Fan labor

=Definition=

Fan labor is a term used to refer to the productive creative activities engaged in by fans, primarily those of various media properties or musical groups [http://cms.mit.edu/news/2007/12/futures_of_entertainment_2_fan.php, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/1/3/8/4/p13840_index.html] . It differs from other well-known fandom activities such as collecting, gaming, or attending conventions or concerts in that fan labor activities involve actively creating works of art, fiction, costumes, props, music, videos, etc. John Fiske describes these activities as "textual productivity", the production of items that fans "produce and circulate among themselves, texts which are often crafted with production values as high as any in the official culture" [Fiske 1992:39] . These works may fall legally and collectively into the category of transformative works (such as a parody of the original); however, most fan labor products are derivative works [Tushnet 2007:141-150] , in that they are creative additions or modifications to an existing copyrighted work, [Tushnet 2004:551] or they are original creations which are inspired by a specific copyrighted work. (see Legal Issues below)

User-generated content (UGC) is a blanket term which can also cover the activities of fan labor, and is sometimes used interchangeably, but UGC most often refers specifically to content that is created electronically in order to participate in various activities via the Internet, such as providing text, graphic or video content for blogs, MySpace and Facebook pages, fan websites (whether fan-run or commercial), YouTube postings, and other “Web 2.0” or “participatory culture” types of activities [Jenkins 2007c:357, http://www.iab.net/media/file/2008_ugc_platform.pdf] . Fan labor products may well be digital works, such as written fiction posted on a fan fiction web site (such as [http://www.fanfiction.net FanFiction.net] ) or a Live Journal page, photo collages, music videos, or creations of digital objects for use within games or environments such as Second Life, but they can also be items such as paintings and drawings of series characters or band members, jewelry inspired by a series or a character, original design costumes based on a fictional book, t-shirt designs based on quotes by a character, and writing and performance of original songs inspired by a given media property.

Other terms used in current scholarly and marketing studies to refer to fan labor are the terms “prosumer” (coined in 1980 by Alvin Toffler in "The Third Wave") and the more recent "produser" [Axel Bruns; http://distributedcreativity.typepad.com/idc_residencies/] , both referring to individuals with sophisticated multimedia skills who produce media content, share it with others via the internet or other digital means, and consume similar content, both that which they have created for themselves as well as other content produced and shared with them in a similar manner. These “produser” activities have become an area of interest for media companies as these activities add a level of uncertainty to various corporate activities, from media product development, to marketing, advertising, promotional activities, and distribution; while some companies actively court fans and these type of activities, other companies attempt to highly restrict them, to the point of legal activity.

Categories of Fan Labor Activities

Although the actual forms fan labor activities take are extremely varied and change as technology changes, they can be broadly classified into five categories:

#Fan Fiction writing
#Vidding/Machinima
#Costume, prop, and model construction
#Art and Graphic Design
#Filk – Music writing & performance

A sixth category, web site and blog construction and maintenance, could also be listed here, but the focus of this article is on primary creative works, not activities that would be more curatorial or service-oriented in nature. Those who do create web materials for use by other fans, such as banners or avatars, technically fall into other categories, such as art and graphic design by this definition. Summaries of each of these areas and examples of each type of activity are found below, but more complete information on each can be found within Wikipedia, and in fandom scholarly texts, such as "Textual Poachers", "Enterprising Women", "Fandom", and "Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers".

Fan Fiction

Fan fiction stories (“fan fic”) are literary (or artistic – see below) works produced by fans of a given media property, that expand on an original story line, character relationship, or situations and entities that were originally mentioned in the original author’s work. Fan fiction allows fans to explore various “what if” situations that would possibly been developed if the series would have continued or the author had time to explore their characterizations further. [Busse and Hellekson 2006: 5-31] Fan fiction is the most widely known fan labor practice, and arguably one of the oldest, with the "Aeneid" possibly being the oldest form, in that it takes a minor character from "The Iliad" and creates a new mythology surrounding him. [Clerc 2002:69] In modern fandom, fan fiction as a common fan practice began in the 1960’s, with fan-produced magazines ("zines") of stories based on science fiction and popular drama shows, such as "Star Trek", "Doctor Who", and "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.", being produced via photocopying and mimeography, and mailed to other fans or sold at conventions for a small fee to help recoup the supply costs. With the advent of the internet, fan fiction rapidly moved online to individual sites and webzines, fan fiction archive and sharing sites such as [http://www.fanfiction.net Fanfiction.net] and [http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org The Leaky Cauldron] and various Live Journal pages. [Coppa 2006:41-59]

