OTW Legal has an update on what the September 12th vote on EU copyright legislation–including Article 11 and Article 13–means for fans and for AO3. Learn more, including how you can help, here: https://goo.gl/SB73Wv
To celebrate the spirit of giving and gathering, we’re providing 8 invitations to all users who have been with us 6 months or more and
posted at least 1 work, or
left at least 5 comments, or
given at least 10 kudos
Since we’re generating a lot of invitations (over 7 million!), it might take a few days for them to arrive in your account, so don’t worry if you haven’t gotten them just yet! You can follow these instructions to access and share your invite codes with anyone who wants an account.
We’re making some overdue improvements to the code that powers our login system. When we make these changes, all Archive users will be logged out of their accounts.
To avoid permanently losing access to your account, please make sure you know your password and/or can receive password reset emails by December 13.
If you don’t have access to your email address, please contact Policy & Abuse immediately.
We’ll do our best to help you regain access to your account whenever you contact us, but it’ll be a much easier process if it’s done while you’re still logged in. If you wait to get in touch with us later and can’t prove account ownership, we won’t be able to update your email and you might be logged out permanently.
Please take a moment to check your email account, and send a ticket as soon as you can if you need to have your email address manually updated. You can always reach Policy & Abuse here:
“but AO3 *wants* writers on their platform, writers are providing a service for them, that’s how they get content.”
no, they are PROVIDING you a platform. for your content. as a service to you.
please, please, please learn how the internet works.
the companies that WANT you on the platform are the companies that are SELLING YOU TO ADVERTISERS.
*Facebook* wants you on their platform. *Tumblr* wants you on their platform. *FF.net* wants you on their platform. You are Facebook’s product. Facebook is not a service to you. It is an incentive for you to give them eyes and data to sell. And the second your eyes and data stop being profitable they will toss you under the bus.
That’s why fans made AO3. So we had a space that was ours, that wasn’t profiting off of us, so we wouldn’t get sold out.
Yep. It’s an archive, a repository, not an entertainment service.
It still shocks me how many active, participating fans – including frequent users of the site – do not understand that most important distinction.
AO3 updated their filters and I’m so shook???
I love this so fucking much, you have no idea. Thank you, AO3. This made my day way better, and my life so much easier.
Also two notes: This is not completely rolled out to all logged in users yet, but almost. If you are logged in and don’t see the new filters yet, you’ll probably see it in the next day or so. After that it will become active for logged out users, so if you don’t have an account and use the site logged out, you’ll probably see it a couple days later.
And, on a purely personal note, to anyone complaining that a) this doesn’t do exactly what they want, or b) that it took too long, I want you to know that this took literal YEARS for our coding, design, and testing volunteers, who were also keeping the site running, and also ARE VOLUNTEERS. People have worked amazingly hard in their spare time, for free, to make this happen, so don’t be ungrateful little goblins.
AO3 filtering options have been updated, and so far I love the new version! 😀
OTW Legal and our allies have been active in fighting on fan-unfriendly legal proposals in the EU. Since these proposals were introduced in 2016, OTW Legal has submitted comments opposing them and has joined in calls for action against them. We’ve managed to hold them off so far and encourage some revisions, but a key vote will be happening in the European Parliament’s JURI committee on 20/21 June that could have a significant impact on the Internet and fan sites. In particular, two provisions of the current proposal would be bad for fans. Article 11 would impose a “link tax” that would make it more expensive for many websites to operate, and Article 13 would impose mandatory content-filtering requirements on websites that host user-generated content. These provisions have been hotly debated and revised a bit since the last time we reported on them. (For more on recent revisions and debates, see these discussions by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Hogan Lovells Firm) But despite revisions, they’re still bad deals for fans. Importantly, they don’t preserve the “safe harbors” that websites rely on to operate, and they don’t include user-generated content exceptions.
Without safeguards for user-generated content, Article 13 would require your favourite websites to implement systems that monitor user-generated content and automatically remove any content that could potentially infringe upon copyright, giving publishing giants the power to block your online expression. Sites like YouTube, Tumblr, GitHub, Soundcloud, etc., could be required to block the upload of content based on whether it has been “identified” by big corporations, rather than based on its legality. The law is still being debated, and it is difficult to predict how it would impact the OTW’s projects, including the Archive of Our Own, if it is passed. Regardless of how this vote comes out, the OTW will work as hard as we can to keep the Internet fan-friendly. But we need your help. The most effective thing you can do right now is contact your Member of European Parliament. You can use one of these tools to e-mail your MEP or call your MEP to tell them that having user-generated content on the internet is important to you.
