Fandom Etiquette: ur doin it rong.

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

EDITED TO ADD:

Whilst I'm not thrilled about the metadata being available at Last.fm, I'm tremendously relieved to hear that Podfic itself isn't currently uploaded there

A little while ago I made a discovery that scared the pants off me, and when I'd finished panicking I decided to go into denial mode. I'm great at that. La la la. A conversation today reminded me of it, though, and now that it's not quite such a shockingly fresh discovery I'm feeling pissed off, rather than terrified. (I might go back to terrified again later, as and when it eventually bites me in the ass.)

So - not sure whether you good people are aware of it, but some cuntless shitweasel bastard fuckwit twatwaffle turdlicking cock-for-brains BASTARD with the social skills of a retarded baboon bright spark has taken it upon themselves to upload podfic to Last.fm.

My immediate response, upon realising that my voice, reading explicit porn, was now available on mainstream streaming radio (of the "hey, you liked such-and-such a thing! So we think you'll like Fay's reading of this NC17 fanfic!" variety) was hysteria. Then I drank a lot, and then there were other things to panic about, like my father dying, and my city being in a state of emergency with buildings on fire and snipers in the street, and I kind of closed the lid on that one and forgot about it, because there were more immediate worries.

But, yeah - Last.fm! It's full of illicitly uploaded podfic! Go look, people - because some of it might be yours. I know there's a metric buttload of my podfic up there, and I happened across stuff by Juice817 and pennyplainknits and rhea314 and jinjurly and all manner of people.

I feel rather like punching somebody in the face, to be honest, because this is such a fucking LIBERTY. And, okay, I know that I am laying myself open to this by doing something as stupid as recording podfic in the first place and unleashing it onto the internet, but I'm honestly staggered that people would just help themselves to something I've made & shared with fandom for free and think it's fine to UPLOAD IT TO A MAINSTREAM RADIO SITE. WITHOUT ASKING.

Why? If you've downloaded it, then you can already listen to the bloody thing! Why in the name of little green apples would you go and upload it there? When it isn't yours? Why would anyone DO that?

FIGHT CLUB, for fuck's sakes! Fight Club! I am not a wealthy professional making wads of cash for my podfics; I'm doing this for free, for the love of it. You didn't have to pay to download it, or say thank you even. THE LEAST YOU COULD DO is avoid screwing me over by needlessly exposing me to more risk than I have chosen to run. And, okay, I know that this is a hobby that could get me in deep deep shit, were my current or future colleagues/employers to find out that in my spare time, I like to read and write and perform stories in the grey area of copyright, which sometimes involve explicit shagging. But I'm still sharing my podfics with fandom, because I &hearts fandom, and I am totally cool with fandom getting to listen to my podfic. And I have the self-preservation instincts of a new-born lemming in the middle of a mine field.

But I'm not totally cool with my boss stumbling across my podfic.

Kind of tricky to play the plausible deniability game with fanfic - much worse than when I was writing NC17 Harry Potter slash novel whilst living in a Muslim country. 'Cause, you know - my name ISN'T actually Pandarus. But my voice really is my voice, and that's a bit of a bastard to talk your way out of.

...how can somebody not realise that? How can they think it's okay to decide for me how public I want to make my podfics? Or decide for you, gentle reader, if you're one of the podficcers whose stuff is up there?

But, okay - one knows that that could be on the cards. It's a risk one takes; we make ourselves vulnerable with podfic in a way we don't with writing fanfic, or creating fanart, or making fanvids. And, yes - maybe that's just dumb, I don't know. Hell, maybe I'd be okay with this whole Last.fm thing if it had been my decision. I mean - yeah, no, I don't think I'd have been up for it, but a fair bit of my current sense of STABSTABSTABBITYSTAB stems from having my choices taken away from me. By some entitled, thoughtless stranger, who ran no risk when they decided to increase mine.

Another thing that "chaps my ass", in the vernacular of so many US TV shows, is that one can, it appears, BUY the damn podfics. In a download-as-a-ringtone manner.

What the fucking fuck?

I know that probably should be my first concern, but, hey, I like my career, and I'm good at it, and it worries me that there's even a tiny chance that it could be being jeopardised - so that's been kind of my first thought on this one. But - how does this work? Who would hypothetically be making this money? Is this just a side-effect of the site design, or some kind of sneaky attempt on somebody's part to make money? (Surely not, but...)