Vidding and Machinima

Fan videos, or fanvids, are compilations of video clips from TV shows and/or movies that are synchronized to music and/or snippets of audio from media sources. [Jenkins 2006b:144, Kozinets 2007:198-200] “Vidders,” the creators of these videos, spend a great deal of time carefully matching the audio and video components to tell a story or set a specific mood. Often, the videos focus on relationships between the characters in the media property, such as pairing "Star Trek"’s Captain Kirk and Mister Spock in various ways to comment on the original show or pose possible new relationship issues. Machinima is a more recent activity in which vidders use computer game engines to create “actors” and create scenarios for them to perform in, using the physics and character generation tools of the game, and then record the computer-generated characters acting out a specific script created by the vidder. These videos (and their creation) tend to be more popular with males, with the fanvids created more often created by female fans [ [http://lstein.wordpress.com/2007/06/06/robert-jones-writes-on-pink-vs-blue-the-emergence-of-women-in-machinima/ Robert Jones writes on “Pink vs. Blue: The Emergence of Women in Machinima” « transgeneric ] ] . A well known machinima is the ongoing web series, "Red vs. Blue", which was created inside of the Halo game environment.

Costume, Prop, and Model Construction

Costuming (often known as cosplay, especially when discussing costumes based on Anime or those used for live action roleplay activities) is a form of fan labor that involves creating costumes that replicate those worn by characters in a show or movie, creating original costume designs that the creator feels would fit within the time period and setting for the show/movie/book, or creating fantasy costumes that may be inspired by a specific genre of characters, such as vampires, fairies, elves, etc. Costuming often goes well beyond basic seamstress and tailoring tasks to create the clothing worn by the character, and may include sophisticated mechanics (such as hydraulics to open and close wings) or complicated manufacturing techniques (such as building a set of "Star Wars" Stormtrooper armour from scratch by using vacuum molding, fiberglas application, etc.). The construction of appropriate props, such as guns, swords, lightsabers, etc. to complete the costumes accuracy or realism is an area of fan labor that is predominantly male-oriented, as is the construction of scale models of spaceships and other items seen in movies and shows, or discussed in books. Props and costumes based on fictional literary works which have no official visual representation are examples of speculative derivative works, and their creators are less likely to find themselves under prosecution for violation of copyright than those that exactly reproduce an item or costume seen on the screen.

Art and Graphic Design

This area of fan labor is exceptional in that artists have often sold their works in public at conventions and other fan gatherings [Fiske 2002:40] , as well as on their own web sites. This is not to say that there are not artists who receive Cease & Desist letters or find themselves running afoul of copyright law, but the “artistic interpretation” of a character or scenario is often seen as a derivative work and not violating the fair use doctrine. However, in recent years, media companies have cracked down on the sale of these works, causing some conventions to ban them entirely from their art shows, even if not offered for sale. Graphic Design activities include creation of web banners, avatars, animations, t-shirt designs, etc. The areas of design and fine art overlap in fan creation of photo collages featuring characters from their show/movie, as well as posters and artistic representation of movie/show/book quotes. Many fans in this area have set up e-commerce storefronts through vendors such as Café Press and Zazzle, which allow customers to purchase items such as t-shirts, totes, and mugs with the fan design imprinted on them. However, again, media companies are increasingly conducting web searches to locate items which they feel are in violation of copyright, and the third party vendors (such as Café Press) will enforce the copyright owner’s rights and shut down offending stores or at a minimum, remove an offending design from the fan’s store.

Filking

Filking is a word used to describe fan music writing and performance of songs inspired by a specific fandom(s). The word is a corruption of “folk” music, and originated in a misprint in an essay that changed “folk music” to “filk music", and the word has meant the specific musical creations of fans about their fandoms and science fiction/fantasy fandom at large ever since. Filking is often done in small groups at conventions, often late at night after other official convention programming has ended for the day. Although filking has gotten more sophisticated in its production values and performance aesthetics over time and with advances in sound editing and performance technology, groups of fans gathered with a guitar or two, singing their original songs in a round robin performance style, is still a very common fan activity at conventions. Filking is also an area of fan labor that has gotten more commercialized, with several fans (The Great LukeSki, Voltaire, The Bedlam Bards, etc.) producing and selling filk cassettes, CDs and DVDs of their performances.

