Are AO3 fanfics being stolen? What happened with ao3.life and what I'd do if I found my own story there
Last time, when I wrote about where to read fanfiction until AO3 comes back, my biggest worry was how to survive without my evening dose of Snarry. Then I read that someone had taken stories from the archive during the outage, turned some of them into audiobooks with an AI-generated voice and tried to sell them. And suddenly I was thinking about it as an author. What would I do if I played a sample somewhere and two sentences in realised I was listening to my own story?
What happened with ao3.life
According to CNN, ao3.life appeared on 1 November and offered thousands of stories that had previously been on Archive of Our Own. Some of them were also on sale as paid audiobooks. Authors started speaking up and the site shut down. When I think about how much time I spend on a single scene because I still don't like how Severus answers in it, the idea that someone could just take it, have it read out and sell it seems pretty absurd to me. Especially since I put that text online so people could simply read it. CNN report
I love it when someone writes to me that they'd like to translate or record one of my stories. Just the fact that they want to put that much work into it makes me happy. But they also ask me first, and I get to say which text I'd be comfortable with and which one I'd rather think about. With ao3.life, I would have found out about my own text only after someone had already decided for me. And honestly, being offered a share of the sales afterwards wouldn't have improved my mood either. I would still mostly want to know why nobody asked me.
How I check that I'm on the real AO3
When AO3 is down and someone sends me a link to a page that looks almost the same, the first thing I check is the address. The official archive lives at archiveofourown.org. A similar name or a familiar-looking layout is no reason for me to type in my password. When I want to know whether the archive is coming back, I go straight to the OTW status page. It also posts news about any limited operation, so I can check there whether what someone sent me matches what the people running AO3 have actually announced. OTW service status
After the security incident, OTW said that, as far as it could tell, no works, bookmarks or kudos had been deleted. It couldn't rule out that the user database had leaked, though. If you used the same password on AO3 and anywhere else, OTW recommends changing it on those other services. I'd start with my email, if it had the same password. That's where I usually recover access to everything else, and I'd hate to end up sorting out a pile of other accounts because of one password. OTW incident update
What I'd do if I found my own story somewhere else
I'd probably want to message the site owner straight away. But first I'd save the address of the exact page, a screenshot showing the title of the story, and the date. If it was a video, I'd also note the account and a link to the specific post. Then I'd get a link to my original ready and put together a short message: which text is mine, where I published it and which post I'm asking them to take down. If my original link isn't working at that moment because of the outage, I can still dig out my own file with its edit history, or the version on my website. Just imagining a situation like that makes me glad I keep my originals myself.
If I found my text on TikTok, for example, I'd go through the form right in the app. Their official process lets you report an intellectual property violation on a post and continue through a form. Requirements can differ between platforms, so before sending anything I'd read what details the form asks for and what might be passed on to the other side. I wouldn't send my legal name or address to an unverified contact just because someone promised to take the story down afterwards. How to report on TikTok
And if I came across a copy as a reader, I'd probably try to find the author first. Maybe she has the story on her own website or on another archive where she posted it herself. And if I couldn't find it there, I'd happily send her a link to what I'd found. I'd much rather get one message with a page address myself than find out about my story only when someone starts telling me how much they enjoyed its audiobook.
Mimosa Confiante
By day, I work somewhere between marketing, copy and campaigns; by night, I usually end up somewhere between fanfiction, cosplay and yet another “what if” that refuses to leave me alone. I write mainly in the Harry Potter and Mo Dao Zu Shi fandoms, most often Snarry, Snamione, HarryLu and WangXian. My healthcare background means that anatomy, medicine and far too much research occasionally find their way into my stories. Cosplay is another way for me to play with the characters I love, whether I stay close to canon or turn them into my own fanfiction and AU versions. In Diary of a Slytherin Girl with ADHD, I write openly about life with a brain that usually has far too many tabs open at once.
📖 More stories on AO3 and Wattpad · 📸 Instagram · 🎥 TikTok · 👉 More about me
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