I have only lost two stories on fanfic.net so far; my letter
and an original fic. I assume that more will follow.
We have had some small wins. The site now updates their
homepage more frequently. Yay.
They now post public announcements on your admin page. Yay.
The site has
changed layout and does appear to be updating faster. Yay.
There are a few protests organised. One hopes that everyone
will log out of the site this weekend.
The upcoming weekend
of June 8th and 9th, 2012, for a 48 hour period, we are asking people to ban FF
net to make them take notice of the atrocious way they are dealing with their
authors. I'm asking that you all avoid FFN Friday and Saturday, don't even go
there, let them feel what it would be like if we all left. Remember to sign
out.
Also make sure you are in the right time zone. Midnight in
the USA is not midnight in Australia, for instance.
There is a petition you can sign, that already has nearly
20,000 names on it.
I fear that none of these things will make a real
difference. Fanfic.net controls the industry simply because of its size. Four
million members gives them some serious clout.
I looked up their terms of service recently. (Now moved to
the bottom of the page under TOS). According to their terms of service,
original stuff has to be posted on their other site. I knew that when I posted ‘Spontaneous’,
but people wanted to read it and it was only the second thing I had ever posted
on the site.
But also, according to section 6 of those TOS with regard to
user submissions:
“D. In connection with
User Submissions, you further agree that you will not submit material that is
copyrighted, protected by trade secret or otherwise subject to third party
proprietary rights, including privacy and publicity rights, unless you are the
owner of such rights or have permission from their rightful owner and the
necessary consents from any individuals whose personally identifiable
information is contained in such material to post the material and to grant
FanFiction.Net all of the license rights granted herein.”
Now, by my reading of that (and yes, I do have a law degree) that would mean that the ONLY people
who have the right to post submissions on fanfic are the original writers.
In that case, EVERY single story on fanfic.net breaches
their own TOS. Except for the legendary rumours of real authors posting their
own crack fics.
Hmmm fanfic? Are you going to delete them all? Or are you going to apply your TOS in an erratic manner?
No, don’t answer. I know this one…
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