i'm back

*cackling*

By all means, start your own website and upload your fanworks and monetize them. Or start a Patreon for your fanfiction. Just make sure you’ve got a good lawyer on retainer in case you get sued.

Just because people find ways to make money from fandom, that doesn’t necessarily make it legal. It just means they haven’t been caught yet.

Furthermore, AO3 is under no obligation to allow you to monetize fanworks on their platform. It doesn’t matter if they ask for money. You don’t have to give them any if you don’t want to.

At the end of the day, if you are making money from someone else’s intellectual property, you can be sued. Even if you aren’t making money, you can still be sued.

Copyright law favours the copyright holder, because it’s there to protect them, not the people potentially infringing. If you are sued, the best course of action would be to claim fair use (if you’re American. Most countries have similar legal doctrine). Fair Use is an affirmative defense, which means the burden of proof shifts to the defendant.

What that means is, if a copyright holder sues you, they don’t have to prove that you’re not protected under fair use. They only have to prove that they hold the copyright and you infringed on it. So you need to have good lawyers with thorough understanding of copyright law to defend you, because you have to prove that fair use applies.

Making money from transformative works does not automatically negate fair use, however it gets tricky because for fair use to apply, you must not have impacted the income of the copyright holder, and if you’re making money while using their intellectual property in a very similar way to how they use it (ie telling a story using someone else characters, as opposed to creating a parody of the original with characters loosely based on the copyrighted characters), that one’s going to be difficult.

Luckily, AO3 has a team of copyright lawyers, and they do everything they can to protect users from being sued, and assist them if they are sued.

So they’re not just sitting there saying “you can’t make money because we don’t want you to, but we get to make money.” It’s a fucking nonprofit.

Hosting a platform like AO3 is expensive. 75% of their annual budget goes to the cost of hosting the actual site, like the cost of servers and licenses. 11% goes to administrative costs, 9.5% goes to fundraising (because processing payments online costs money, so AO3 will be charged transaction fees for the money sent to them, like any other company), and the remaining 4.5% goes toward things like legal advocacy.

AO3 doesn’t bring in revenue, which is why they ask for donations. They have 2.5 million registered users and host over 6 million works. A website that large, with that much traffic, would be expensive af to host, and they don’t run ads. How else should they get their money?