Dear Sergey Pekar,

I see you’ve built an app that scrapes AO3 and dubs itself an “archive” of fanfiction, the biggest in the world. The fanfiction you’re publishing is fanfiction that we wrote, that we chose to put on AO3 because we feel good about the OTW’s motives, methods, tools, beliefs, and origins. Many of us refuse to put our work on platforms that collect ad revenue or censor fanworks (like ff.net). While our works are available for free on AO3, we retain the ability to control what happens with it, and we can edit, remove, or restrict any fic we’ve posted at any time. AO3 also acts as a platform through which we interact with readers, and AO3 provides information about our readership through statistics that help us understand the impact of our work.

The app you’ve built runs counter to all of that. You are taking our work and redistributing it without our permission, and you are soliciting “tips” from readers and ad revenue from advertisers. You are literally selling an archive of fanwork without any fan permission.

Fanwork is based on remixing, borrowing, and reconceptualizing media and work owned by others. In principle, taking our work and making something new out of it isn’t inherently bad or counter to our values. But that’s not what you’re doing. You’re taking work uploaded to one trusted platform and republishing it on another, selling it as a “huge fanfic collection to read”. You’re selling our work, not yours.

The kicker, for me, is that AO3 has explicitly asked you not to do this. They do not offer a feed so that app developers can do what you’re doing, and you are in no way authorized to use their code and their work in this way. You are scraping AO3 directly against their clearly articulated wishes. To do so, you are using the bandwidth the rest of us donate to make available. We don’t donate to AO3 so that you can profit off of it: we donate so that readers can access our work for free, and so that we can store and share our work in a place that aligns with our morals, ethics, and values.

If you were partnering with AO3 to develop an app that would provide fans with a tool to store, comment on, interact with, bookmark, rec, or transform fanwork posted on AO3, I would be your #1 supporter. Building tools for the fannish community that builds on and transforms the fannish experience is an amazing act of fanwork in itself, and tools built with an eye towards how fans interact with each other are amazing. But that’s objectively not what you’re doing.

Just because content is freely available on the internet doesn’t mean its creators don’t still have rights. Freely available doesn’t mean you own it. We are all about transforming works into something new, but re-publishing someone else’s work without permission is not transforming anything. It’s just profiteering.

As a copyright owner, you do not have my permission re-distribute and re-publish my work via your “Fanfic Pocket Archive Library” app . You do not have my permission to profit via tips or ad revenue based on offering people an archive my work. You are currently publishing all of my available works on. AO3: please remove all of it immediately.

Sincerely,

Ivy Blossom

Thanks to Kizzia for bringing this app to my attention. <3