Signal Boost: On Fandom and the "culture of selling"

[morgandawn]

a comment to fairestca's post: On Fandom and the "culture of selling"

But my understanding has always been that a main reason for not monetizing fandom wasn't that the money was dirty, but that keeping fandom noncommercial was the main way to keep the owners of the intellectual property off our backs. If I sell my Narnia novel Carpetbaggers, even by putting up a Patreon link, I'm entering into competition with the Lewis estate, and giving them justification for shutting me down.

To my mind, the fear of the copyright-holders has always been the primary reason to keep fannish creativity quiet and non-commercial. Even if, as the OTW legal team asserts, transformative fandom is protected as fair use, it's also functionally protected because it's not considered a threat by the corporations. Once money enters the equation, they are much less likely to look the other way.

(I've always wondered about fan art in that way, particularly the amazing one-off works that get sold at cons, but any single Kirk/Spock painting doesn't constitute a threat to the franchise's intellectual property the way that that Axanor movie would have.)

I have a suspicion that the community has made a virtue of necessity, and took the non-commercial requirement and converted it into the gift economy. So that element is considered by many old-school fans to be a special part of the fannish world: we give gifts to one another, and no money changes hands in exchange for our creativity. It's nicer to say, "we give gifts" than "we're afraid of Paramount", after all.