Fandom Etiquette: ur doin it rong.
Oct. 20th, 2010 12:38 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
pandarus.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
amplificathonEDITED 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 somecuntless 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?
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
So - not sure whether you good people are aware of it, but some
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
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?
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-20 10:58 pm (UTC)In fact, I remember reading an article somewhere once (I just spent about 20 minutes looking for but can't find it now :S) where the author was complaining about all the fanvids on youtube. That every time he went looking for a song he'd get a vid with it.
The thing is, YouTube has a lot of content. It's the third largest website on the internet and has 24 hours of videos uploaded every minute. There are sooooo many videos up there that, honestly, the chance of someone stumbling across something up there and taking the time to figure out what it is, is probably on par with someone randomly finding your podfic through last.fm. There's probably a smaller chance of someone randomly finding your podfic on YouTube than there is of them finding it through the places your podfic already live.
I mean, I've gone looking for specific videos on YouTube and haven't been able to find them through all the crap up there. Without proper search terms, what are the chances?
And the thing is, you probably have more control over it on youtube. If the podfic is NC-17, you can simply flag it as inappropriate and YouTube will take it down.
I really don't think it's something you need to worry about.
I remember when YouTube first came out. I was vidding a lot more those days and I actually heard about it from a vidder that was freaking out because someone had uploaded her vids there. Vidders were all in a panic that this was going to be this huge threat to vidding that could force us all underground again.
Which, YouTube ended up doing the exact opposite. I know that in my country the government is getting ready to bring forward new copyright law that explicitly legalizes fanvids, being called "the YouTube clause" by everyone. Vidding is actually being helped by YouTube and it's helping vidders too, because vidding is so common that even if my boss or whomever found my vids they would be unlikely to care. Even if it is a slash vid or whatever.
And I have every confidence that podfic will come out of this ok. It can be scary when things change faster than you're ready for but change is going to come and while I can't promise no one will be hurt by it, I think the statistical chance of it happening to you aren't any higher than anything else we do in fandom.