stunt_muppet

Some people are full of fear and loathing about OTW that I really, truly do not comprehend. They're convinced that it's all an evil cabal of BNFs, or an evil cabal of academics who Don't Care About Fandom, or both. Some opponents have decided that the OTW's public stance in favor of the legality of transformative fanworks means that they're going to deliberately draw the attention of copyright holders to them and try to provoke a lawsuit (despite the fact that the OTW has repeatedly said they have no such aim).

I've seen OTW-haters twist logic in the most amazing ways--recently, for example, Transformative Works and Culture, the online academic journal associated with the OTW, issued guidelines saying it preferred--but didn't require--that its contributors get permission from anyone whose online posts (fanfic, meta, etc.) were quoted in their essays. The thing is, this was an attempt to be considerate of fans, because academia in general treats things publicly posted online as published and therefore fair game for quotation and analysis. But some people had absolute shit fits about the guidelines, claiming that the journal was encouraging its evil, evil academics to quote fans without permission, and somehow this was equivalent to outing and would bring down the wrath of TPTB on the fans quoted. This kind of reaction presumably came from people with no idea how academic discourse actually works, but factual correction had no impact on their response that I could tell.

So, when Yuletide announced the move to AO3, there was wank. And wank erupted periodically as people who hadn't bothered to watch the admin comm or read announcements noticed, after having signed up, that they'd have to post on AO3. (This fact was announced before sign-ups, but as I said, some people signed up without bothering to check the rules.) There's been even more wank over Yuletide's plan to move the old story archive onto AO3; I've heard the someone threatened to issue a DMCA takedown notice, although I haven't been able to track down where it happened. (I haven't tried very hard, as I'm thoroughly sick of this stupid wank.) Because apparently some people who have no hesitation posting fanfic on for-profit sites like LJ that don't give a damn about fandom just can't bear the prospect of their stories being uploaded to a non-profit archive run democratically by and for fans.

I don't know if this is what people are referring to, but I saw some complaints about the interface/tagging system at AO3 making the stories "unreadable" and unfindable (I always go by recs to read and found the old Yuletide archive very heard to search anyway, so...), and then throw in the usual "OTW/AO3 is out to destroy fandom as we know it" stuff. *shrugs* So, really, no idea.