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Day 12’s challenge is to talk about what you think the future holds for fandom. What are your hopes and dreams for fandom? Do you have any predictions about what the next five years holds for fandom?

Five years? Heh. I’ve been in fandom much longer than that. I’ve been in online fandoms for almost 20 years, starting out on newsgroups (alt.star-trek.creative, alt.x-files.creative–anyone remember those?) and really nothing much has changed except the mediums (blogs instead of newsgroups, lots more visual stuff with art and vids) and there’s more people participating. Before the internet, there was fanfic available in ‘zines and self-published books. So five years from now? Fans will still be fans. The medium changes, but fandom is still fandom.

My only real hope is that transformative works obtain legal protection as an art form. If I could make a wish, it would be that these insane copyright laws get rolled back to their original time frames and to serve their original purpose: encourage individuals to create, not to allow heirs or corporations to lock up our culture in order to milk cash cows to death.