Becky. Very much legal. Such fangirl. Currently stanning: The Untamed but mostly a big old pile of multifandom trash.
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According to the company’s website, “Baking Pitchfest 2024” offers a product edition geared toward baking brands founded and owned by people of color across the U.S., and a bakery edition, which focuses on people of color-owned bakeries in the Northeast and Washington state.
“Half mentorship, half competition, Baking Pitchfest is an accelerator program designed to foster greater inclusivity and creativity in the baking world by providing equitable opportunities for People of Color entrepreneurs,” the website states, adding that winners will receive financial support, mentorship, and exposure.
But the initiative has generated outrage amongst conservatives online, who have blasted the competition eligibility rules as discriminatory against white people.
One X user critical of King Arthur Baking’s contest posted an email she received from the company in response to her complaining.
“Helping build joyful, equitable communities that celebrate diversity is an important part of who we are as a company,” the email states, later adding: “We love baking with anyone and everyone. Our simple expectation is that everyone show respect for one another.”
Time to buy more King Arthur Flour!
If you need more reason to support them, they’re worker owned.
If OTW weren’t around, this wouldn’t be “scaremongering”: It would be the inescapable status quo.
The people who believe this crap are the anti-vaxxers of fandom.
Oh god. They kind of are, aren’t they?
I’d go bigger and just say that they’re the conservatives/reactionaries of fandom–or, to frame it differently, this is how conservative and authoritarian ideologies express themselves in the context of Fandom.
my opinion on AO3 is that it’s an important asset but i still find it scummy that they’ll ask for money but when their users try to ask for money they slam them with their non-monetization rules.
Like Anne Rice is dead and this isn’t the 90s anymore, people are making money from fandom please catch up with the times.
I think you’ve misunderstood:
AO3 was built by a bunch of us with our free donated labor for the purpose of being a space free from commercial spam.
It’s not a public service. It was built by us to house the type of fandom culture we liked.
People who want to do fandom differently, including making money, are welcome to go build their own site with their own money or their own donated labor.
AO3 does not forbid commercial links because they think fans making money from fanworks is immoral but them making money (to run the damn site) is fine.
AO3 forbids commercial links because they are making a very specific claim about the legality of fanworks, and that claim is about noncommercial fanworks.
They’re not saying that commercialized fanworks are against the law. They’re just not prepared to host them–nor defend them in court.
In case people missed it: The OTW will not honor DMCA takedown orders that are basically, “I own X work and that’s a fanfic of it, and that’s copyright infringement so make it go away.”
The OTW says, lolnope, we don’t think that’s copyright infringement. If you disagree, sue us.
The OTW says: Disney - we will not remove explicit Mandalorian fanfic. Rowling, Warner Bros - we will not remove trans Harry Potter fanfic. Gabaldon - we are not removing Outlander fanfic no matter how much you think it’s illegal or a personal violation. Yarbro, if someone puts “The Adventure of the Gentleman in Black” on AO3, you will need to actually take it to trial to (try to) get it removed; none of this C&D order followed by fans caving because they can’t afford a lawyer.
…So far, nobody has sued them. (This is, in my mind, the strongest proof we have that fanfic is not copyright infringement. In 13 years, not a single person or company has scrounged up a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against AO3/the OTW for hosting fanworks.)
But they’re not willing to put themselves on the line for commercial works. Those get considered differently in copyright law. They’re not always infringing - there’s a whole history of parody books & songs to prove that - but the OTW is not dealing with them.
The OTW does not care if fans are making money. The OTW cares if fans making money interfere with its legal defense of its archive.
If you are not a copyright lawyer, your opinion about the situation is not going to be considered.
Also, it wasn’t just Anne Rice coming after fandom in the 90s as though this is some relic holdover terror from ancient history.
Events like Strikethrough and Boldthrough happened in the early to mid-2000s. It felt like you’d wake up every day in 2007 and find another fandom group on LJ gone. (And not just fandom groups either, important community groups for education and trauma survival were also wiped out in those purges as well.)
And while not exactly the same, Yahoo Groups–and yes Yahoo Groups was a major online fandom hub at one point–were deleted as late as 2019 with very little warning, leaving a lot of older fandom groups scrambling to back up decades worth of content.
I might be projecting, but Fanfic.net seems to be wobbling too. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they go under in the next few years despite performing similar purges of adult content in 2012 and allowing for obnoxious ads, which made the site unusable on mobile unless you wanted to see an ad what felt like every couple of paragraphs. (It might be better now, I haven’t checked in a while.)
It has only been in very recent memory that fandom has gained any sort of foothold that isn’t poised directly over a precarious faultline that could at any moment open up and swallow entire communities whole, and a huge part of that is the volunteers at Ao3 who decided to play chicken with the likes of Anne Rice and won.
Ao3 at its core was and is built by fandom. Some people don’t like it and that’s fine, but to even suggest that the volunteers are lounging around eating peeled grapes and lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills making bank through fraud while fanfic authors are left out in the cold is beyond the scope of laughable.
It’s cute how people think that Anne Rice was the only one who did this. Look at what Disney does to people who they think are making money off fanworks (lightning Mcqueen dude on tiktok, for example).
(now what really would be fun is if they found a way to claim that people who make money from their 50 minute long youtube vids about their Marvel predicitons (which IS FANFIC it’s just that it’s mostly dudes) are making money from thier IP. Because they are.)
IIRC, Anne McCaffrey, J. Michael Straczynski, George R.R. Martin and Marion Zimmer Bradley, among others, have also thrown hissy fits over fanworks (MZB possibly with some rational grounds for it, since I seem to recall she actually did get caught up in a legal snafu involving a fan who claimed she’d stolen their ideas.)
The MZB situation is… uh… complex, to say the least. Nobody agrees what happened, but it appears MZB’s people approached a fan about using her stuff in exchange for a thank you, and the fan wanted money and actual credit as a writer. (According to the fan, they then threatened her to shut her up, which makes some sense in the context of MZB being post stroke and hiding it at the time.) Basically, it was some kind of clusterfuck that probably involved covering up that MZB was no longer able to write.
Ngl the people who hate on AO3 *specifically* for the fact that they do fundraising and claim that they all must be rolling in money? They come off to me like the Fox News of Fandom.
Also we go through this *every year* and at this point it just feels like willful and malicious ignorance.
people think that servers and bandwidth grow on trees. no but for serious. The only site that possibly uses more bandwidth than AO3 is Amazon for Pete’s sake.
