neotoma | Trainwreck, coming soon!

So, apparently this guy named Keith Mander bought LOTRFanfiction.com and a Twilight fanfic archive --

esteliel has wonderful coverage here -- and is going to monetize them ... somehow.

This is not good.

OTW has already posted their reaction to this -- they're offering Archive of Our Own accounts to any writer from those sites who don't already have an AO3 account and the OTW coders already working on custom importers for anyone who wants to transfer their stories.

My own take on it is that this guy is going to be no more successful at monetizing fanfic than the guys behind FanLib, mostly because the core fanficcers will flee from this kind of horsecrap. Fanfic exists in gray areas to start with and has a gift culture that is fairly shy of attracting attention from the rights' holders, and blundering in trying to make money off of other people's fanfic is considered beyond the pale. In part, because it violates the gift culture, but also because it just emphasizes just how much of a clueless outsider you are and that you might just bring down the attention of rights' holders (like the Tolkien estate, which is pretty fierce about their ownership of the the rights) on people who have been trying to fly under their radar.

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He sounds like a dudebro, doesn't he?

The OTW does champion work, but then they have to work damage control when some fool like this one shows up. Seriously, I doubt they wanted to have to shift a lot of their coders (who are volunteers, you know! I believe the only paid employee is the CPA who handles the OTW taxes) over to creating custom importers to transfer stories from the LOTRFF and Twilight archives.

*nods* One person trying to make money off of the work of others, and in turn he makes twice as much work for volunteers. :/ And, yes, I think that word sounds up what he sounds like nicely.