Anyway, I have reached the flaily conclusion that there is nothing I can do at this point other than either stop podficcing, or else choose my podfics very carefully. And, you know, I don't want to stop podficcing, because I enjoy it. Although I suppose I could go back to just making them for my own amusement, as I was originally doing, rather than uploading them. Eh. It seems a shame to start thinking like that, and I suppose it would be futile, because the aforementioned bright spark could still merrily upload their copy of my podfic to Last.fm (or, God help me, Youtube) even if I took them all down tomorrow. So I'm mostly lighting candles and sacrificing goats sacrificing The Cat Daniel sacrificing doughnuts in the hope that somehow this will All Be Okay and the shit will not hit the fan.

Any thoughts on what we can do to prevent this happening/discourage this from happening/undo it? Or am I the only one having a O_O reaction to this?

Comments

[pennyplainknits.livejournal.com]

WHAT. THE. FUCK?

NO SERIOUSLY, WHAT?

I am, yeah. I do not like this at all. I'm in a laid back country and I try to keep my fandom identity seperate but this, this frightens the life out of me.

Is there anyway you can contact last.fm as the creator and ask for it to be taken down?

God I don't want to stop making podfic but this is seriously making me consider it.

[ysbail.livejournal.com]

I have one thought, though it could be a complete pain in the ass. If you kept control of your podfics and uploaded them with a password that people had to request from you - at least that way you'd have some knowledge of who had access to your stuff.. though I know it'll be time consuming to administer and there's no guarantee people won't pass on the password ... and .. and ... well I know there are pros and cons to the idea but it's the only one I have .. sorry.

[weimar27.livejournal.com]

I don't know a way to prevent this.

But that's just wrong. It's one thing to post to lj, but this much different. I think you're rightfully angry.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

?!?!?! O_O is about the size of it. I get my podfic from General Jinjur's lovely site or from the various versions of Amplificathon on LJ or DWth, and would never consider uploading them anywhere else.

Not knowing how last.fm works, is it possible that someone had some kind of app/plugin that 'scrobbled' *all* their audio tracks *including* your podfic automatically, and didn't know it, at least at first? Does a last.fm user actually have to authorize 'scrobbling' of tracks?

I *hope* that the 'selling' of tracks is just a site-design thing, but see above. D: Wonder if the OTW should be let known about this issue?

[fangirlism]

That is a possibility. This is why I make damn sure I don't listen to podfic in my main audio player (iTunes) cause anything played from iTunes is scrobbled.

However, if I did accidentally scrobble a podfic, it wouldn't be automatically available for streaming.

The douchefuck in question deliberately uploaded the files for streaming, and that is not okay.

ETA: Okay, they were just scrobbled and it was a bit of Last.fm confusion.

[annj-g80.livejournal.com]

Nope, not the only one with this kind of reaction. I'm kinda speechless. This isn't just rude. That's plain evil. Is it possible to delete it from Last.fm? I don't know. There's gotta be a way?!

[malnpudl.livejournal.com]

This is an OUTRAGE.

I want to kick somebody's ass right off the damn planet for this.

Absolutely intolerable.

[aneas.livejournal.com]

This is not happening. I refuse to believe it. Fandom is my happy place, dammit! It should be free of assholes!

Edited because rage makes me lose my grammar, apparently.

[cybel]

The asshattery of stupid people will never cease to amaze me. :-(

On the bright side (sort of), it's important to realize that fandom has gone mainstream, and pretty much everything is available pretty much everywhere. I remember panels at cons in the mid 90's where fans were pretty much freaked out at the idea of fanworks--any fanworks--being available on the web: like apocalypse now end of the freaking world freaked out. And here we are, living happily in our brave new online world.

Yes, the idea of all this is frightening, and rightly so. Yes, there is no way whoever did this deserves less than tarring and feathering (metaphorically, at least) and universal vilification by fandom at large. But... the risk it presents to anyone in particular is miniscule in the grand scheme of things.

Of course, I'm a noted Pollyanna.

[paraka]

I remember panels at cons in the mid 90's where fans were pretty much freaked out at the idea of fanworks--any fanworks--being available on the web: like apocalypse now end of the freaking world freaked out. And here we are, living happily in our brave new online world.
Heh, I can well imagine. I wasn't in fandom in the 90s but I was in vidding when YouTube came around and there were similar reactions (and, actually YouTube has probably done more for vidding than any website out there. In my country, the government is in the process of changing copyright laws and one of the things they'd like to introduce is the "YouTube Exemption" which would explicitly legalize vids, which never would have happened without YouTube).

A few weeks ago I read an interesting piece of meta by nikkiscarlet. She was talking about LJs addition of the Facebook and Twitter features, however I think the idea applies to a lot of other things.