Economic Theories and Models of Fan Labor Practices

In any type of fan labor, one of the major aspects is the formation of relationships between fan creators and other fans, whether they are also creators or not. This is one of the aspects that many fans see as separating fandom economic practices (particularly a gift economy view) from the external capitalistic practices of everyday life. George Dalton reinforces this idea, in his discussion of “primitive economies” saying “to the participants, the movement of resources and products is not regarded as an activity distinct from other social activities…The pivotal matter is the social relationship between the persons…It is only when production activities become divorced from activities expressing social obligation that production becomes marked off as a peculiarly economic activity, apart from other activities.” [Dalton 1967b:72 in Isaac 1993] The relationships created through fan exchanges are often as important, if not more so, than the products exchanged. The vast majority of fan labor communities today are organized around various web sites, discussion boards, and media repositories such as photo and video sharing sites. The communities formed around their common interests are strong and cross-pollinate among various types of fandom activities (costuming with graphic design, or writing with video, for example) as well as among fandoms ("Star Trek" with "Firefly"; "Halo" with "Star Wars", etc.) These various fandom relationships of informal, non-commercial (for the most part) exchange constitute what Fiske has termed a “shadow cultural economy” [Fiske 1992:30] , which shares some aspects with the cultural industries that regular popular culture lacks, but still is external to those industries. Fiske bases his analysis ("The Cultural Economy of Fandom" in "The Adoring Audience") [Lewis, ed. 1992] on Bourdieu’s metaphor of culture as an economy, where investments of cultural capital are made by individuals [Fiske 1992:31] , but continues to problematize it throughout his examination of fan practices. He concludes that fans are not dupes of the cultural industries, and “they may choose to make some of their commodities into popular culture, but reject many more than they adopt. Fans are among the most discriminating and selective of all formations of the people and the cultural capital they produce is the most highly developed and visible of all.” [Fiske 1992:48]

Gift Economy

The most common formal economic model associated with fan labor practices is that of fandom as a gift economy [http://deuze.blogspot.com/2007/10/fandom-and-media-work.html, Bacon-Smith, Camille, Enterprising Women, 1992, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press] . Theoretically, the idea of a “gift economy” was originally documented by Marcel Mauss in "The Gift", which he wrote in 1923. The basic formula of “gifting” as set forth by Mauss’s study was that of gift – exchange – reciprocation. This can be clearly seen in a fan labor practice such as fan fiction: The writing and posting of a story (the gift given/exchanged), followed by the reading of the story (gift acceptance, completing the intital exchange), and finally, feedback to the original author and potentially passing the work along or linking to it for others to see (the reciprical gift given). Fans themselves often express this view when asked about the reasons they participate in unpaid labor activities as listed above, and neither expect nor ask for remuneration. In fact, the gift economy is seen by many fans as a central tenet of “what makes fandom different.”

It has been written that one of the main rules of fan fiction is “we make NO money.” [Tushnet 2007] Karl Polanyi commented on this idea in discussing the differences between trade done with “noble motives” (such as tribute, honoring another, etc.) and those who engage in commercial trade, saying “Thus he who trades for the sake of duty and honor grows rich, while he who trades for filthy lucre remains poor.” [Polyani 1957:259] A theory of gift economy in fandom fits this concept in the idea that fans who do their creative work out of “noble motives” (paying respect to the original media property or an actor or to the fandom in general) “grow rich” (gain cultural capital in the fandom), while those who attempt to sell their creative products will “remain poor” (shunned by other fans, subject to possible legal action.) Fans often classify other fans trying to sell their items for profit motives as “hucksters” rather than true fans [Fiske 1992:40]

Mauss also views a gift as a sacrifice of surplus labor made to compel the deity (the original media property in this case) to “make a return.” [Wells 2007:6] . A gift seen as a “sacrifice” in this case could be seen as an offering made to show the original show/movie producers that there is a lively fandom for their product, and possibly encourage the producers to make more, such as was seen with the “Browncoats”, fans of "Firefly" and "Serenity", when they engaged in very visible fan activities, such as charity events, “guerilla marketing” activities, creation of fan videos, filk, etc., in order to convince a studio to greenlight a sequel to the cancelled TV series "Firefly" [ [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/08/DDGQJD4D2O1.DTL When Fox canceled 'Firefly,' it ignited an Internet fan base whose burning desire for more led to 'Serenity' ] ] . Based partially on this fan activity, Universal Studios greenlit the movie "Serenity" to be produced in early 2004, and it was released in September 2005.

