Fanfiction Authors: HEADS UP

(Non-authors, please RB to signal boost to your author friends!)

An astute reader informed me this morning that one of my fics (Children of the Future Age) had been pirated and was being sold as a novel on Amazon:

(And they weren't even creative with their cover design. If you're going to pirate something that I spent a full year of my life writing, at least give me a pretty screenshot to brag about later. Seriously.)

I promptly filed a DMCA complaint to have it removed, but I checked out the company that put it up -- Plush Books -- and it looks like A LOT of their books are pirated fic. They are by no means the only ones doing this, either -- the fact that """publishers""" can download stories from AO3 in ebook format and then reupload them to Amazon in just a few clicks makes fic piracy a common problem. There are a whole host of reasons why letting this continue is bad -- including actual legal risk to fanfiction archives -- but basically:

IF YOU ARE A FANFIC AUTHOR WITH LONG AND/OR POPULAR WORKS, PLEASE CHECK AMAZON TO SEE IF YOUR STORIES HAVE BEEN PIRATED.

You can search for your fics by title, or by text from the description (which is often just copied wholesale from AO3 as well). If you find that someone has stolen your work and is selling it as their own, you can lodge a DMCA complaint (Amazon.com/USA site; other countries have different systems). If you haven't done this before, it's easy! Here's a tutorial:

HOW TO FILE A COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FOR STOLEN WORK ON AMAZON.COM:

First, go to this form. You'll need to be signed into your Amazon account.

Please share this information with your writer friends, keep an eye out for/report pirated works, and help us keep fanfiction free and legally protected!

NOTE: All of the above also applies to Amazon products featuring stolen artwork, etc., so fan artists should check too!

this is really how i feel sometimes

Fic in my case, but yeah

squishy

Scotch Bonnet! The youngest, tiniest, and most chill of girls.

hello, who am I squeaking with?

Hold on, I’m putting you on squeaker phone!

1. A dog is full of joy

#get him

i love naruto hes so pure but he is not on luffys level

The thing about OP is that its thesis begins and remains radical and the thing about naruto is midway through kishimoto sorta lost his nerve and started being like: “maybe child soldiers are good… actually…. Idk”

Whereas OP was eight arcs in laying down: “privatized healthcare is an act of violence against the people” and then a hundred episodes later they’re like “the military exists to protect the ruling class and will perform atrocities beyond your imagination to maintain the status quo”

Today my art history professor gave some words of wisdom:

Nude is when your clothes are off. Naked is when your clothes are off and you’re up to something 

lots of people seem to forget strikes are SUPPOSED TO negatively impact the economy and inconvenience people. that's how you force the company to give into your demands. it's hitting them where it hurts hardest--their profit.

Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen by Johann Hari

let me tell you, i could barely make it through this paragraph, but this shit is important

Another part of the article that really grabbed me:

“At the moment it’s as though we are all having itching powder poured over us all day, and the people pouring the powder are saying: ‘You might want to learn to meditate. Then you wouldn’t scratch so much.’”

This post is about why you're scrolling past

Some additional comments about Sudowrite, hopefully of use to people.

1. There’s not a lot of point in locking your works. The AI has been trained. It’s done. Not only that, but the data itself remains archived and can be reused.

2. The algorithm in question is a bigger project called GPT-3, which gets its training data from a resource called Common Crawl. Common Crawl basically trawls everything on the web and is how search engines (including Google) index content. So it’s probably not that the people behind it have intentionally targeted AO3, though I am fascinated by the high specificity of fandom content in my results.

3. That’s going to make things difficult for AO3 staff to prevent, though, because as mentioned, if you make it so Common Crawl can’t look at the site at all, pages will no longer show up in searches at all.

4. This is understandably creepy as all hell, but my personal opinion is that locking my fanworks will do me more harm than leaving them open.

5. Action is needed to address the root problem of these AI training datasets in all fields, but I don’t think focusing on the ethical or artistic arguments is the way to change things. I think we should be leaning hard on IP and copyright law here. You can’t copyright a sentence or a phrase, but once you get enough individual factors together (character names, similarity of narrative, concepts) it starts to get dicey. So for example, if Sudowrite always gives a character named Harry glasses and black hair… well we all know why that is but it’s unlikely to be actionable.

If Sudowrite always associates a character named Harry with characters named Hermione, Neville, and Sirius, and consistently produces concepts like wands, potions, schools, etc… it starts to look like the kind of problem IP holders may take an interest in. Sudowrite claims that all its text is original and not directly lifted from anywhere - which may be technically true - but ironically, copyright and IP law is based on the whole of a work and its context… and if the AI can’t help but imitate those works and contexts, things are going to get interesting.

6. While Elon Musk is eminently blameable for all things, he doesn’t have any personal involvement here as far as I know, these people have just got some of his money.