Fandom has traditionally been in a mindset of hiding what we do. Keeping it on the down low and out of the public eye. However as time passes that attitude keeps getting stomped on. And as with anything, there are some people ahead of others. Back in the 90s some were freaking about fandom online, while others were putting it there.

I remember a lot of the freaking out over the OTW when it first started up and all of these fans going "OMG, don't be out there in the open, we need to hide!" Which I found ridiculous since it's not like fandom has been hidden from TPTB for a long time now.

But, you know, the rules and standards change and not just within fandom. When I first started doing stuff online my family would randomly give me these lectures about concealing personal information and being super careful about what I put online. Now, with places like Facebook, it's like all thoughts about privacy and keeping personally identifiable information off-line are completely out the window.

I really think that Facebook is going to end up being another site that will unintentionally change fandom too. Not directly maybe but people keep putting their whole lives up there for the public to see. Everyone's dirty laundry is showing and, it's the internet, so nothing ever really disappears. This means that we're going to hit a point in our society where we can't really hold people completely accountable for what they do online. Well, maybe still accountable, but what you do will lose a lot of it's importance. Like having someone find out you read gay porn online is going to just go on the list of things people would rather not know, along with your coworkers pics of puking on the lawn while mostly naked after a bender from 5 years ago. Or those ass backwards statements a politician made when they were a teenager. Everyone's going to have something they'd rather not be out there so they'll feel like they can't judge as much.

And I don't think fandom is going to stop using pseudonyms any time soon, so we're probably safer on that front than some others are.

[katemonkey.livejournal.com]

Um...are you sure they're uploaded to last.fm or are they just scrobbled (http://www.last.fm/help/faq?category=99#201)?

Because last.fm doesn't host files unless they're put up by the musician. However, it does list which music files were played by people who have signed up and allowed their music playing to be scrobbled - recorded by last.fm.

It does this with all music files that are played by members - whether it's music or podcasts or whatever. The files aren't on last.fm, but they're listed as being audio-that-someone-has-listened-to.

For example, there's BBC Radio 4 (http://www.last.fm/music/BBC+Radio+4), but you can't download any of the podcasts from there. And David Tennant (http://www.last.fm/music/David+Tennant)'s also on there, but that's just him reading audiobooks, and, again, you can't download it.

So what it means is that someone out there has listened to a podfic, while being a member of last.fm, and has scrobbled the file. People can't get to it, they just know that "Person A" listened to it at a certain time.

You could track down each individual listener and ask them to remove your track from their listings, but, a lot of the time, people don't even realise they're scrobbling them.

I often have to dig through my last.fm stats to clean them up, because I listen to podfic on my iPod, and despite me constantly clicking "no, don't scrobble that", it still does it.


I don't know if I'm explaining it properly, so if I'm not, I'm sorry. I can try to answer more questions about this, if it'll help - I use last.fm quite a bit, and I'm a podficcer, and I love the way you read stories, so if I can help you with this, let me know.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK, so nothing's *actually* been rehosted when something gets scrobbled, LFM just has a bunch of metadata about it.

Still, :/.

[novembersmith.livejournal.com]

Holy balls, that is fucked up. I've always been fairly leery of my RL identity and fandom identity being linked, but that -- that is pretty damned scary. I will join you in lighting candles and sacrificing pastry in the hopes that it staves off any potential badness. :\

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

Evidently the pastry gods have smiled upon us, and I am learning to chillax.

;)

[josieb1.livejournal.com]

No your reaction is normal, and on your behalf, and all the other pod ficers out there i am outraged. In fact words fail me right now, how dare they!!!!

And as much as I would really miss your pod fics (trying not to cry here) I can totally understand why you might stop.

I think Ysbails idea is a good one, as much as its more red tape it might be your only option to control who has access to your pod fics. I personally would have no concerns over that, in fact i would even be happy to pass over my real name and address, and if you need any help feel free to contact me I would be more than happy to help you in any way I can

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

That's really really sweet of you! Thank you for the offer!

Happily it looks like I'm over-reacting, and we're not (yet) at the place I thought we were; apparently the files AREN'T actually downloadable, it's just the data about their existence that's there. Which is a lot less disconcerting.

I probably should take this as a pre-emptive warning to ask myself about what I'm happy to have publicly available, as and when something does go pear-shaped (like some twit uploading a podfic to Youtube, or something). Hmm. Given my acknowledged fecklessness, though, I will probably carry on carrying on - just be leary about recording NC17 things in the future.

[blualbino.livejournal.com]

D: There is no logic behind that, wtf.

I don't use last.fm too much, but is there a way to find who originally uploaded it and ask them not to? Because the only other thing I can think of is to spread this post around like a virus and hope s/he gets it.