Arjun Appadurai has said that the concept of a “gift” is usually very oppositional to ideas of profit, self-centeredness, and other “negative” attributes, [Appadurai 1986:12] which are all things that fans often eschew. Fans are often fearful that charging other fans for products of their creativity, such as zines, videos, costumes, art, etc. (although as mentioned above, art is often exempt from this rule) will somehow fundamentally change the fan-fan relationship, as well as attract unwanted legal attention from copyright holders. That fear has come true in more than one case, such as the recent trial of "Rowling v. RDR Books" regarding the publication and sale of the "Harry Potter" Lexicon, which was a fan-created compilation of facts compiled by fans worldwide [Coverage of the Harry Potter Lexicon trial http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5748] , and the removal from sale on Amazon.com of a commercial fan fiction book set in the "Star Wars" universe [MacDonald 2006:6] . Rebecca Tushnet has written about the concept of fans being engaged in an economic model that rewards in “credit”; that is, in attribution, notoriety, good will, etc. rather than in monetary means [Tushnet 2007] . However, as Tushnet also recognizes, there are fans, primarily in the computer game industries, who do find employment through their fan works, and there are companies who purchase fan created additions or game items, or run marketplaces for fans to sell these items to other fans for monetary reward.

Economic Anthropology and Ritual Economy

Looking at fan labor practices through the viewpoint of economic anthropology, the various creative practices can be seen as labor that is done in a relatively routine way (these are all common practices within all fandoms) which helps to maintain a connection to what could be seen as a “cultural ancestor” or even “deity”, the media property itself. Based on a concept by Mary Helms [Helms 1998:169-172] , the products of fan labor are a form of cultural wealth that goes beyond a “sophisticated rendering of concepts” to creations that are valued in their ability to be used in “ceremonies” (exchanges among fans, commentary on creations at conventions, etc.) that help to interrelate the objects, the fans themselves, and the larger polity, the media property. Looking at fan labor through Helms’s model, the fans become “affines” of media property and of other fans, who create their wealth through “crafting and artistry”, and in this way, they replicate “the original creative acts of first-principle deities, ancestors or cultural heroes.” [Helms 1998:171]

Another useful model for examining fan labor practices is that of "ritual economy". Christian Wells defines a ritual economy as “the materialization of values and beliefs through acquisition and consumption for managing meaning and shaping interpretation.” [Wells 2007:6] . This is not ritual in a religious sense, but is looking at the concept of ritual as a “routine act”; that is, as the daily activities of conducting household provisioning (how you get what you need and want, both through production and acquisition), consuming products/services (how daily life activities – the ritual acts – use and transform the items acquired and/or produce), and how power relationships are expressed through materialization – the choices made in provisioning and consuming – of an individual's worldview (beliefs, meanings, interpretations). Under this model, and relating it back to Helms’s concepts above, the actions of fan acquisition and production are tied to skilled crafting, which is an essential part of fan labor practices.

From writing to graphic design, video production and photo editing, fan labor practices involve many types of skill sets, and have increasingly become more sophisticated as fandom has moved online. Fans produce goods that are have social value (within the fandom and as part of their individual identity creation) by other fans, with the goal of providing a product that not only pleases the fan creator themselves, but is also desired by other fans in order to fulfill a desire for products (which can be seen as provisioning) that relate to their beliefs and feelings about the fandom [Thorne and Bruner 2006:54] . In this way, fandom labor practices can be seen as those practices of production and consumption which continually reproduce the structures and worldview of the fandom through the choices fans make. These choices also reflect the relationships fans construct of their view of their place within fandom, including how they relate to the media property and the corporate structures and products surrounding it. Robert Kozinets comments on this fan-media relationship saying that fan activities are “a fantastic bridge crossing the boundaries between fictional and real worlds. Like modern Eleusian rites or Macumba possessions, the participant enacts and embodies the god.” [Kozinets 2007:204] His view of fan practices and motiviations is similar to Wells’s model of ritual economy, particularly his concept of a fandom as an "inno-tribe" of consumers or prosumers who “collectively open up the source code of the culture of consumption.” He suggests that fans (members of a specific inno-tribe) are “prosumers who identify as the members of a particular group that collectively uses a culture of consumption – and whose ‘use’ includes the individual and collective construction of overlapping and even conflicting practices, identities, meanings, and also alternate texts, images, and objects.” [Kozinets 2007:205]

