Thursday, December 13, 2007

Organization for Transformative Works website launches

I've been critical of the way copyright fair use doctrine has of late tended to merge "transformative" and "fair," which denigrates uses that aren't transformative. At the same time, I'm a huge supporter of fan fiction, art, and other works created in celebration and criticism of popular cultural artifacts, whether within copyright or not. I'm therefore thrilled to be involved in the Organization for Transformative Works, whose website is now live.

Ethan Zuckerman has a great post about the OTW, which has a number of wonderful projects in the works, including a journal and the Archive of Our Own for hosting fanworks in a noncommercial context. I see the OTW as an important part of a public conversation about how to treat copyrighted works, similar to the work done by AU's Center for Social Media on fair use guidelines for documentary filmmakers, along with other great work by the EFF, Stanford's Fair Use project, and chillingeffects.org, among others.

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