Yes, it’s an hour long video about a lawsuit between authors in the NSFW Omegaverse fanfic genre. (It’s seriously NSFW. Really. So don’t blast the audio with kids or co-workers around.) Lindsay Ellis is a fantastic presenter and the topic goes into serious territory about DMCA abuse.
The Omegaverse is a porn sub-genre in which wolfy dudes have sex mostly with other dudes. To impregnate them. And other stuff. This one writer puts out stories with one wolfy hunk having sex with women - but her character is based on Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. (Yes, really.) She transitions to an actual paid and published author by cleaning out all the Bane stuff. Another author of Omegaverse stories similarly hooks up with a publisher, but she starts getting DMCAed by the first author even though the second writer’s stuff is arguably more “original” since it was never based on any movie fanfic.
Enter the New York Times.
Lindsay Ellis, as a YT creator and recently published author, is intrigued. After all, she has paws in both worlds and she loves her some trashy literature. The video above is her attempt to summarize the saga and editorialize on DMCA abuse.
Guess what? The DMCA happy wolf-porn author wasn’t pleased with Ellis’ video. Time for her lawyers to get involved!
Oh god, I want to blow a big chunk of my night diving into this. Ellis is awesome and the story hook is crazy compelling. But it’s also, you know, something I’d have never heard of without this thread and that won’t, most likely, impact my life in the slightest, and I’m crazy behind on several major commitments to people. . .
Addison Cain was living in Kyoto, volunteering at a shrine and studying indigenous Japanese religion. She was supposed to be working on a scholarly book about her research, but started writing intensely erotic Batman fan fiction instead.
Yep - reminds me of Japan based anime weebs to the letter.
What’s amazing to me is that not only is there enough of a paying customer base to make a living writing gay furry impregnation Batman fan fiction, but you make so much doing it you can afford lawyers.
What the hell am I watching? I feel completely lost here. So there is someone who is claiming to own a theme… like some idea that no one else is ever supposed to use?
The genre is not my thing, but the older I get, the less judgemental I am. We all have kinks, and we’re all a little crazy.
But, christ, Addison is sociopathic; her arguments make no sense, but having been sucessful allows her to lie and bully a bunch of people with no consequence whatsoever. Well, I lie, I believe she has threats on social media, but, eh… who doesn’t when you’re famous.
Anyway, a clear example how there’s no problem with using “IP law” (I know, not a thing) as a weapon; at most, you hit someone with enough connections for Patreon, Youtube and the EFF to say fuck off and… you still get to not pay anything for baseless claims while you rile up the fanbase.
The good news is that YT is, indeed, capable of caring enough to ignore DMCA claims, so there’s that.
I guess we were so busy teaching young people to be unhappy with Disney that they keep screwing over our laws to protect a mouse that we kind of forgot to tell them, yeah other people are going to be inspired by and use your ideas… you know, like you’re doing with all the authors before you.