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  • Living in a Den of Thieves:Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership
  • Alexis Lothian (bio)

Picture some scenes from an Internet video: shots from the movies Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005), Pirates of the Caribbean (Gore Verbinski, 2003), and V for Vendetta (James McTeigue, 2005) captured from DVD, edited in a graphics program, and set to a Regina Spektor song. It's a fair bet to assume that license holders would consider such unsanctioned use of image and music to be theft of their property and profit. But in the age of YouTube parody and viral reproduction, few amateur media makers would consider [End Page 130] that a reason to stop. Such familiar acts of digital reproduction have much to say about copyright and its enforcement, about piracy and the penalties it incurs, and about how ordinary people's actions complicate conventional assumptions about such things. I use one semiotically rich piece of digital video art, the 2007 fan video "Us" by Lim, to explore the implications of everyday digital thefts at the capital-saturated scene of online media production and consumption.1 When politics and technology meet to challenge received definitions of what it means to own or to create art, cultural production that appropriates and transforms copyrighted material might speak to larger transformations taking place both on the Internet and in the wider world.

Fan Art and Copyright.

"Us" both embodies and comments on practices of digital theft that take place among artists who sample, remix, mash, rip, and burn. In particular, it commemorates the practices of online media fan communities: female-dominated networks that cohere around affective investments in media properties and that produce and share textual, visual, and video art that is based on "their" TV shows or films. The video celebrates this "den of thieves," as the song's refrain goes, with special emphasis on one trajectory of the so-called slash culture that centers around the creation of male homoerotic fan art.2 Lim modifies captured images to make them look hand drawn in a visualization of the way fans write their own narratives over and around the media's narratives. Karen Hellekson's essay in this issue describes the gendered relations at play in this subcultural world.

In the closing image of "Us" (Figure 1), we see a young, bespectacled woman taking off a mask. She is a figure for the geeky fannish women who craft their own art with corporate media's materials, who are the "Us" the vid addresses and celebrates. And her practices are beginning to matter to more than her fellow slash fans in the "user-penetrated" ecology of digital media that Julie Levin Russo describes in this issue. The self-conscious tradition of the fan video-making (vidding) subculture is intersecting messily with public fights between big media companies over who will gain revenue from the expansion of digital video, mirroring the long-standing fights over musical appropriation that Abigail De Kosnik discusses in this issue.3 Does Lim's geek girl pose a danger to the copyright regimes of the big media companies whose products she reinterprets?

For most vidders, valid fears of not being recognized as owning the product of their recombinatory labor—often, as in Russo's case studies, perceived as an undifferentiated feature of the online "public" domain—are of more concern than whether their disregard of copyright is likely to usher in new forms of digital ownership. Many valid arguments for the righteousness of Lim's artistic production leave intellectual property laws intact, insisting that the geek girl poses no threat. Putting transformed images to music [End Page 131] in a new order creates a new artwork worthy of recognition, and (as Hellekson outlines and De Kosnik challenges) Lim does not profit from her production. These arguments have been publicized by the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit organization of media fans who work for "a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity."4 For OTW, being transformative positions fan art forms such as vidding outside the realm of theft and in the realm of artistic transformation...

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