Poll: Vid Permissions

[thefourthvine]

Recently, I have been doing some codeine-enhanced pondering of vids - specifically, linking to them or recommending them, and how we do that, and how we get permission to do that. (This was inspired by a discussion with someone, but I won't be mentioning her name unless she indicates that she wants me to.) Because in media fandom, my understanding is that fannish etiquette requires you to ask permission before you link to or recommend a vid. But I could be wrong. I have yet to get my hands on miss_manners161's Guide to Fannish Etiquette. That thing is so damned hard to find.

So, in the absence of a definitive ruling, I thought I'd ask vidders.

There aren't, however, a lot of vidders reading this LJ, I don't think. And I'd like to get responses from as wide a cross-section of the vid-making community as possible. So, if you are a vidder (or, as AMV people put it, editor) - or if you aren't, but a lot of vidders read your LJ, or if you have the password to the Secret Clubhouse where all the cool vidkids hang out - could you please link to or pimp this? Great would be my joy and appreciation.

Obviously, only those with LJ accounts can take this poll, but anyone can comment anonymously. (Or, heck, email me if you like - thefourthvine at livejournal dot com will find me.)

And, just to repeat: this poll is for those who have vidded only. There will be a poll for non-vidders, though, coming soon.

[Poll #796561]

Comments

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

I think laurashapiro is right about this - it's a question of modes of fandom. People who got into vidding when vids were distributed on VHS at cons sort of learned a fly-under-the-radar mindset, whereas people who started this year, with YouTube and YSI and all that already out there, are much more in a be-hidden-amongst-multitudes mindset.

In pre-LJ days, internet fandom was still mostly text-based, and vids and suchlike, I believe, were mostly transferred between people by mail or in person. The people from then are more used to having to keep it a secret, to being on the fringes. They're more aware of the dangers of public exposure. And, of course, they've had more time to get screwed over. (Like with the Firefly debacle of, um, 2002? And the MetaFilter debacle of just a few months ago. And everything in between. These things make people very wary.)

But there's been a mode shift, because now vids are just another kind of fanwork, mostly distributed on the internet. And vidding is much less of a fringe activity than it used to be; even though the vidding community is one of the smaller ones in fandom, it's growing. Rapidly.

The result is that the newest folks mostly don't care; they just want people to watch their vids. And the people who have been around a while mostly don't care; they're too busy fighting hotlinking and unauthorized uploading and streaming to worry about mere links. And even the folks from the pre-LJ and pre-internet days really don't seem to care anymore; mostly they just worry about being exposed outside the fanworld - even the ones who said permission is necessary also (almost all) said it was perfectly fine to link to LJ announcements.

And, you know, it never occurred to me that there might be a problem with your post, either, even though most of the best known (and best) vidders were listed there, and many of them password protect. You just asked for recs, then summarized the recs. I never thought for a moment you'd need permission to do that.

Which is why, when I started talking about this with another recommender, I thought - huh. Why do I ask permission to rec? How is that all that different than the linking I see around fandom, or the casual recs, or the stuff like MMWD just did? Maybe I should ask the vidders themselves.

Turns out the answer is that we don't need permission to rec unless the vidder specifically says otherwise in her announcement or on her site. Which is, for me, a very happy-making thing.