The newly open WAM Library. A site dedicated to archiving WAM & Gunge based fiction already has over 200 stories archived. Come and join us!

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/wamlibrary/index.php

So instead of building a member-base and getting people on-board for your site, you're just taking stories others have written, claiming it as "archiving" them, without any kind of permission? At the very least, I didn't give permission for my stories to be hosted on your website, and I can see at least 10 others who probably haven't.

Not to mention, the terms of the site you're using explicitly forbid pornographic content.

Pretty unimpressive.

Hi,

I use the psudeonym MacGyver 1990 on a group where some of my stories have been taken from for this so-called "Archive". I did not give permission for original works involving my own original characters and my works of fanfiction involving characters not belonging to me to be posted anywhere else. I am expressly forbidding the use of my works and characters both original and borrowed and I am requesting their immediate removal from your so-called "Archive".

It is unfortunate that you don't wish for your stories to be made available through the Library. The majority of writers who have contacted me are supportive of having their work easily viewable, but i am fully aware this is not for everybody.

McGyver the works under your name have been removed.

Markenson, there are no works under your name in the library, did you perhaps use another alias at the time?

There are so many things wrong with your reasoning here, that I think this had best be spelt out point by point.

"It is unfortunate that you don't wish for your stories to be made available through the Library."

The only reason I came to your site to begin with was to post my stories. And then, I find out, you've already made that decision for me. That, aside from being really annoying, also destroys whatever trust would be needed in a site like that. If you created the site properly, instead of the ethical and legal quagmire it now is, I'd probably have been on your side

"The majority of writers who have contacted me are supportive of having their work easily viewable, but i am fully aware this is not for everybody. "

Where to begin with this...

- Who's contacted you? You've got 50+ authors listed, but how many of them are even aware of your site, let alone contacted you? All the posts are under your name. I know close to 1/5th of these authors (thanks to you liberally stealing from one site), and I'm certain they didn't reach out to you.
- A majority of how many? If you've only heard from 5 or 6 people, it's meaningless, because you've taken stories from a lot more people than that. If we're talking 25-30 people, why are you not able to get them to post the stories themselves?
- Your site is not easily viewable, because it's members only.
- If you know full well that this is not for everybody, then you know full well you shouldn't be reproducing people's works to begin with.
- The fact that a bunch of people in the end were OK with you reposting their work after the fact doesn't magically make what you did right.

Now I'll address your archival excuse, the alleged point of your site.

It's painfully obvious you're not archiving, because it's woefully incomplete. You know, as if you were just picking and choosing stories you liked, instead of archiving whole sites. It doesn't seem like you're impartially archiving things, you're using this to build a site and to sell it to people as a place to go. Maybe because you've got a love of WAM fiction.

Or maybe because you're hoping to profit on it. Because I looked through the terms and conditions, and how that Tapatalk forum works. And there's revenue sharing, even among free users. So that means potentially you're now PROFITING on other people's work, put up without their permission.

You've likely now made more money on my stories than I ever have.

And there's more.

I am pretty sure at least one other author you've got on there does not want their work re-posted. But, I'm having issues reaching them to actually let them know of what you're doing. So that's another author you're basically violating, but this time they're unable to speak up thanks to you reposting older works. And that's just the one I know of, there could be a bunch more.

I probably haven't covered all the legal, copyright issues as well, but at the very least the way you're doing things now is pretty unethical.



Like I said at the start though: If you did this right, I'd be on your side. And maybe you really are just misguided, lost in a dream of a WAM story paradise without really thinking things through. I've brought up several ways this could be wrong and unethical, but the principle of charity dictates giving you the benefit of the doubt.

So, seriously speaking. How could you fix this, and do the job right?

- Delete all the stories you've archived. They're all in folders, sure, but you had no right to post a lot of them, maybe even all of them.
- Go out and get in touch with this majority of users who are fine with their work being reposted. And get them to sign up, and repost things themselves. It ought to just be a copy/paste job in the first place, so if they aren't willing to do that much to share their work, do they deserve the exposure?
- Go advertise the site, obviously. The WAM Story Archive is gone, so you know there's an audience to draw from. Get those users to actually post their stuff.
- That also solves the ad-revenue issue, since obviously someone consented to post things on your website, they consequently consented to the advertisements on the pages as part of using it.

And a couple of other suggestions:
- Ditch Tapatalk. Seriously, your site is probably on borrowed time until they do a review and figure out it's porn. Which is against their terms and conditions. And then poof, it's as gone as the WAM Story Archive. It's in the Site-Owner License Agreement at the bottom of their main page, Section 5, IV, parts C and D.
- Make reading submissions public. Seriously whatever audience you've got is immediately halved if you want them to sign up to view free stories.

You do things the right way? You'll get people actually contributing, instead of just posting old stuff you found. You'd get my stories on there legitimately, including the stuff you didn't find, and the new series I'm working on. I'd be able to put in a good word with the other WAM authors I know, as opposed to what I have to tell them now: "There's this guy stealing your work and making money off of it."