I once saw an analogy comparing saying something unintentionally hurtful to stepping on someone's foot. If you inadvertently stepped on someone's toes, and they expressed discomfort or pain, would you go "I'm sorry! Are you okay? Can I get you anything?" or would you go "Well it's not my fault your foot was there! It's not like I ran over it with a car on purpose! It's not a big deal!"? I mean, I'm sure there are people who would do the latter, but those people are assholes of the Nth magnitude. It's the same for words. If you said or did something and it caused someone pain or distress, even if that was not your intention, own up to it. Acknowledge it. Try to do better.

no DNIs we just post content specifically catered to ourselves that will coincidentally alienate anyone with whom we would not want to interact

Queer men (especially trans men) have been using the term butch for decades, and the movement to redefine butch and femme as lesbian exclusive terms is spearheaded by and beneficial to terfs.

If butch is the word that fits, then use it. Terfs don’t deserve to shape your life or our community.

Terfs don’t define us, and they certainly don’t define you.

is that true? Do you know where I could read more about it? The only things I could find just state that butch is a lesbian term

I’m on mobile right now, which is always hard on research, but I will collect you some sources tonight, no worries

Thank you so much!

Starting off simply, here’s a timeline of the history of “butch,” exploring its roots in working class queer women of color’s bars (remember, the word lesbian just meant “woman who has sex with women” until the 70s). The 80s is when the author first starts talking about the use of butch by queer men. Specifically, urban men of color.

And, while I hate to play the “defer to authority” card, when it comes to butch identity, there are few people who would know more about it than Butch Voices, the largest butch activist organization in the world. Which specifically refuses to exclude men, and more than that explicitly includes trans men.

Gay men often describe themselves (check out these personals ads), their partners or their friends in terms of being femme or butch, not just in casual contexts, but in research ones. That’s how deeply these identities are felt. Again and again, the term used to describe all queer masculinity is butch.

And while most definitions by queer organizations welcome and acknowledge the fact that butch was popularized in post-WWII women’s spaces, you’ll note an absence of gender limitations on the definitions themselves.

That’s because butch identity, by its very nature, is a violation of gender norms (one that some people say is outdated and antiquated, though I strongly disagree).

And so, too, are all forms of queerness ultimately a violation of gender normativity, of strict definition and categorization.

That’s why major butch authors, for example, hesitate to even use traditional gender pronouns such as “he” or “she” when writing about the hypothetical butch. Because a butch may be a woman, but womanhood is not a necessary component of butchness. And I do apologize for that link, I know it only shows scraps of the whole book, but it does at least include a couple of the more relevant essays about the complexity of trying to assign a gender to butch identity.

For all queer people–including the men–butch identity is an act of reclamation of masculine performance, in the same way that for all queer people–including the women–femme identity is a reclamation of feminine performance, ripping it out of the hands of the cisheteronormative hegemony and saying, hey, fuck you, you don’t get to decide who counts as what, who gets to do what, get fucked. And this can be fumbled, of course, but so can anything. Performance is what it is, and we all make missteps.

Now, as for the other half of my conclusion: that the constant claims about butch (and femme) being “lesbian exclusive” are TERF propaganda.

The following links require content warnings far in excess of just “these talk about queer history and the evolution of terminology.”

These are links to TERF news articles written and intended for non-TERF audiences. That means they present TERF talking points in positive language. Be careful when you approach them, be careful when you read them.

Since at least the 1980s, when masculinizing medical transition started becoming more accessible on a larger scale, trans-exclusionary feminists and trans-exclusionary lesbian separatists have been going out of their way to erase, shame, and punish their trans brothers and lovers for “betraying” them,.

A great many people who had previously identified as hard-butch lesbians because it was the only word they new moved into identifying as trans men. And because radical feminist, lesbian separatist theory had no place for any kind of men, the only way that kind of act could be frames was as treachery. The men who did so, some of whom had been stalwart feminists for decades, some of whom had even been powerful voices in second wave feminist movements, were suddenly treated as abusers, drug peddlers, and sexual criminals.

And that is why it is imperative that we refuse to let TERFs define who does and does not get to be butch. They never got to before, and they sure as hell don’t get to now.

I am all here for a great resource post and @intersex-ionality kinda knocked it out of the park with this one.

Here’s more evidence that TERFs don’t get to define anything in our community, especially not for butch people.

Bigotry has no place in our community. TERFs are bigots and have no place in our community.

Butch here! Literally all of this is historically accurate.

The butch and ftm community pretty much started out as the same community and then diverged slightly when the trans label became a thing. Before the identity existed there were butches using he/him and even taking T. For example Leslie Fienberg, the author of Stone Butch Blues, started out identifying as a butch lesbian which he explained was defined by his lack of connection to womanhood. He now identifies as trans, uses he/him pronouns, and takes T.

Every single butch I’ve ever talked to has said that they have at best an extremely convoluted and challenging relationship with their womanhood. Many experience gender dysphoria to varying degrees. A handful use he/him pronouns or change their names to be more masculine. Every butch I know described wearing femmenine stuff as numbing, humiliating, dishonest, and even painful. They describe masculine expression as empowering, genuine, exhilarating, etc and big leather jackets/boots as armor.

Some of those butches were bisexual, non-binary, trans men, etc. And you know what? Very few of them had issues with other butches but they tended to get a lot of shit from, unsurprisingly, white lesbian feminists.

My point is butch is a label for a feeling and experience more than it is an identity. If I didn’t identify as a lesbian I would still identify as butch because hypermasculinity and the expression of it is fundamental to who I am. If the hat fits, don’t let some terf bullshit keep you from it.