burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

So, i remember surfing /friendsfriends and seeing someone mention her problem with the fic auction for writercon since it becomes making money off your fic, which gets into iffy legal territory, and someone else wrote an entry having a similar problem with fan_the_vote. I didn't think to bookmark either of them, though, which i now regret because they were very well-written (and i happen to agree with both arguments). Anyone know what i'm talking about and wanna point me to the links?

Thanks to scrollgirl for finding the links i wanted.

"Anyone or anything that is not ME its heirs and assigns coming away with a dollar they didn't have before because of fanfic constitutes too much profit as far as I'm concerned." is what stakebait said about the WriterCon fic auctions and what lasultrix used as an epigraph for her entry about fan_the_vote. (Of course, thebratqueen raised the same issues around VidCon and WriterCon before either of these.)

I’ve said before that "Anything wherein you are playing with someone else's universe/characters is, by my definition, fanfic." Certain people get paid to do that, but they get permission from the people who own the universe/characters. If i ever get to make a fanfiction department, i’m making sure that gets emphasized in every class: both the historical precedent and the legal logistics.

I’m okay with ficathons wherein you write someone a fic in exchange for getting a fic written for yourself, but the cons have had people auctioning off services including fanfic writing in order to raise money to help people attend the cons. As someone who doesn’t come from money, i’m a big fan of scholarships, but i really just don’t think we’re allowed to make money off of fanfic (or fanart) without permission.

stakebait: "The con profiting, the scholarship recipients profiting, anyone or anything that is not ME its heirs and assigns coming away with a dollar they didn't have before because of fanfic constitutes too much profit as far as I'm concerned."

thebratqueen: "the cons are raising money with something that is not theirs to raise money with."

fan_the_vote has people offering up fannish services such as fics, betas, etc. in exchange for pledges to the John Kerry campaign and/or MoveOn.org. This has the same problem as the cons plus, as lasultrix said: "People have promised fic from a hell of a lot of fandoms here. You really think nobody who owns the rights to any of these fandoms is a Republican? Forget taking a little bit of what's their money by right to line your own pockets - in this community, you'd be sending their money to a political party they oppose and encouraging others to do the same thing. I can't count the ways in which that's wrong."

I thought this (thanks to raskazzptitsa for the article link) was the coolest thing. I didn’t actually participate but hello, thebratqueen found a way to end world hunger. If you want to give money in support of something and associate your donation with an additional cause, go for it. (Hello, businesses do that all the time: giving money to charities while also getting the good publicity for their business.)

The charity [the International Committee of the Red Cross] was chosen to reflect both the international nature of the fans who contributed to the campaign and the mission of the title character, Angel - to "help the helpless." -press release

"I said a while back that I tend not to like fan campaigns that involve donating money for Variety ads and the like because my personal moral system is that I don't feel comfy giving away money to something like that when there's people and organizations out there who really need it."
-TBQ

I was telling someone a week or two ago about how because of my father i am absolutely addicted to consistency, and i was realizing that this probably relates to my twitchings around adaptations of texts.

I want people to be consistent in what they say and do, and i believe there’s a consistent logic that underlies each person’s approach to the world. I also believe in capital T Truth. These two obviously tie together and help explain why i don’t want people messing with “canon.” A story exists, say a novel. When you make it into a movie, certain aspects of it get changed by necessity since movies are different forms than books, and also often by choice because the director has various interpretations. This means the endproduct seems like a “false” story to me, that the original is True in a sense, and the adaptation is a falsification of that story.

Obviously not everyone shares my view, but i like having my view articulated.

More recently, i articulated why i’m okay with reworkings but not adaptations.

In adaptations, the reworkings are unfortunate byproducts. The point of an adaptation is to present a story, only you’re changing the medium (book, movie, play, whatever) so certain changes have to be made by virtue of the differences inherent in the media. But the ostensible purpose of the adaptation is merely to present the original narrative, only adapted to a new form.

If your purpose is to play around with the story, though, to say “What if it happened this way instead,” then that’s fine.

Is this all clear enough, or are there aspects i still need to articulate?

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E-mail from him:

I thought of this last week.

Stop me if you've heard this.

You know, if Mercedes McNab married Julie Benz, she'd be -- okay, I'll stop.

Dear Cherokee,

When i buy "opaque tights," i want them to be actually opaque. As in, one can't tell what color my skin is or whether i've shaved my legs or whether i have a tattoo. Opaque does not mean "you can actually tell there is material covering your legs, unlike the sheer stockings which remind me of the whole idea of makeup as something no one should be able to tell you are wearing, but you can still see legs through said material."

No love to the stores whose inventories are unhelpful in this and other shopping endeavors,
Me