And if you're not willing to do that and build an audience the normal way? If you'd prefer to continue just stealing content?

My works are under Agent 47, get them off your bloody site. Maybe I'll create my own WAM story forum online, with blackjack and hookers.

Ouch

Gave up with looking at the site when I realised you have to register.

So i'm not going to go through all that vitriol. Now that you have given me your name, your stories have been removed.

I will deal with a couple of the serious accusations however.

1) At no point did i claim it was a completed library, yes there are plenty of stories missing. It has only been active for a week. Yes the majority of stories i have saved on my PC are those which interest me, and were the first to be uploaded Any & all stories are welcome however.

2) This is not a profit making site. I am certainly not making any money out of this archive. Yes Tapatalk has banner ads by default. The only way to turn them off is for me to pay for a Premium membership. If the way Tapatalk revenue sharing works interests you,then i get "points" for having a forum which has the banner ads. The points go towards improvements to the site but i could save them up and with the rate they are accumulated in about 10yrs i might just have enough to convert to £5.


If you wish to create your own online archive. Great! please do. I have said several times that i fully support multiple archives and copies of these stories so they don't get lost when various hosts go down as has happened so much recently with various yahoo groups being deleted.


Once again i wish you no ill will. Clearly at some point i enjoyed your writing as i downloaded and saved 4 of your stories.

Any chance of making it so people can browse without having to register first?

Librarian, you have to take on board what others have said here.

You do not have any right to re-publish on your own forum something that has been written here or elsewhere. True, many of us here repost pics that are webfinds, but those finds are available freely online and so accessible to anyone and everyone anyway - and mostly republished dozen of times before we got to them.

What you are doing is something different - you are taking something that was made available to a select group of people on this website, and making it available to a different group of people. There is probably a reason why those stories were published on this site and not elsewhere on the web. Either way, they are creative works that belong to the authors. The legalities of using them is relatively unimportant, but morally you cannot just grab them and repost them and just assume the authors will contact you if they're not happy.

It has to be a case of you contacting the authors and asking for permission. They may not want people who are members of your forum reading works of that nature written by them, whether under a pseudonym or not.

The terms of service state quite clearly that copyright remains with the author when posting on here:

"By uploading, hot-linking, or HTML-embedding any images, videos, or other content to our site via the forum or any other facility, you acknowledge that you are giving us the right to host, archive, download, modify, and distribute those images to the public. While actual copyright of the material remains yours, you give us the license to make your content viewable anywhere on our site, including our Premium member-only "Picture Archive," which helps fund the site to prevent the need for pop-ups and other sleazy types of advertisement."

You need to get your house in order. Putting up others works without permission is piracy and you're putting yourself at legal risk.

Doesn't matter whether it's for your profit or not or calling it an archive - you're publishing other peoples work without permission.

Archiving non commercial wam fiction is relatively harmless, especially when lots of the WAM Story Archive is on archive.org

But, if someone asks for their content to be taken down then the correct thing to do is to immediately follow their request and apologise for any inconvenience caused. That little bit of courtesy and politeness will mean people are more likely to cut you a but of slack and are more likely to say that their work can be put on your site.

If someone wanted to be a dick about things then just because they submitted their work to the WAM Story Archive, does that mean the webmaster can give permission for it to be moved to the UMD.

Someone should make an archive of the WAM Library as tapatalk will pull the plug sooner or later

While I agree with the general point you are making it weakens your argument to state it's ok to take and repost copyrighted photos/videos (which is done constantly on this forum without the owners permission) but written material is somehow more sacred and off limits.

Finding something on the internet doesn't mean you own it and someone having stolen it first don't make it ok to take again without permission. As a community we should show more respect to all types of content creators and respect the privacy of everyone, not just a small group.

GDPR does not change anything to do with copyright or intellectual property laws.

It makes enforcing your rights a lot more difficult but that's a different subject entirely.

The biggest problem though with copyright laws and intellectual property laws tends to be rights holders misunderstanding their rights and so having unrealistic expectations for what can be enforced and what actions can be taken.

Everyone just needs to be realistic and practical with their approach. If someone wants to run a WAM story library then good for them, they just need to play nicely and then people are much more likely to be cool with what they're doing.

Look at what the big sites are doing and how they deal with copyright holders wanting stuff taken down from archives or however else you want to describe a cache of information taken from somewhere else. The policies and procedures archive.org have are a good a place as any to start

A few years ago on an old account I remember getting shouted down by a lot of people for saying how streaming is a very good solution to piracy problems. It's funny how these things play out, it's so important to be practical about your expectations because if you're not then you're always going to be disappointed where-as if you're realistic then everyone wins.

I'd be pretty confident that nobody is getting sued for taking stories from UMD (or other wam sites) and putting them on a tapatalk website. If the UMD isn't following their data protection obligations then they could end up being fined which is a entirely different thing.

Signing up to the website doesn't work, it goes in a continuous loop saying "Please fix this field." for the username and yes I've tried using different usernames.

"Fix this field" comes up without telling you what is wrong. - Bye!

