English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

7. Political consequences
I'm not sure if what I'm thinking of is political or economic, but those two are so close usually, I'll just shove them under one heading. Obviously, vidding is a type of piracy according to most copyright laws in the US. Fans of US texts such as StarGate and UK texts such as Harry Potter (which has mirror copyrights via Scholastic) openly acknowledge that their "poaching" is actually "stealing"--in fact, one could make an entire study of the disclaimers used. Fans place these disclaimers at the top of webpages an in their YouTube homepages, stating that no copyright infringement is intended. For fans, intention is what separates fantexts from plagiarism--they don't intend to make money, they don't intend to pass these texts off as wholly their own. They don't intend to take credit, or violate reproduction laws for the purposes of hurting the authors of the original text.
YouTube has since removed many of the vids I was looking at originally for this project due to "copyright infringement." While we in this class recognize along with Jenkins that this act is pretty darn ridiculous, we also recognize that ideas-as-property is rooted pretty deeply in our Enlightenment-filled heads. Fans still are posting their vids to other sites; most notably, LiveJournal communities for the various relationships (Harry/Snape, Hermione/Draco, Jack/Daniel, etc) are growing too fast for me to really keep track of. Vidders are posting on multiple sites under different usernames; I confess, this politicalization is making my job harder.

8. Other people: What they're saying
Not much. While "YouTube" is a hot topic, fanvids in particular are not. Other than Jenkins' blog on the subject, the best analysis I could find comes from Camille Bacon-Smith's 1994 book Enterprising Women. In this book she describes "songtapes"--early VHS fanvids of the Kirk/Spock 'ship. Like many feminists looking at fandom, Bacon-Smith imagines a sort of utopian space where women can posit a truly "equal" relationship between partners, where "possession" and "domination" are not in play. As my PCA presentation notes, I don't see this happening in fanvids today. For an extended conversation, see: http://unwiredmascot.blogspot.com/2007/04/fanvids-version-1.html

13. The Future of Vidding
As the technology to create vids becomes more and more available, and as YouTube introduces the idea of vidding to more and more people, we can expect that vidding will become as common as ficcing (writing fanfics). Other than YouTube, there is no central hub for videos; fanfics have several such hubs, searchable by fandom, genre, author, title, etc. Of course, the copyright infringement problem may prevent such a hub from forming--it would be far too easy to hunt down and prosecute vidders if they all uploaded to one site. For some reason, fanfics are less volatile to the copyright watchdogs: publishing written works about a text seems fundamentally different from actually copying and pasting a text together in a new way. Fics infringe less because, we might argue, they include more invention on the part of the author; vids emphasize "simply" arranging an already present production. Vidding might survive the copyright purge by taking a more fic-like stance; including more original footage, perhaps?

16. The Value of Vids
18. Vidding Stereotypes
19. Vidding as a Symptom