If you haven’t seen it, read Cory Doctorow’s Secret copyright treaty leaks. It’s bad. Very bad. It spells out some of the details of proposed international copyright law that the Obama administration is looking to change the world with.

If this changed happened, it would be bad news for fans and their families. It looks like it would also squash a lot of fair use rights that fans rely on for things like fanvidding and fan fiction archives. For fan fiction archivists, there is always the question of “Is this material legal?” For the most part, archivists just ignore this question and only deal with the issue when legal threats are issued. There is no precedent for the material so we just don’t know. If archivists are going to be held liable for user uploaded material, then there will be an incentive to close archives. Why? Most archivists run their archives as a labor of love and cannot afford to the liability.

Fansites are in the same spot. Most of those are also labors of love that rely on their promotional aspects and fair use to rely on what they host or allow contributors to their site to upload.

There are so many other issues with this and how it is bad news for the fan community that I can’t fully articulate them. This is not change we can believe in. Let the US government know that this is not good and is not necessary for national security, that our current implementation of this has been a total failure and unAmerican in that it does not allow due process.