i want to consider the thought experiment of (1) should fanfic writers get paid (2) should ao3 or other hosting sites be the one that pays us

NOT can fanfic writers legally receive payment for works based on copyrighted characters. Let’s assume the revolution has happened and copyright does not exist. Or it exists but it freely allows creative remixes for profit with no legal gray area.

i am guessing the person in this post is actually a bad faith actor who really cares more about fake perverts than they do capitalism or whatever. but what if they’re right? should fanfic writers be paid? https://twitter.com/kraygaio/status/1254110213944168448?s=21 https://twitter.com/kraygaio/status/1254110213944168448

fanfic provides entertainment. writers work hard on it. in the current system, that work is compensated with attention, influence, friendship, connection, writing experience... not actual money

but let’s say we’re post copyright looking back to pre copyright models. a guy comes to your town to sing a song. it’s based on another song he heard and tells an exciting story of heroic deeds. no one “owns” those heroes but they’re basically like Captain Americas.

wouldn’t you probably tip him? Or feed him dinner? that seems fair to me. or maybe you’d invite him to sing at your inn so he’d attract people to come in and they’d spend more money. maybe then he’d get tips or a cut of the pot at the end of the night.

so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to tip fanfic writers. but ao3 isn’t really like an inn. it’s more like a guild we all formed to have a central public square where we could sing our songs. So we have to pay dues for the upkeep of the square.

In a better form of this, we’d pay dues to the square from the tips we got from performing there. But we can’t collect tips in the square as it is because if we do, the cops might come and bust up the square. So the square banned tips but still has to collect donations.

we have to keep the flowers nice in the square so we can perform there and get whatever we can out of it (a fun time with our friends)

basically: maybe fanfic writers should get paid but i would rather that come from readers directly and some of that would be paid back to ao3 for ao3’s upkeep and improvement.

you can alternatively think of ao3 as a publishing company but that would probably require it charge for access and mean a very different relationship between writer / site / reader... and I think the publishing industry isn’t a great model for writers getting paid for work

the other side of this is... money changes relationships. when i give $10 to ao3, it changes my relationship to ao3: i am no longer a user but a member. that’s weird! if you give me $10 for a fic, i am no longer just doing my thing—i am now doing labor.