Fanfiction extracter/downloader

[HarryT]

Paramount probably felt that they HAD to do it to protect their trademarks. In the US, if someone violates your trademark and you fail to take action, a third party can use that as evidence that the term has entered the language as an everyday expression. That happened to trademarked names like "aspirin", which is no longer a trademark in the US, because the courts ruled that the trademark holder had failed to take action to protect it from unauthorised use.

I would imagine that, at the time, the various trademarks associated with Star Trek were an extremely valuable commodity.

[Redcard]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Paramount probably felt that they HAD to do it to protect their trademarks. In the US, if someone violates your trademark and you fail to take action, a third party can use that as evidence that the term has entered the language as an everyday expression. That happened to trademarked names like "aspirin", which is no longer a trademark in the US, because the courts ruled that the trademark holder had failed to take action to protect it from unauthorised use.

I would imagine that, at the time, the various trademarks associated with Star Trek were an extremely valuable commodity.

Well, I don't know their reason. I know that I had friends who worked at ISPs who were basically told by Paramount lawyers to delete someone's account in its entirety, or they will be sued. Most of these ISPs were barely making money back then, and were run by people who were more fans of the internet than actually businessmen (That came later.) When they were threatened like that, they reacted by doing exactly what they were extorted to do. It was heavy handed.

But I mean, think of the long term effects here. IF you were born in 1995, around when all this was happening, and you became 10 in 2005.. and let's just accept that that was the "age of sentience" or something along that line.. that means in 2005 , here is what you had:

You had the last season of Enterprise, which was, frankly, a pitiful show.

That's it. That's all the star trek a 10 year old born in 1995 has had an oppurtunity to see live. You do have about twenty novels or so, spread out amongst the product line from 2005 to now.. and you have a myriad of cancelled game projects. There's the movie coming out in 2009 which supposedly would kick off a new product line.

Now, imagine that Paramount didn't go out of the way to alienate their fanbase in the 90s. Can you imagine what this fandom would look like?

The thing is, the Paramount move wasn't about Fanfiction. It was about Paramount's "official" star trek fan club. They wanted everyone in that, and were glad to "sanction" websites that were paying members of the club. They loved to have fiction sent to those people. They had a limited set of graphics, a huge copyright statement, and a bunch of mandatory links, but you could have an official fan site if you wanted one.

(Added in edit)
Forgot to add this part. Not only would Paramount shut down the fan sites, but they would also shut down websites that talked about Paramount shutting down the fan sites. They claimed their C&D letters were copyrighted materials, and that it was illegal to discuss the contents of them with anyone outside legal counsel or Paramount. So even what they were DOING was under cloak of darkness, which is why it's so hard to find things related to the crackdown even today.. because they STILL go after sites that talk about it.
(Added in edit)

Fanfiction had very little to do with the crackdown. Sure, some sites that had fanfiction were shut down.. but a lot more sites that were just "I like Star Trek, WHEE!" sites were too. It'd be as if Amazon came here and shut this site down because we talk about the Kindle, and they have official forums for that and they don't want us talking about it here.

Paramount even tried to shut down USENET before someone in their legal team figured out that Usenet was more "hydra like" than they could handle.

All in all, it was a mess. It was corporate greed, and now look at what the company is trying to do to get back fans.

MANGA. That's right, Manga, staring characters from TOS.

[HarryT]

I used to be a huge ST fan but, frankly, I just got bored with it; you can have too much of a good thing. I think all these things have a natural lifespan and ST just reached the end of its life. For me it "peaked" with DS9, which was my favourite ST series by far. Voyager got tedious. I didn't even bother with "Enterprise".

[Redcard]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I used to be a huge ST fan but, frankly, I just got bored with it; you can have too much of a good thing. I think all these things have a natural lifespan and ST just reached the end of its life. For me it "peaked" with DS9, which was my favourite ST series by far. Voyager got tedious. I didn't even bother with "Enterprise".

I tried Voyager and Enterprise. I liked DS9 up to a point, but it got to be where DS9 was just blatantly ripping ideas off of Babylon 5.. so that's when I decided I could find other shows. I came back to give Voyager a run, but never could get used to it.. and Enterprise was just too.. angsty? for my own tastes. Too much hard science fiction, not enough star trek.

[scruffy]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Actually, if SONY ever did threaten me, I'd just drop support for their products, like a hot potato. Given the modular nature of libprs500, it would require maybe a week of work to add another (well understood) ebook format as an output format. In particular, mobi and epub should both be easy

Kovid, so long as we're on the subject... if you added in support for the GEB/Ebookwise, you'd make hundreds of new fans... adding IMP support would be a huge boost, and the existing code is already out there... In fact, I don't even own a Sony reader, but I've used libprs500, because your converters do a good job (for example, mobi2oeb). If you make libprs500 ebook agnostic, supporting imp/mobi/epub/lrf/oeb /etc, you'd increase the number of eyeballs and supporters...

