Vidding

Clifford Chamberlin Peter Quattrociocchi III Andrew Montgomery Mark Homayouni David Weiss
 * Fanvids(vidding):**


 * "Vidding** is the [|fan labor] practice in [|media fandom] of creating music videos from the footage of one or more visual media sources, thereby commenting on the source text(s)." -- Wikipedia

www.animemusicvideos.org -- must become a member and then are able to download www.cardboard.ipbfree.com archiveofourown.org/ -- this is a beta version

Of all of the types of digital creation that we've covered in class fanvids is most closely related to machinima. Fanvids and machinima are similar in that they both literally use original source content. The only real difference is that fanvids are made with the finished product cut up because they don't have the artistic skill, actors, set equipment, and whatnot that it took to make the original whereas machinima is usually able to be made with the same tools that the original was created with. Machinima can use the actual character models and environments from the original as is seen in the hugely popular series Red Vs. Blue which plants its roots in the Blood Gulch multi-player map. So, as far as a fan is concerned they are doing the same thing in making a fanvid that fan is doing when creating machinima, only they have less to work with.

Fanvids are created for a lot of reasons, but were initially started as ways for fans of certain media to show to comment on and share their thoughts and feelings about said media or simply to enjoy comedic or artistic representations of the media. In this sense fanvids are invaluable as far as creating a collective personality of the chosen media as it explores the consumers understanding and perception of aspects of their favorite shows, movies, etc. This is compounded by their further copyright infringement of including a song released by an artist with a record label. So, in a lot of ways, fanvids are a great cultural product in (extreme)spite of their legal viability. The legal value of this is that it is bringing up a lot of important questions about content creation in a lot of really important places.

As far as the legal position people take, it is varying. Even the copyright infringement hosting engine(otherwise known as YouTube) goes through its vast amounts of content and removes that which is infringing "too" blatantly. However, their position is obviously that of someone that would like to see this type of content continually made. One of the ways that fanvids continue to survive is that they claim to fall under the fair use exception of copyright law, only including clips and pieces of the original source while no profit is exacted from viewers or those that host the material. While copyright law says that all of this material, especially the unaltered songs that are included in AMV's, is to be attributed to the creators of the original source content, people such as the Organization for Transformative Works make the aforementioned exception. In the end, its free content(usually) and the places that host fanvids usually warn against copyright infringement, however these same places usually don't care and allow almost all but the actual episodes or feature films or original source content in its entirety to continue to exist.