Final Research Outline for Participatory Culture

Topic

My topic has changed slightly since my last post on the subject. I was planning on comparing an official and unofficial movie site according to the element of participation. The problem with this approach was that it was difficult to choose from the enormous amount of fan sites that accompany an official site. How would I know what sites to pick and how could I possibly make sure that the ones I chose would be an accurate reflection of others? Therefore, I decided to focus on one aspect that is part of the official/fan relation: the way fans use the material that is offered to them in the original movie. My focus will be:

In what ways can fans/users participate in creating meaning by adapting original movie material? How does this relate to the original material legally?

Sources

This creation has become an important part of movie fandom and thanks to the Internet can now be made available to a great number of people. In my final research I would like to include a number of aspects that have to do with the creation of new meaning, which should be thought of in the widest sense. It would include the commenting on certain aspects of the movie in forums, where meaning is found and is shared with others. By comments made by other participants, new meaning can also be created when people start discussions on interpretations that go against the preferred, dominant readings. Other ways of creating new meaning would be to write fan fiction: stories that adapt the surroundings or characters of a certain movie, in which the writers make up alternative storylines. The same goes for fan art, drawn or computer-generated imagery portraying a movieˇ¦s characters. I will look at the way the movieˇ¦s imagery has been adapted and the subjects of the fanˇ¦s works. For example: fan fiction and fan art are sometimes of erotic nature.

DMCA Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics is dedicated to making people aware of their online rights. www.chillingeffects is their official website and offers a lot of useful information on the protection of online properties and copyright. Each section, like 'linking', 'protest, parody and criticism', offers an extensive list of FAQs, frequently asked questions on all kinds of subjects regarding the rules that concern the using of online content. Website owners that have received  'cease and desist' notices from companies, urging them to shut down their site because of illegal usage of images for example, can gain information about whether or not they should actually respond to the request. This site is very useful for my research because it touches upon a number of ways the public can adapt movie content, like in fan fictions, and describes the way that copyrights apply to these aspects. For example:

Q: I purchased the movie, book, etc. Does that mean I can do what I want with it?

Q: What is FanFic?

Q: What about a fictional world and the events described in the world? Are they copyrightable? Can I use those in my story?

Q: If a hyperlink is just a location pointer, how can it be illegal?

Q: Is linking protected by the First Amendment?

Research

I want to combine the two aspects mentioned above in an analysis of the user created content of a number of movie fan sites. I will look at the sites of well-known movies, because I expect these to generate the most response from their audiences in quantity and variety. Examples of sites that can be useful are Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings fan sites, where forums, fan art and fiction are abundant.  I'll have to do more research in advance to find out whether other movies have also spawned a lot of discussions or art.