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

Looks like the files themselves aren't uploaded, thank fuck, just the meta data, so I'm officially calming down at this point. Although it's probably a rather good pre-emptive fright, to make me think about what I should do BEFORE it reaches a point like that, where somebody uploads my stuff to youtube or something dumb. Hmm.

[anatsuno.livejournal.com]

If, as seems to be the case, it's a case of metadats being 'scrobbled' but no track actually being uploaded to and downloaded from Last.fm, I feel definitely better about it. I admit that I was a bit agog imagining all this fic being available and even sellable O.o from such a website...

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

I know! I mean - there's a "purchase" button and everything!

::boggles::

But I'm calming down a lot now.

[katemonkey.livejournal.com]

While on the bus, I thought up a new analogy that might help explain it a bit better. I hope.

It's kinda like delicious (http://www.delicious.com/). People link things they like, and, if they have their browser set up a certain way, everything they bookmark will show up on their delicious account.

Delicious doesn't host the content, but it has whatever information the account owner has included with it.

So, for example the "katemonkey" tag (http://www.delicious.com/tag/katemonkey) has links to my stories and a CSS-related article I wrote yoinks ago, but they're not on delicious. And I could change my links, but it wouldn't stop delicious from associating that link with my username.

Plus, if I produced anything new with my username, and someone were to tag it, there'd be nothing to stop them. If it was a password protected site, only a few people could see it, but it would still be listed on delicious as "katemonkey".

So last.fm is like that, but even less connected, because there isn't even the link from the last.fm information to the actual content. You could ask people to not scrobble, but part of the whole podfic thing, for me, is listening to it on my iPod (I mean, god, your longer podfics got me through a rather dull-as-hell temp job, for which I eternally thank you), and despite me constantly trying to make sure that podfic isn't scrobbled to my account, it does have a tendency to sneak in.

Um...I hope this helps.

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

Cheers!

No, I can't see the usefulness of asking people not to scrobble, whatever the hell that is exactly; I'm relieved as hell to know that despite appearances (and purchase buttons) the files themselves aren't there. (I'm so used to not being able to download stuff, between my crappy connection and the fact that I'm in Thailand, and thus in the wrong zone for various places to allow me to download from there, that I didn't realise this was universal.)

It's given me pause, though, I must admit.

[blackbyrdy.livejournal.com]

WHAT? I literally just did a spit take, coffee everywhere!
I went and looked at the site, kind of confusing, it doesn't look like there is anything actually on there. Though now that the possibility has entered my mind, now I'm paranoid that someone could do that. I did think about not continuing podfic-ing just from that thought alone....

[tdancinghands.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of a dustup some years back, when a bunch of fanfic writers -mostly Trek, but other stuff too- discovered that some shining example of human failings had copied a ton of (mostly adult) fanfic *text files* and were offering them *for sale* on CDs.

One cannot help but have a complex reaction. On the one hand, hey! this guy stole my, and a buncha other people's stuff, but on the other hand, holy crap, what an idiot! He, she or it disappeared without a trace in a matter of weeks, and I can't imagine anyone could turn a profit on such a venture (then again, you never know).

My advice? Googling yourself every few months isn't just a matter of vanity. Our names and ours works can take on a life of their own in the public commons, and it behooves us all to keep an eye on what the little buggers are doing.

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

That's actually exactly how I stumbled across this - I'm generally pretty content that it's unlikely somebody would randomly connect my fannish and RL identities, but I do keep an eye on them, just in case. This was a bit of a jaw-dropper. Still, it looks like it's not actually the files themselves, just the meta data, so I'm officially calming down at this point.

[txrabbit.livejournal.com]

I totally understand keeping yourself separate from fandom. I have no offers of what to do to protect yourself, but I am throwing in my voice as one who would desperately miss you if you quit podficcing.

[revolutionaryjo.livejournal.com]

Balls. Half my stuff is listed there. >:(

Thank you for making this post or a never would have known. Luckily it does look like it's just scrobbled metadata from someone listening to the files. So thankfully no strangers are going to be streaming them any time soon. But there were a few minutes there where my heart just about beat out of my chest.

I'm tempted to start including a short "Please don't upload or stream this podfic anywhere without my express permission" at the beginning or end of my recordings to ward off the possibility of it happening with actual audio associated.

It's an idea that seems to work well for vidders. Doesn't always stop someone, of course, but it could at least stop the ones that are well-meaning but ignorant of fannish etiquette. It's a bit of an inconvenience for people to have to listen through it every time, but it's not just my work that I'm protecting here, it's the author's too. I feel the need to be extra vigilant.

