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jkingsman 15h ago

AO3 rocks, as does the parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works. They do a lot of pro bono legal work around free speech and copyright (which can be especially sticky around transformative works). AO3 has drawn ire and appreciation alike for their fierce free speech stance (which is, essentially, if it's against the law to exhibit in the state of New York (or against their TOS e.g. not a fanwork), it must come down. Everything -- EVERYTHING -- else stays.)

I also love another of their programs, Fanlore[0], a treasure trove of obscure internet fanfiction works, social groupings, and tropes. Sort of a combination oral history + TVTropes-esque fanfic breakdown.

Fanfiction is a beautiful thing and a great way to stretch creative writing muscles that can be helpful by being a bit less of a blank canvas than needing to invent characters and locations. Of course, a TON of fanfiction does invent, liberally, but I've seen people insist they can't write creatively, then make something beautiful when you ask them to rewrite a scene in their favorite show or book that they were disappointed with and boom, they just wrote their first fix-it fic[1].

Also, praise be for AO3 having no news feed/algorithm, and instead an incredibly intricate tagging system. Makes it easy to find what you want, avoid what you don't (see free speech commitment), and feel liberated from algorithmic exhaustion.

[0]: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Main_Page

[1]: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fix-it

sincerely 14h ago

> or against their TOS e.g. not a fanwork

Isn’t there an “original work” category?

robrtsql 14h ago

There is. Presumably, they mean you can’t upload the full text of someone else’s book and have it remain up.

scythe 13h ago

They're pretty open about it in practice. They don't want people hosting blogs, basically. Original fiction is almost always allowed.

scythe 13h ago

>I've seen people insist they can't write creatively, then make something beautiful

Yeah, now you have a worse problem. A few people like the first chapter you posted, now "oh shit I'd better come up with something good".

A curse on the OP. I was trying so hard to stop thinking about this today.

causesothere 13h ago

AO3 is wonderful. I strongly believe that humans have tens of thousands of years of telling and retelling stories. The Odyssey isn't one book, it's something that was composed and collected and retold.

The idea that a company could "own" a story and the characters within is recent. Very recent.

IMO, AO3 continues the human tradition of retelling stories, and we should celebrate that.

tourmalinetaco 7h ago

This is why I’m a copyright minimalist. 15 years + 5 years extension is my belief. I should be legally allowed to use what I grew up on to tell stories and invent within that world and, if the market enjoys it, make some money doing it. Anything more is various shades of immoral, and the current 95-150yr terms are closer to something from parody than reality.

arjie 13h ago

There's no way to just download all of it, is there? You have to scrape it slowly? I don't mind doing it that way, but flat downloads would be pretty neat. How do mirrors work? Do they run read-through caches?

magicmicah85 12h ago

I have to imagine that's not available to avoid training by commercial entities. https://www.transformativeworks.org/ai-and-data-scraping-on-...

arjie 12h ago

Makes sense. Somewhat strange (but not too strange since it's not standardized) they don't have a Crawl-Delay except for Slurp. Why not on User-Agent: *

Confusing. Would even prefer a commented crawl delay that specifies in human language since then I could special-case it.

Seattle3503 12h ago

I feel like I am coming in to the middle of a discussion. Towards what end?

arjie 12h ago

Just data hoarding tendencies, faster and better search, etc.

brokensegue 12h ago

there's some dumps on archive.org

i worked on a project a long time ago and downloaded a bunch of it

arjie 12h ago

Thank you. Do you still have your archive? I'd email you if you had address on profile.

brokensegue 8h ago

I think I uploaded the only archive I had

dmd 11h ago

Weird to see this here. I posted my first story of any length to it just a few days ago, a short story in the universe of Iain M. Banks' Culture.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/94745346

valorzard 14h ago

If you all are interested in fanfic, may I direct you to learn about one of my favorite pieces of internet art, my immortal? And, if you want to delve into the history behind this work of art, oh boy: https://youtu.be/0JodBp-r9jM

Blackthorn 10h ago

It's nice that this sprung up after the owners of fanfiction.net seemed to completely stop caring about it. It's nice to have a place where the people who run it actually care.

ballmerpoint 13h ago

I disapprove of how much underage material they host. Free speech absolutism runs head-first into its internal contradictions.

mjd 12h ago

I suppose it won't help to point out to you that it's fiction, none of it actually happened, no person was ever hurt, and this is nowhere close to ”free speech absolutism”.

ballmerpoint 11h ago

https://archiveofourown.org/content#II.H

It’s acceptable on AO3 to write a narrative description of a real person’s actual abuse, including their personal information (see II.F.4.a), and it only “may result in a judgment of harassment” if also the author specifically makes it available to the victim.

The policy is unsafe by design.

TheOtherHobbes 11h ago

It's the written equivalent of deepfake porn - hugely entertaining for the creators, not so much for the victims. Especially if they're teens at school, and the creators are bullying them.

No matter what AO3 thinks, in many countries this immediately crosses the line into criminal harassment.

As for the rest - the fanfic community has been among the loudest criticising AI writing for 'stealing from real artists', which is... not exactly self-aware.

fwlr 9h ago

What is not self-aware about criticising machines for stealing the work that you were previously doing?

letmevoteplease 12h ago

There is no contradiction here. It was founded precisely because LiveJournal started censoring sexually explicit fanfiction involving taboo subjects (particularly incest/rape/minors).

Archive of Our Own (archiveofourown.org)