A weird thing happened today; I got an email from someone wanting to know why there's a chapter of my most popular HP fic missing from Fiction Alley, the HP fanfic archive. And I'd completely forgotten about this. This missing chapter is a relic from a CRAZY BYGONE FANDOM ERA.
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The reason Chapter 9 of my fic, Love Under Will, is missing from FA is that in 2003 when i was writing it, Warner Brothers contacted , the site owner, to tell her that they were okay with FA hosting slash (queer fanfic), except for 3 popular fics in particular!
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One was a (great) fic called Tower With a View; i'm not sure what the other one was (was it Irresistible Poison? Heidi, do you remember?), and one was mine. BECAUSE THEY WERE JUST A LITTLE TOO SMUTTY. ahaha.
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This is hilarious given the state of Harry Potter fanfiction at the time. In the wilds of livejournal, people were writing the most insane, obscene, blasphemous, explicit fic imaginable, but on Fiction Alley, my fic where two teens had sex was too much for Warner Bros. 😂
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This was actually a milestone moment in the history of fandom as we know it. Warner Brothers also approached another fic archive along with FA, the Restricted Section. Only in their case, the WB sent a C&D to the archive as a whole: fanlore.org/wiki/Restricte
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It wasn't uncommon at all for fanfic archives to get cease-and-desist notices; I wrote about Star Wars lawyers doing it in the 80s, again regarding queer slash fic, here:
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But this was the "modern" era of fandom and the internet, and J.K. Rowling was supposedly cool with fanfic.
So Fiction Alley and the Restricted Section did something that, to that point, no fanfic archive had really ever done before: they collectively told Warner Brothers no.
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No, you don't have the right to ask us to remove these fics because they are Fair Use under U.S. copyright law, and no, we are not removing them.
This was roughly equivalent to challenging a DMCA takedown notice on YouTube; but this process was unheard of at the time.
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And Warner Brothers was kind of taken aback by this show of resistance from the fans, but the company also did something unprecedented at the time — they backed off, in exchange for a few compromises from FA and the Restricted Section. One of them was that I had to edit my fic.
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So I wound up ultimately removing the chapter where the sex scene happens assuming that people would just go read it elsewhere. This was actually a hugely formative moment for me: the tacit threat of Warner Brothers policing fanfic archives to make sure they were suitable.
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This moment where the HP fandom resisted the WB's takedown attempt was a huge turning point in the cultural history of fanfiction. It's now pretty much unheard of for a major franchise to target online fanfic, but that hands-off stance developed bc of fans asserting Fair Use.
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Even at the time, in 2003, C&Ds felt like relics from the distant past. It was so strange to have the WB come for anyone's fic, let alone *my* fic. And the result, as happens so often with this type of fandom policing, was censorship: 15+ yrs later the chapter's still missing.
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The moral of this story: fans, appreciate the Archive of Our Own. Be thankful for this space where the organizational structure is *entirely* dedicated to protecting your right to write fanfiction, and where the entire project is funded, not by outside interests but by you, fans.
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Six hours too late, it occurs to me that linking this AO3 explainer would have been a good way to end this thread, oops vox.com/2019/4/11/1829
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