While fanfiction has been around for decades, the Internet has provided a new gathering place for fans to share their passion and creativity with others. As we have seen in class, remix culture is entering into mainstream consciousness and “remix literature” will undoubtedly begin to play a bigger part as well. However, because fan work violates the current laws protecting copyright and has been subject to cease-and-desist, the fan community has an uneasy relationship with publishers and original copyright owners.
In the past, fans often congregated around centralized archives, such as fanfiction.net. Currently, much of fan activity has moved to LiveJournal and LiveJournal communities. While great for authors, allowing them to have better control over their content, it has lead to the decentralization of fanfiction and an increasing difficulty of navigating each community.
Our solution, FicBound, would serve to provide a platform for discovering new fanfiction to those new to the community, as well as provide the community tools for rating and organizing fanfiction. Structured much like Digg, FicBound would be adapted to the fanfiction community’s needs, thus integrating social as well as publishing and sharing elements. The content itself would remain on the LiveJournal and archive accounts of the users, thus allowing them to maintain full control.
FicBound hopes to build on Clay Shirky’s insight that “Conversation is king. Content is just something you talk about.” While recognizing the difficult issues surrounding fanfiction, we nonetheless hope to build an useful platform to facilitate conversations around content for fans.
For those who wish to view our paper in full, please go to: https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYPnJLMOxStCZGhwZDJzczRfNDk0YzkzMm5mZjU&hl=en
– Eric and Crystal
Yale Law Tech 