Here’s what you can tell them: Without safe harbors for user-generated content, Article 13 of the Copyright Directive would stifle free expression on the Internet. We don’t want mandatory filtering. Algorithms don’t understand limitations and exceptions to copyright like parody, public interest exceptions, fair use, or fair dealing, and we don’t want our non-infringing videos, website posts and art blocked because of a biased algorithm created by big corporations. We want the law to protect user-generated works, not harm them.
OTW Legal will keep fighting for fan-friendly laws!
Please signal boost if you can’t help directly!
If any of my followers are in Europe, please help protect the AO3 (and other fannish archives as well)!
OTW Legal and our allies have been active in fighting on fan-unfriendly legal proposals in the EU. Since these proposals were introduced in 2016, OTW Legal has submitted comments opposing them and has joined in calls for action against them. We’ve managed to hold them off so far and encourage some revisions, but a key vote will be happening in the European Parliament’s JURI committee on 20/21 June that could have a significant impact on the Internet and fan sites. In particular, two provisions of the current proposal would be bad for fans. Article 11 would impose a “link tax” that would make it more expensive for many websites to operate, and Article 13 would impose mandatory content-filtering requirements on websites that host user-generated content. These provisions have been hotly debated and revised a bit since the last time we reported on them. (For more on recent revisions and debates, see these discussions by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Hogan Lovells Firm) But despite revisions, they’re still bad deals for fans. Importantly, they don’t preserve the “safe harbors” that websites rely on to operate, and they don’t include user-generated content exceptions.
Without safeguards for user-generated content, Article 13 would require your favourite websites to implement systems that monitor user-generated content and automatically remove any content that could potentially infringe upon copyright, giving publishing giants the power to block your online expression. Sites like YouTube, Tumblr, GitHub, Soundcloud, etc., could be required to block the upload of content based on whether it has been “identified” by big corporations, rather than based on its legality. The law is still being debated, and it is difficult to predict how it would impact the OTW’s projects, including the Archive of Our Own, if it is passed. Regardless of how this vote comes out, the OTW will work as hard as we can to keep the Internet fan-friendly. But we need your help. The most effective thing you can do right now is contact your Member of European Parliament. You can use one of these tools to e-mail your MEP or call your MEP to tell them that having user-generated content on the internet is important to you.
Here’s what you can tell them: Without safe harbors for user-generated content, Article 13 of the Copyright Directive would stifle free expression on the Internet. We don’t want mandatory filtering. Algorithms don’t understand limitations and exceptions to copyright like parody, public interest exceptions, fair use, or fair dealing, and we don’t want our non-infringing videos, website posts and art blocked because of a biased algorithm created by big corporations. We want the law to protect user-generated works, not harm them.
OTW Legal will keep fighting for fan-friendly laws!
Please signal boost if you can’t help directly!
If any of my followers are in Europe, please help protect the AO3 (and other fannish archives as well)!
The EU’s new regulation on data protection, the GDPR, is coming into effect on May 25. Click the link to find out how this affects AO3 and its users: https://goo.gl/rRtuzN
This is a fun option if you use, for example, phrases in other languages in your story. I often do, and this is a nice way to give translations without having to scroll to the end of the text, or putting them in the starting notes where people have to keep checking back – or where they spoiler the story!
HOWEVER. The drawback is that the floating boxes only work when a ‘mouse’ is ‘hovered’ over the marked text. They do NOT show up on tablet or phone screens, so you’ll still need to put a list of translations in the notes for readers using those devices.
Let’s have an example.
“Qu’est ce que tu veux?”
Now if you speak French, you might know that means “What do you want?”
But not all of your readers will know that. So, you offer them a translation. And since the boxes don’t appear unless you hover directly above them, I usually add a Beginning Note to the chapter that reads something like this;
‘Hover over italicised foreign language text for translations! (Mobile and tablet users please see the Ending Notes)’
In HTML mode in Ao3, (if you try this in Rich Text mode you will get a horrible mess so don’t) the line with this example would appear as:
<p>“<em>Qu’est ce que tu veux?</em>”</p>
To add the floating box with the translation, you would select the words to be translated (that is, Qu’est ce que tu veux?) and paste in the following HTML.
<span title=“What do you want?”>Qu’est ce que tu veux?</span>
The whole line will now read:
<p>“<em> <span title=“What do you want?”>Qu’est ce que tu veux?</span> </em>”</p>
Review your work, hover over the part that requires translating, and you should see the following:
And you’re done!
I tend to set up a Word doc with all the <span> lines I want to use created in it, and then when the time comes, just copy/paste them into Ao3. Saves lots of time!
SliceOSunshine 