Just what it says on the tin.

So, yeah. The poster is explicitly giving proper credit, and the in-story credits are included, but... I feel like that's not the largest potential issue, here.

-----
Iä! Iä! Moe fthagn!

I feel as if we should sternly but politely tell them to stop. If the EPU authors want their stuff posted there, they'll do it themselves.

Hmm.

So, there's probably no percentage in getting involved in this myself. I know virtually nothing about that site, but having skimmed their abuse FAQ, it looks like their policy is only to take action in cases of "look! I made this!" plagiarism, which this is not. Besides which, from the overall tone of the thing, I feel like it would be taken as just me being That Guy, under the circumstances.

On the other hand, it does feel kind of bad. I mean, for one thing, the poster's stated rationale for doing it doesn't make sense to me. "Ease of access", the heck does that mean? They already accessed it in the first place in order to have it to put it on the other website. I don't get it.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>Hmm.
>
>So, there's probably no percentage in getting involved in this myself.
> I know virtually nothing about that site, but having skimmed their
>abuse FAQ, it looks like their policy is only to take action in cases
>of "look! I made this!" plagiarism, which this is not. Besides which,
>from the overall tone of the thing, I feel like it would be taken as
>just me being That Guy, under the circumstances.
>
>On the other hand, it does feel kind of bad. I mean, for one thing,
>the poster's stated rationale for doing it doesn't make sense to me.
>"Ease of access", the heck does that mean? They already accessed it
>in the first place in order to have it to put it on the other website.
> I don't get it.

I thiiiiiink that Archive of Our Own has pre-built tools and interface points for things like feeding to mobile readers, text-to-speech apps and the like. Not sure that that's the actual reason, but it's my best guess by what that's supposed to mean.

-----
Iä! Iä! Moe fthagn!

Part of the thing with AO3 is that you can download fics in a variety of formats (epub, mobi, etc.) That may be what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t excuse posting them without asking first.

>Part of the thing with AO3 is that you can download fics in a variety
>of formats (epub, mobi, etc.) That may be what he’s talking about,
>but it doesn’t excuse posting them without asking first.

That seems to be the case given the introduction they provided to their upload of NXE:

“This is a reposted work. The original creators can be found over at http://www.eyrie.net/NXE/. I claim no responsibility for this work, and just want to take advantage of AO3's download system.”

Presumably they want to convert large swaths of EPU’s output into one of the formats you’d mentioned. It seems like that would be a lot easier with some sort of software solution rather than rehosting an entire body of work on AO3, especially given the time that had to have been spent copying and pasting into their submission system. It’s pretty weird for sure, and certainly rude not to at least ask permission.

That said, it’s interesting to see the word counts for various Eyrie projects when uploaded en masse in a way that AO3 interprets as a single work. For example, Undocumented Features - uploaded as 280 seperate chapters, and presumably right up to date given that “Fable of the Reconstruction” is included - clocks in at 5,047,415 words. Which, if you use the Hugo Awards’ minimum word count requirement for the Best Novel category, 40,000 words, means that the whole of UF translates into roughly 126 short novels.

> It seems like that would be a
>lot easier with some sort of software solution rather than rehosting
>an entire body of work on AO3, especially given the time that had to
>have been spent copying and pasting into their submission system.

Almost certainly. Calibre seems to be able to convert just about anything text based into whatever format you want, in a very batch-friendly way. And it's certainly not the only tool of it's kind, though the others I'm familiar with are more specialized.

But first you've got to know that the other tools exist. And if they're already comfortable using Ao3's system, it could be one of those 'if all you've got is a hammer' situations. Though I'm not sure someone would actually have to make their upload public if all they wanted to do was use the downloader...

-IA.

(received information not interpretable)

I mean.

Is the reposter going to go to the trouble of tagging every single character in a given EPU work, plus relevant other tags? If so then /maybe/ I can see justification for this? Because hey, someone might be looking for interesting stories with the Ghostbusters or Hyatt in them and discover this?

But otherwise this just feels kind of skin-crawly and Not Right to me.

In addition to everything else wrong, UF has been posted as a single, 280-chapter work, which is ... poor archival practice at best.

Oh that’s a yikes and a half. Especially considering the story isn’t being written fully sequentially.

Since I have an AO3 account, I'm tempted to report them as, "Hey, this guy just took the entire works of another site and reposted them here, in a really obnoxious format (All of UF as a single story, with each actual story being a separate 'chapter'? Give me a break!), despite the original site being actively maintained." And then let the AO3 admins decide if they are going to do anything or not. Frankly, I can't decide which is the poster's bigger crime - not resolving the formatting issues that necessarily come from trying to post some of the older stories into a modern parser or the fact that his post just says, "I claim no responsibility for this fanfiction. The original creators are over at eyrie.net, hate on them if you don't like it." The least he could do is actually describe what he's posting and possibly why he likes it... *headdesk*

That said, while I'm not quite sure how I found it, at some point my clicking took me to a list of fics for "Undocumented Features", and found that someone wrote their own little interlude involving Corwin, Kozue, and an OC (my guess is self-insert, but I haven't read it). I don't know how proprietary you feel about Corwin, though I can also see the hypocrisy of a fanfic author telling anther fanfic author not to use their original characters...

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

>That said, while I'm not quite sure how I found it, at some point my
>clicking took me to a list of fics for "Undocumented Features", and
>found that someone wrote their own little interlude involving Corwin,
>Kozue, and an OC (my guess is self-insert, but I haven't read it). I
>don't know how proprietary you feel about Corwin, though I can also
>see the hypocrisy of a fanfic author telling anther fanfic author not
>to use their original characters...

This is starting to vaguely remind me of that ridiculous insulting "award" where they asked to use DJ Croft, Gryphon refused, and they used him -anyway- to insult NGE. Ugh.

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

>This is starting to vaguely remind me of that ridiculous insulting
>"award" where they asked to use DJ Croft, Gryphon refused, and they
>used him -anyway- to insult NGE. Ugh.

Hey, at least this one isn't hostile towards the characters or the story.

Just, uh, somewhat pornographic. Which, on the one hand, I'd feel like at least a bit of a hypocrite pointing fingers at, given some of the ideas I've gotten ? (Albeit only involving canon characters.) But... eh, I don't know, this comes across as off for reasons I'm not quite sure of.

-IA.

(and also i haven't written down any of the fore-mentioned ideas)

Wait, /what/? Someone's written derivative fanfiction involving Corwin, and not even got permission from Gryphon?

For pity's sake...

I also have an AO3 account. Let me know if you want me to report this too. Maybe multiple voices'll get them to pay attention.

Grats on being paid in exposure :v

Aaaaand, poof. All works apparently removed.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

I got an email from AO3 a day or two ago saying they'd investigated my report and found it to be correct that the works were in violation of their TOS, so they nuked them.

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>