Although many fans see the concept of “fandom as gift” as central to their identity and practice as fans, there are fans who do engage in commercial (for-profit) exchange of their creations in what is known as the “gray market”, where fan-produced product is sold, usually for minimal profit, operating mainly through word of mouth and “under the table” sales, such has been seen with fan fiction zines at conventions where fans were aware that commercial representatives of the original publishers would be attending [Clerc 2002:76-77] . This “gray market” is different than the common view of a fandom “black market,” where unlicensed or bootleg goods are sold, such as bootleg videos from overseas, knock-offs of licensed products, and imports of collectibles of dubious origin. The gray market provides products of varying quality, from amateur crafts and publications, to professional-quality original graphic design and art posters, prints, and apparel based on media characters, sayings, etc., and highly detailed costume and prop replicas. Even though these are commercial activities, it is still expected that fan vendors will not make a large amount of profit, charging just enough to cover expenses. Some vendors attempt to not mark up their products at all, and will use that information in their promotional information, in an attempt to secure the confidence of other fans who may look down at fans making a profit (as discussed above). [personal observation of discussions on the topic online] Increasingly, these prosumer fans are becoming more bold in selling their wares online through e-commerce sites, and even as vendors at conventions. Many of these fan vendors maintain that they are protected by fair use doctrine. However, other vendors and authors have received cease & desist letters from copyright holders, as well as requests for back licensing fees or other fines for copyright violations [Universal Studios C&D letter to fan artist 11th Hour, 2006] . Often, these cases are settled out of court, but usually result in the fan vendor having to stop selling products entirely, or significantly modifying their wares to comply with the copyright owner’s demands.

Legal Issues and the Future of Fan Labor

There are many current debates in scholarly and fandom circles regarding fan labor issues, with various media studies conferences having special sessions devoted to this topic (primarily dealing with electronic UGC). [Recent conventions include Media in Transition 2007, Futures of Entertainment 2007 (both sponsored by the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT), and the Popular Culture Association Annual Meeting 2007] Fan labor and its products are certainly not new phenomena [Coppa 2006:41-59] , but with increasing legal action from media conglomerates, who are actively protecting their intellectual property rights, including copyright, as new technologies make media easier to distribute and modify, fan labor activities are coming under greater scrutiny, and some fans are finding themselves the subjects of lawsuits or Cease & Desist letters which ask them to take down the offending materials from a website, or stop distributing (or selling) an item which they believe violates the copyright of the property in question [Clerc 2002:71-54,162-179] .

Fan labor products may be protected by the Fair Use Doctrine of the U.S. Copyright Law, which judges if a work is transformative or derivative; as copyright-infringing or not based on four tests:
#the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
#the nature of the copyrighted work;
#the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
#the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.However, these tests are not absolute, and judges may decide to weigh one factor heavier than another in any given case. [Woo 2004] The copyright issues will likely continue to be the greatest challenge to fan labor for the near future. [http://chillingeffects.org/ Chilling Effects] is a A joint web project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics, which covers the current state of copyright-related law suits, and has a special section devoted to fan fiction legal action and how to fight it. [http://transformativeworks.org/ The Organization for Transformative Works] is a fan-run organization that provides legal advice for fan fiction writers, vidders, and other fan labor practitioners. They have a Board of Directors which includes legal fandom scholar, Rebecca Tushnet, among other scholars, copyright law experts, and fans themselves. They are starting a peer-reviewed journal as well, and will host a fan fiction archive.

Media scholars and business reporters are recognizing the increasingly participatory nature of fandom and what it may mean for the future of the entertainment industry. Henry Jenkins comments on these changes in his "Afterword" in Fandom (2007b:357-364), where he discusses a business report called "The Future of Independent Media", that stated, “The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course [….] A new generation of media makers and viewers are [sic] emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.” [Jenkins 2007b:360] The recent book Consumer Tribes [Cova, Kozinets, Shankar, eds. 2007] is devoted to case studies of consumer groups, many of them media fans, who are challenging the traditional media production and consumer product marketing models.

