Chels
If you’ve been online in the last few days, you’ve probably heard that AO3 is down. Archive of Our Own has been one of the most popular websites for posting and reading fanworks (especially fanfiction) since its launch in 2008. The site went down for 12 hours for maintenance late last week, which isn’t terribly uncommon – the site is run by volunteers, has no ads, and only recently came out of Open Beta, so planned and unplanned down times were relatively frequent. They were also relatively short, and the response was more often tongue-in-cheek pleas to return (what will we do without our bedtime reading?) This time, however, the Organisation for Transformative Works, who maintain AO3, announced that the site would be down for 2-4 weeks after a security incident.
For people new to fandom, and to people outside of fandom, who have only discovered AO3 as a result of this long break, I imagine the concept of AO3 can be quite puzzling. Everything online gets monetised in the end – every home-grown website eventually allows ads or partners with a corporation, every entertainment site eventually develops a fund to reward popular creators, so why are people writing for free? Why do so many people donate to their biannual donation drives? Does fanfiction not violate copyright laws? For those of us who have been a part of the site for years, it all seems very instinctive.
A Brief History
We can’t be sure how long ago fanfiction as a medium began – there were probably people throughout history coming up with stories based on novels they’d read, or plays they’d watched. Typically, we tend to consider the earliest official fanfiction to have emerged in the 1960s with the popularity of Star Trek. We often paint an image of 60s housewives handwriting Kirk and Spock stories and posting them to one another, but it’s a somewhat reductive take that equates fanfiction with heterosexual women obsessed with gay romance. Still, that’s the lore we’ve created. Kirk/Spock fanfiction was definitely one of, if not the first official fandom, and fans would submit art, fiction, and analysis to fanzines mailed out to subscribers. Fanzines have existed for decades, for various fandoms – many members of the cast and crew of modern Doctor Who have had their letters and contributions to Doctor Who fanzines unearthed in interviews.
The advent of the internet further expanded fandom and fanfiction – now, you could type up your stories and email them to your friends, or join dedicated forums to make friends to share ideas with. Everything tended to be very localised, with forums and websites dedicated to specific fandoms, or even specific themes or relationships. From there, more general websites emerged, like LiveJournal, a blogging platform that also hosted communities, and fanfiction.net, the first mainstream fanfiction hosting site. Mainstream, of course, is a slight exaggeration, since fandom and fanfiction as a whole were not particularly mainstream until recent years. There were countless problems with fanfiction.net – they were incredibly strict on what could and couldn’t be posted, and even had an unaffiliated vigilante group dedicated to taking down low quality works, or works that otherwise broke or toed the line of site rules.
David M has a great video explaining the bridge between fanfiction.net and AO3, that I highly recommend, but in summary: a group of entrepreneurs wanted to appeal to both fans and creators and build a site where creators could invite fans to participate in writing competitions and share their fanfiction for prizes. This did not go over well with fans, and as a result, there was an appeal for someone to create an archive of our own. The site was made, the name stuck, and the rest is history.
The Pushback
Not all creators have been happy about fanfiction as a concept. Most famously, Ann Rice was completely against fanfiction of her work, seeing it as a violation of her intellectual property. The anti-fanfiction sentiment was much more popular in the early days of the internet, but these days, most authors and filmmakers take either a neutral or positive stance on fanfiction based on their projects. AO3 and the OTW have worked hard to put legal protection in place – as long as creators don’t make money from their fanfiction, it can be argued to be fair use, and there’s very little, legally, that an IP holder can do. It used to be standard practise to include a disclaimer at the beginning of a fanwork stating that you did not own the characters or world, and that they belonged to the original author. These days, it’s not as common, and it’s also considered to be more harmful than helpful – by including a disclaimer, you effectively admit that you know you are violating the copyright rules, and if an IP holder did want to take legal action, they’d have an easier case.
Wattpad has been around for longer than AO3, but it feels much newer. Wattpad is less of an archive, and more of a social media site, so it’s constantly evolving. The sites tend to have opposing userbases, with Wattpad users viewing fanfiction as a commodity, and AO3 users viewing it as an art. Wattpad themselves have furthered this dichotomy – introducing ads, paid stories, and opportunities for fanfiction to be divorced from the source IP and turned into original media, commonly referred to as ‘filing off the serial numbers’. Famously, the After film series originated as a Harry Styles Wattpad fanfiction. It’s not to say that all fanfictions turned original fiction come from Wattpad – The Love Hypothesis was originally Star Wars fanfiction on AO3, and the Fifty Shades series began as Twilight fanfiction on fanfiction.net. It’s a real grey area – while the revised stories no longer contain any copyright material, the reason the authors are able to publish traditionally, and therefore to profit from their work, is because of the popularity of the original fanfiction. Should IP holders take legal action in these cases? I think it’s far too complicated for a straight answer, and I imagine it’s something that wouldn’t be solved unless someone did take action. AO3 errs on the side of caution, and doesn’t even allow links to paid or subscriber based sites on works or author profiles, where Wattpad and other sites are more relaxed with their rules.
There’s an unspoken rule in older fandoms that fanfiction should be kept away from original creators and actors. Mostly, because it can be uncomfortable for them. If they seek it out, that’s fine, but it’s a social transgression for fans to show creators, or even ask questions about fanfiction. It can also lead to a slippery legal slope – if a writer of an ongoing TV show were to read a fanfiction and then, intentionally or unintentionally, include a similar plotline, they can find themselves in trouble. A few creators have spoken out to say that they approve of fanfiction of their work, but they can’t engage with it to avoid this issue.
Archive of Our Own’s biannual donation drives fund the successful running of the website, as well as a legal fund for creators. Their volunteers work hard to ensure that the works shared on their archive remain legally acceptable, and take action against users who risk compromising this through soliciting payment for their work. Without AO3 and the OTW, who knows what could have come of the rising popularity of fanfiction.
