The Archive of Our Own offers a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting place for fanfiction and - eventually - other transformative fanworks: i.e. it is free to use and does not make any money. (Right now, we can only host text, but you are welcome to embed other media!) It is multifannish and built on open-source archiving software designed and built by and for fans. It is hosted on servers owned by the Organization for Transformative Works and therefore not vulnerable to a commercial hosting company deciding they don't like our fanworks.
That's from the About page in the FAQ. Emphasis mine.
Look, it sucks that Geocities shut down and took all that meta with it. But Geocities shut down because NOTHING is permanent--not AO3, not Google, not the internet itself.
The individual decisions of a company or business that lead it to go bust are always a risk on the internet (and elsewhere). But that's not really what this archive was initially created to provide. It was created to provide a safe space for fanfic and other fair use material that would be otherwise at risk of being kicked off perfectly healthy and functioning websites because of the content issues (not just copyright infringement, but obscenity, etc.)
Comment on Fandom nonfiction: seeking feedback
shinetheway Fri 15 Mar 2013 01:40AM UTC
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