However, there are critics of this trend, including Andrew Keen, who critiques in his The Cult of the Amateur (2007) Wikipedia, self-publishing, blogs, YouTube, and numerous other examples of user-generated Web 2.0 content. Stephen Brown, in his article for Consumer Tribes, "Harry Potter and the Fandom Menace", writes, ”Fans, furthermore, are atypical. [….] They are not representative, not even remotely. Their enthusiastically put views are hopelessly distorted, albeit hopelessly distorted in a direction marketers find congenial. Isn’t it great to gather eager followers? [….] The answer, in a nutshell, is NO.” [Brown 2007:190] Henry Jenkins has also commented on the challenges to fan labor and other user generated media content, saying “Room for participation and improvisation are being built into new media franchises [….] Cult works were once discovered; now they are being consciously produced, designed to provoke fan interactions.” [Jenkins 2007a:145] Jenkins also comments on the fan-media conglomerate relationship, saying, “Here, the right to participate in the culture is assumed to be ‘the freedom we have allowed ourselves,’ not a privilege granted by a benevolent company, not something they [fans] are prepared to barter away for better sound files or free Web hosting. [….] Instead, they embrace an understanding of intellectual property as ‘shareware,’ something that accrues value as it moves across different contexts, gets retold in various ways, attracts multiple audiences, and opens itself up to a proliferation of alternative meanings.” [Jenkins 2006:256]

An issue that is starting to gain attention is that of corporations co-opting user-generated content as "free labor" [Deuze 2007:3,57; Keen 2007:61-62] As fans recognize the commercial value of their labor, the issue of companies abusing these volunteer creators of videos, stories, and advertisements (such as the 2007 Doritos^TM Super Bowl Ad contest) by not providing an appropriate monetary reward is of concern. [Deuze 2007:56-83; Keen 2007:60-63] However, as discussed above, there is a divide in fandom between those who want to see new models of remuneration developed and those who feel that "getting paid cuts fandom off at the knees." [Comment by Catherine Tosenberger, speaker on "Fan Labor" panel, Futures of Entertainment 2007 conference at MIT] Tiziana Terranova (2000) has commented, "Often the unemployed are such only in name, in reality being the life-blood of the difficult economy of “under-the-table,” badly paid work, some of which also goes into the new media industry. To emphasize how labor is not equivalent to employment also means to acknowledge how important free affective and cultural labor is to the media industry, old and new." [Terranova 2000:46] Tushnet (2007) discusses various “fractional reward” concepts, that would allow individual creators to be paid for user-generated content of derivative works by the original copyright holder, such as payments for contest winners, or payments in “credit” or attribution, as was previously mentioned above. If there were legitimate pathways for fans to create products that could lead to fame and fortune (or at least a paying job), the tradeoff between getting paid and getting ahead in the community (cultural capital) might be enough of an incentive to encourage creative work by fans [Tushnet 2007:173] .

The payments to fan creators of content that is used in upgrades to the model train simulator "Trainz" is an example of an original copyright owner being willing to share the potential commercial gain to be made from derivative works by fans [Session on Fan Labor and personal discussion with an Auran company representative, Media in Transition Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 18-21, 2007.] . Tushnet also mentions the world of doujinshi, which is fan fiction based on manga, and is often sold side by side with its original commercial inspiration, with no legal action from the original publishers [Tushnet 2007:173] . Second Life is another model of user-generated content that is sold for real money within the game space. The creators of the environment allow creators to have full commercial control over their creations, including clothes, accessories, houses, meals, scripts, and other useful items and tools.

References

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*Tushnet, Rebecca (2004) "Copy This Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech and How Copying Serves It". In "The Yale Law Journal". 114(3):535-590.http://www.jstor.org/stable/4135692.
*Tushnet, Rebecca (2007) "Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural Creativity". In "Law & Contemporary Problems". 70:135-174. http://law.duke.edu/journals/lcp.
*Wells, E. Christian and Karla Davis-Salazar (2007) "Mesoamerican Ritual Economy: Materialization as Ritual and Economic Process". In Mesoamerican Ritual Economy: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives, E. C. Wells and K. L. Davis-Salazar, eds. pp. 1-26. Boulder, University Press of Colorado.
*Wilk, Richard R. and Lisa C. Cliggett (2007) Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.
*Woo, Jisuk (2004) "Redefining the 'Transformative Use' of Copyrighted Works: Toward a Fair Use Standard in the Digital Environment". In "Hastings Communications and Law Journal". Retrieved from Lexis-Nexis service, University of South Florida Library.

External links

*http://chillingeffects.org/
*http://transformativeworks.org/
*http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5748 Coverage of the "Harry Potter" Lexicon Trial