P.S. I would miss your voice a lot if you stopped podficcing. D: (But I would completely understand your reasoning.)

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

EXACTLY! I was (as you will gather from the flaily rant) very much in a WTFF headspace - but it's a relief to gather that the files themselves aren't downloadable, and that nobody's uploading them.

That said, I too am thinking about including a little verbal watermark/disclaimer like that on the podfics, just to be on the safe side. Because stupid people can be stupid.

&hearts &hearts &hearts

[alexi-lupin.livejournal.com]

Is it actually uploaded or is it just the data that something has been listened to? Either way, mine scrobbles and I hadn't even really thought about it until you've posted this, so I just went through 100 pages of artists and deleted all the fandom ones. I'll keep an eye on it from now on and delete podfic scrobbles as they appear. I can't see a way of preventing the scrobble happening in the first place (without removing the whole thing entirely) but you're definitely made me more aware and now I'll be checking. :)

[chinawolf.livejournal.com]

I freaked out, and then, I went over to last.fm and saw that even though I only scrobbled *once*, when I first got the last.fm account, it caught about ten podfic readers that I'd apparently not shoved into iTunes' audiobook section back then.

Anyway - deleted them all, which wasn't actually that much work despite being on a slow connection and having 24 pages of artists (last.fm makes it easy for you since most artists have userpics, so you just need to page through and look at every artist who has a blank picture - it's really quite fast).

Sorry to have been part of the problem. >_> But yeah, every single link I checked only had scrobble data, definitely no way to actually listen to or download the podfics.

[paraka]

I didn't post yesterday because I didn't have time to give a proper response and actually I still don't but I do want to ask a question.

I suppose it would be futile, because the aforementioned bright spark could still merrily upload their copy of my podfic to Last.fm (or, God help me, Youtube) even if I took them all down tomorrow.
Why do you say "God help me, Youtube"? I can think of reasons why last.fm is scarier than Youtube, but not really any reasons why it's worse.

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

Scarcely anyone I know uses Last.fm, and the way that site functions, as far as I know, involves you actively seeking out a particular musician/genre, or being recced them because you listen to similar stuff. ie even if the my podfics were there, most likely one would only find them because one was already in fandom.

Youtube, otoh, is way more viral. I've never had a friend use Last.fm to link me to a song, but MANY times I've had people provide a link to Youtube via LJ or email, or Twitter. It's set up so you can conveniently embed Youtube in your facebook account, or on your blog page. Moreover, funny/freaky/weirdass shit on Youtube can suddenly become enormously popular and well known by random quirks of fate and coincidence.

There are already fanfic trailers and fanfic parodies uploaded to Youtube.

::scurries over to Youtube, suspiciously::

...iiin fact this chick (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwyZteqwu-A) is already uploading her podfic of her own free will. Because she presumably has no concerns about RL/fannish life colliding and biting her in the ass. Which is nice. And evidently there are several other people who've uploaded their podfics already. Huh.

Oh, Christ. Well, given that fandom has been known to think it's perfectly fine to hand over copies of vids made by other people to the creators of the source text, and porny RPS manips created by somebody else to the real people concerned, and since they regularly upload fanvids not their own to Youtube...oh, man I don't want to start thinking like this, because it's freaking me out, and I think that it's still pretty unlikely. But, yes, all things being equal, I do regard YouTube as a damn sight scarier than Last.fm because everybody I know frequents YouTube. The odds of my students stumbling across my podfics at YouTube would seem to be exponentially higher than via Last.fm (although hopefully very small in either case).

...'course, I thought it was pretty unlikely that my boss would happen to read the dating profile I set up on the Guardian Website, what with it not being under my own name, but a friend of hers who'd met me 2 years earlier happened across it, and emailed it to her. So, you know, weird and unlikely 6-degrees-of-separation shit does happen, especially online.

::headdesks::

...I think I need a drink.

I'm kind of wishing I hadn't read your (most interesting) post the other day, or the discussions that ensued. Because I'd actually pretty much managed to forget about all this rather effectively until I was reminded, and now I'm all flaily and busy embracing denial again as hard as I can.

[crinklysolution.livejournal.com]

I'm really glad to hear that the situation is not quite as dire as it was originally thought to be, because the thought of the ridiculously talented and warm-hearted FayJay having to censor herself was making me quite sad!

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

Bless you - that's much more generous than I deserve, after panicking so badly.

&hearts

Mind you, it's served me well; I've made a point of going over to DW and flocking things down, as well as getting rid of things like my date of birth, to try to make it a trifle less incriminating, should I find myself in the singularly unlucky position of having the wrong person happen across one of my podfics.