One notable one is The Legend of Korra, which recently stopped airing on Nickelodeon--and TV as a whole--entirely, and is now in digital release, which means that it streams free with ads at nick.com and ad-free on a few premium streaming services such as Amazon Prime (a new episode every Friday till the series ends--it's currently still being released) while the physical release has been dragging behind, and new episodes aren't even being released through iTunes, where they previously were synced with episode airings on TV. In this particular example, they were rushed into legal release when some episodes were leaked, and a lot of stuff wasn't thought through or for whatever reason is lagging behind the digital release significantly.
Book 3 is set for DVD/Blu-Ray release December 2nd--Book 4, and with it the series as a whole, will have finished airing (or rather, streaming) by then. Which means if you had a joke, a ship, an action montage, or whatever, set in the latter half of book 3, you would either need to use streaming content, or wait until the series was over and fandom had started to leave the building--and when there was already a whole new season fresh in people's minds while you're retreading old content. Right now ALL vids, gifs, and graphics of any kind using content from Book 4 or the latter half of Book 3 use streaming content. The entire fandom is doing it because there's nothing else. So to avoid doing that would basically mean you can't participate in the party while it's happening.
For other examples, I'm not as familiar with these fandoms, but I believe there would be a similar situation with Netflix Original shows like Orange is the New Black, Hemlock Grove, and similar. Digital release is becoming the new standard, and what happened to Korra is definitely a foray into that as a viable option for major networks. Millennials as a generation are "unplugging," cancelling both landlines and cable subscriptions, increasingly moving towards mobile and streaming technology. Even though they may not want to, the major networks are essentially being forced to follow this demand, and while we have streaming and televised options side-by-side now, you had leaded and unleaded gasoline side-by-side in the 60s--it's a transition more than a diversification. I don't think broadcast is going away tomorrow or anything, nor are landlines, but it's pretty clear this is the direction distribution models are going, and law above all else should reflect not just the present or immediate past, but the foreseeable future. This definitely falls under foreseeable.
Thank you for doing this, I think the time is really ripe for rightsholders to embrace fair use vids as something that benefits them as well as fans. Right now YouTube's robots are indiscriminately blocking vids for a frame of copyrighted content, ignoring that the order of the frames has been changed and it's useless for anyone looking to pirate. I don't think aggression towards their own fans due to misunderstandings of our culture and an attempt to dictate to us what our culture should be is going to be a winning strategy for them in the long run, and I think they're starting to realize that too.
Thanks--I agree with everything you're saying. The trouble is, not everyone does! And no matter what the marketers tell them, the people who show up at the DMCA hearings reflexively oppose any freedoms for other people. They tell themselves that when the time is right they'll decide which clips to allow, or which artists to allow; the law lets them make this claim for total control and they're happy to do it, ignoring remixes until one makes them mad and they'd like to be able to suppress it. For our purposes, the more specific the examples are, the more helpful it is in our submission. If you know of particular Korra vids that are participating in the fannish conversation in this way, that could be very useful.
Sure, I can link some vids! Right now there's a ton of new characters being introduced, so if that's your favorite character or if your ship includes that character, you have to use that footage.
The first one I want to mention might be controversial, but it was actually pretty influential in getting Book 3 released. What happened was that episodes from Book 3 were made available streaming on the Mexican version of Nick.com, Mundonick. Anyone with a Mexican IP could legally view the stream. Someone made a fanmade trailer, which even though it said it was fanmade, people mistook for an official trailer (which had not yet been released) and the fandom went wild. Because of this fanmade trailer, within a day or two a real trailer was released and we were given an airing date. I wish I could link you this culturally important video! But it has been removed by YouTube. Here is an article on it, with a broken embed to the video: http://www.hypable.com/2014/06/10/fan-made-trailer-for-the-legend-of-korra-season-3-is-everything-you-ever-wanted/
Keep in mind that part of the reason the above is controversial is because that (encrypted) Mexican stream became the leak that completely changed the gameplan for the release, and a lot of people aren't happy about that. This is also an instance of a fanmade vid literally forcing an official vid (trailer) to be made on rush order, and I know they don't like it when the tail wags the dog. But there's no doubt that even if that person hadn't made that vid, someone else would have made a vid like it, and there is a culturally important conversation going on here.
Now just some standard vids using current content and sharing enthusiasm for new characters and situations!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH9E3qAcYgI - This primarily features Prince Wu, a character who doesn't appear until Book 4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n454GHQt6jE - This parallels the struggles for power between Kuvira, the Book 4 antagonist, and Avatar Korra--Kuvira for national power, Korra for self-mastery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsH_In3xZZY - This video has 18k views, and could be seen as a tribute to the antagonists of Book 3 or a criticism of Book 3 as a whole. The book 3 antagonists were anarchists, and some fans (including yours truly) felt ill at ease with the political agenda of the creators in villainizing them. By pairing footage of them with a song promoting anti-authoritarian revolution, the vidder could be contributing to a political conversation through analyzing/critiquing the show. Since three of these four characters were killed in the Book 3 finale, and the fourth was written out of the story, this had to be released while it was topical, before Book 4 came and went, for people to care about it. It couldn't wait for December 2nd. Also note that you can see the transition from TV to digital in this vid--TV-sourced episodes have a Nick HD logo in the corner, stream-sourced episodes do not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YjPnUwwsLk - Here's a parody/humor vid, again uses a lot of footage from parts of book 3 that were only released streaming.
I hope that helps! I'm not an expert on all the Korra vids out there, so if anyone else has suggestions then go for it.
Comment on Calling all fan video makers! Tell us about your work!
Aiffe Fri 24 Oct 2014 12:26AM UTC
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RebeccaTushnet Fri 24 Oct 2014 12:36AM UTC
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Aiffe Fri 24 Oct 2014 01:51AM UTC
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