Panel Report
Aug. 18th, 2022 09:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferret"Ethical Norms in Fanworks Fandom", the first panel I ran at Fanworks Con, is a panel I originally developed for Discon. As I got tied up with Mystery Hunt I lost track of program development and it ultimately ran as "Fanwork Factions", to my mild disappointment. I think it's really interesting to see that evolution.
My developed panel description:
The Discon panel "Fanworks Factions":
So whoever developed the panel idea further was interested in the final clause of my description, 'how are they enforced?' and took that to its extremes. I attended the resulting panel and I thought it was interesting but occasionally frustrating. Given the slant of the description, the panelists spent a lot of time decrying teenagers who didn't understand how important the freedom to write smut was, which I thought was kind of silly and patronizing, as well as misunderstanding power dynamics. During the Q&A I pushed back a bit by asking them if they understood that the same tools that are used to harass smut writers are also the tools that we use to try to drive racist fans out of our spaces.
Anyway, I ran the original panel at Fanworks, which is much more focused on what are the communual norms that we agree on and why they exist, rather than on how do we use social pressure to punish fans we don't like. I talked about copyright and the idea of derivative works and transformative works, and why the OTW idea of fanworks as transformative works is useful but limited and so fandom in practice only takes advantage of it when it's convenient and otherwise adopts extralegal rules for derivative works. I presented three models for fandom's approach to copyright- the It's All Transformative model, the It's Illegal but I Do It Anyway model, and the It's Not Illegal Because the Copyright Holders' Inaction is an Implicit License model, and then the audience argued with me for a while about whether the second two models are essentially the same, which was a good, clarifying argument to have. Then we looked at a bunch of rules that fandom has for when you can make derivative works and we talked about the logic behind them and how sometimes they seem counterintuitive and sometimes they make logical sense.
I did a little soapboxing at the end about why I think that cancelling and other forms of social pressure is sometimes appropriate in a fanworks community context, as long as we are careful and impose limits on its use. In general my line is that white knighting is the moment when canceling and call-out-ing goes from being an appropriate tool for maintaining communal norms to being a tool for toxic harassment.
Here is the slideshow I used Ethical Norms slideshow
My developed panel description:
Fanworks are created by relatively small, self-selecting communities that have developed our own ethical standards about how and when elements from other peoples' work, fan- and otherwise, can be incorporated into your own. These rules often overlap, but are not congruent with, copyright law. How are these community norms created, and how are they enforced
The Discon panel "Fanworks Factions":
Fanfiction and other fanworks are well known for creating space for the stories that aren’t-quite-told in canon. Communities have developed their own ethical standards about how and when elements can be used from other peoples’ work, but we have also seen significant ship wars and the rise of purity culture. How are these community norms created, and how are they enforced? How does one stay afloat amidst the shifting tides of morality, taste, and social custom?
So whoever developed the panel idea further was interested in the final clause of my description, 'how are they enforced?' and took that to its extremes. I attended the resulting panel and I thought it was interesting but occasionally frustrating. Given the slant of the description, the panelists spent a lot of time decrying teenagers who didn't understand how important the freedom to write smut was, which I thought was kind of silly and patronizing, as well as misunderstanding power dynamics. During the Q&A I pushed back a bit by asking them if they understood that the same tools that are used to harass smut writers are also the tools that we use to try to drive racist fans out of our spaces.
Anyway, I ran the original panel at Fanworks, which is much more focused on what are the communual norms that we agree on and why they exist, rather than on how do we use social pressure to punish fans we don't like. I talked about copyright and the idea of derivative works and transformative works, and why the OTW idea of fanworks as transformative works is useful but limited and so fandom in practice only takes advantage of it when it's convenient and otherwise adopts extralegal rules for derivative works. I presented three models for fandom's approach to copyright- the It's All Transformative model, the It's Illegal but I Do It Anyway model, and the It's Not Illegal Because the Copyright Holders' Inaction is an Implicit License model, and then the audience argued with me for a while about whether the second two models are essentially the same, which was a good, clarifying argument to have. Then we looked at a bunch of rules that fandom has for when you can make derivative works and we talked about the logic behind them and how sometimes they seem counterintuitive and sometimes they make logical sense.
I did a little soapboxing at the end about why I think that cancelling and other forms of social pressure is sometimes appropriate in a fanworks community context, as long as we are careful and impose limits on its use. In general my line is that white knighting is the moment when canceling and call-out-ing goes from being an appropriate tool for maintaining communal norms to being a tool for toxic harassment.
Here is the slideshow I used Ethical Norms slideshow