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by scruffy

Kovid, so long as we're on the subject... if you added in support for the GEB/Ebookwise, you'd make hundreds of new fans... adding IMP support would be a huge boost, and the existing code is already out there... In fact, I don't even own a Sony reader, but I've used libprs500, because your converters do a good job (for example, mobi2oeb). If you make libprs500 ebook agnostic, supporting imp/mobi/epub/lrf/oeb /etc, you'd increase the number of eyeballs and supporters...

I principle, sure, practically, I don't have the time, I typically write new converters only when I need them But I'm happy to accept patches.

[Redcard]

I actually found a way to do this without writing a utility, which I would recommend to anyone as soon as I find two more pieces of software.

I need something that combines multiple HTML files into one file.. and then I'll be golden.

[JSWolf]

As far as Star Trek goes, I believe the purging was done in the Richard Arnold era which was not a good time for Star Trek in print overall. Now they have a completelly new set of people in charge and these people know what it takes to make good Trek in print these days and that also means allowing fanfiction to exist.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Redcard

I actually found a way to do this without writing a utility, which I would recommend to anyone as soon as I find two more pieces of software.

I need something that combines multiple HTML files into one file.. and then I'll be golden.

As long as you don't care about CSS, this is trivial to do. If you do care about CSS, you're in trouble. Perhaps an easier way to go is to leave them in separate HTML files and create an OPF file theat lists all the HTML files in the order they should be read. Then the set of HTML + OPF files can be easily converted into an ebook with existing tools.

[TheLongshot]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The people who are in charge of the Star Trek books do know of the fan fiction sites and are not trying to close them down. Things have changed since 5 years ago. In fact, there are even fan fiction based video series even and some of the TV folks are involved in some of this.

And one of them is nominated for a Hugo this year.

Fanfiction, and other creative fan activities like fan art, music videos and others, have always been part of the fan community. It isn't a replacement for what is out there, but a supplement. Some of these writers have gone on to become pros themselves.

Certainly, it is a gray area and probably is one that is actionable, but it never benefits any who try to stamp it out.

One company that hasn't been mentioned that is very aggressive in "protecting" their characters is Disney. They have been very aggressive in the past of protecting their characters, even ones that they don't use all that often anymore. Some of it is understandable, but the aggressiveness of some of it leaves a bad taste in some people's mouths.

I guess I understand if this site wants to protect themselves from overaggressive lawyers, tho I don't think it is that much of a problem with most people.

Jason

[Redcard]

For those interested, I got the toolchain working.

It's pretty much a combination of DownThemAll with a custom filter to get the webpages, then an awk script to cut between "Author: " and "end story --" and concatenate into one file, then into libprs500 and up to the PRS-505.

It doesn't make people BETTER authors, but it does make it easy to FIND out if something is good or bad.

[stustaff]

There is already a really good fanfic downloader that I posted on here a while ago that everyone ignored, been using it a while and its great.

im gonna go try to find the link.

[Redcard]

Right.

There is a good fanfiction downloader, the problem is, it downloads the ENTIRE fanfiction. The problem with that is that I don't know who the good authors are yet

I have to find them first, then I can download the whole thing.. so what I was working on (and now have it working) was a way to get a page worth of first chapters from Fanfiction.net. Then, I can use the story ids of the ones I want to read to download the full thing

[stustaff]

Why wouldnt you download the whole thing? and then read the first page and if you dont like it delete it?

My way you download it once and start reading if you dont like it you delete it, if you do like it you read it.

Your way you download a selection of it.. read it and if you dont like it delete it.. but if you do like it go back again and download the whole thing? what is the point? I already have the whole thing so if im away from my connection or on my ereader i have it to carry on reading. you dont.

I could understand if the file size were large but they are so tiny that the differentce between download in part or all would be a few seconds at most.

[Redcard]

Originally Posted by stustaff

Why wouldnt you download the whole thing? and then read the first page and if you dont like it delete it?

My way you download it once and start reading if you dont like it you delete it, if you do like it you read it.

Your way you download a selection of it.. read it and if you dont like it delete it.. but if you do like it go back again and download the whole thing? what is the point? I already have the whole thing so if im away from my connection or on my ereader i have it to carry on reading. you dont.

I could understand if the file size were large but they are so tiny that the differentce between download in part or all would be a few seconds at most.

Because this is typical of the bad fanfiction.
---

I go 2 the door an open it.
"HI! wu?"
"Nm, u?"
"same!"
She walks across the room points her wand at a obok an goes "accio wand!" an it rises in air.

------

Now, not all fanfiction is like that, and to use the downloader (and most downloaders) require you to type in a 7 digit number, then download it all, and then convert that to LRF for upload into the Sony.

MY method downloads chapter 1 of a number of fanfics, converts that into a single HTML file, and then I upload that into the Sony. I get 20 beginnings. That way, if 15 of them are bad (and 15 of them ARE bad..) , I can go and get the complete of the other five, and move on.

It's a lot faster a method than downloading 20 , converting 20, and uploading 20 into the reader.. only to not get past page 1 on 15 of them.