". New York Magazine. Retrieved 28 November 2009.
  7. ^ Organization for Transformative Works. "Annual Report 2021".
  8. ^ "Fanlore:About - Fanlore". fanlore.org. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  9. ^ "Legal Advocacy | Organization for Transformative Works". transformativeworks.org. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  10. ^ Jenkins, Henry (5 December 2008). "Fan Vidding: A Labor of Love (Part One)". Retrieved 28 November 2009.
  11. ^ "About". Fanhackers. Retrieved 12 February 2016.
  12. ^ Estavillo, Maricel (November 2012). "US Makes New Exemptions To Digital Millennium Copyright Act Provision". Intellectual Property Watch. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
  13. ^ Staff. "EFF Wins Renewal of Smartphone Jailbreaking Rights". Kansas City InfoZine. Archived from the original on 27 March 2013. Retrieved 30 April 2012.
  14. ^ Mao, David S. (20 October 2015). "Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies" (PDF). United States Library of Congress. Retrieved 9 June 2018.
  15. ^ "Comments of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, New Media Rights, Organizational for Transformative Works on Proposed Class 1 – Audovisual Works – Criticism and Comment" (PDF). United States Copyright Office. Retrieved 9 June 2018.
  16. ^ "Fox vs. Dish Amici Brief" (PDF). Organization for Transformative Works. Archived from the original (PDF) on 29 April 2014. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
  17. ^ "Ryan Hart vs. Electronic Arts Amici Brief" (PDF). Organization for Transformative Works. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 November 2012. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
  18. ^ "Our Projects: Fanlore". Organization for Transformative Works. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
  19. ^ "Main Page". Fanlore. 12 May 2018. Retrieved 9 June 2018. 45,229 articles, 793,761 edits
  20. ^ Jess H (18 January 2021). "Fanlore Celebrates One Million Edits". Organization for Transformative Works. Retrieved 4 February 2021.
  21. ^ "ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa, Public Interface | University of Iowa Special Collections | Organization for Transformative Works Fanzine and Fan Fiction Collection". aspace.lib.uiowa.edu. Retrieved 12 February 2016.
  22. ^ "Open Doors Projects". Organization for Transformative Works. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
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