I managed to register OK, and for those unhappy about registering to see the stories- the WAM Story Archive also had the same requirement.

It also reproduced a bunch of stories from all over the place (including Schokolada's, DJs and some Yahoo Groups), and that was going for years. So while I understand the reasoning I do find it a little surprising it's only now it's become an issue, I can only assume people weren't aware before...

Sorry, late to the party, bit what is wrong with the stories section on the UMD?

I would love for you to explain this, but it really does not make any sense to me at all.

This very forum is home to many videos, photos and links of WAM that people have found everywhere and posted here. Many of them by people who are not making them for fetish purposes, unlike WAM fiction. Maybe the WAM Librarian didn't do things like some of you would have - and if he/she is profiting off it, that's really bad - but they are trying to credit work. Work that writers posted online for free.

You don't want to deal with vitriol, WamLibrarian, then I can lay it out a bit more neutral.

There's clearly an issue with what you're doing. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, that you just meant this as an archive and nothing more. Even if that's the case:

- You're reposting huge amounts of content from other sites, including members-only sites, without any permission or knowledge of the authors.
- You have confirmed, you can profit off of this website, however small a profit it is.
- You're using said stories to basically boost your own site and draw more viewers (hence the title of this topic). That also means more potential ad revenue.
- You have people objecting to what you're doing, and those are just the people who know about your website. The ones who don't know, can't really object, but we can't assume they're ok with you potentially profiting on their work, without their permission.

Those are the facts of the matter, and they do not spell out anything good.

Obviously, you can fix the issue by deleting all the stories you've uploaded from your personal collection. Instead you could go out, put in the effort, find as many of these authors a s you can, and get people to actually submit stuff to your site. Then the issues above pretty much disappear. Besides, if you like these authors so much, I don't see why you wouldn't want an excuse to speak to them and ask them to join your site. And like you said, you had other authors who were cool with it, so you shouldn't have an issue getting more content.

It seems like a straight-up win-win scenario, authors are happy, readers are happy, and you get to run your own site. And hell, in 10 years, you might make a couple of bucks!



If you don't do something though, if you ignore the people drawing attention to these moral problems? It speaks volumes about you and your site, and it doesn't speak good things.

Hi, Jay here, one of the people whose stories you posted. I'd like to request that my stories be removed. I can't log on to the site itself, due to the error that other people have been posting about, but the ones I've heard are on there are old requests made with various characters, including at least one that was unique to the group it was written for. They were created pretty specifically for the group I originally wrote them for, and having them out and about without context or permission is pretty bad.

With all the repeated accusations of WAMLibrarian making money off this, I'd just add that before this thread was started I had noticed the donations box, and sent them a PM offering a donation. I'm a big lover of WAM fiction, the loss of WSA did destroy a community overnight and while I find myself relatively time-poor I wanted instead to contribute financially if it'd help keep servers running.

WAMLibrarian refused this donation (and removed the donation box), so I believe them if they say they're not doing this for money.

I think it's fair to say that those from one Yahoo Group in particular are unhappy with their stories being posted, and that's perfectly fair so WAMLibrarian can I suggest you remove all from that one group, as I think it might be fair to say that's the only one that's actually still (somewhat) active. The others seem to have been all but abandoned.

KakeKid- to answer your question, I'll reproduce what I said in am the thread about the WSA shutdown:

https://umd.net/forums/i/wam-story-archive-closed

(And for those who haven't seen that thread have a look- it's clear from that that there was a big appetite to get something back up and running)

"Sadly I'm not sure we'll be able to tempt all of the authors back, the UMD has rightfully grown to be the hub for WAM on the internet, but I think the much larger community is perhaps less attractive to some than the smaller, interested-only-in-stories community that the WSA seemed to attract."

Without a dedicated writing sub forum any discussion here just gets buried as that's not what most people are here for. Also, I know several users have posted stories here and been met with deafening silence whereas they'd get some feedback and discussion via WSA.

Even if you give WamLibrarian the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he never gets a cent, he's letting Tapatalk profit from the stories. So there is no way to cut out the money angle, it's still there.

And the issue isn't just one active group. You're basically saying "As long as the old authors don't know about it, it's fine." It's one thing to make a new WSA, it's another to just raid every community for content and hope they don't complain. Hell, it seems to be completely against the purpose of a forum about fostering writing.

Leaving aside all the money aspect, the biggest problem wit this is that Tapatalk *is* ProBoards, which is the service that took down the WSA for breaching its T&C. If you click the Tapatalk T&C links it takes you to a ProBoards page. So this library will get shut down just as soon as Tapatalk/ProBoards spot what it is.

I quite like the idea of a WAM story library, and can see now why some might want it independent of the very photo/video focused UMD. But I think if such a thing is to be set up it should comply with the following:

• Authors should submit their own work, no taking things from elsewhere without permission.
• Reading should not require sign up or log in - amongst other things no login needed to read means proper Internet archives like archive.org will be able to archive the site.
  
• Library should be on a host that permits adult erotic text content.

Markenson,

I write some WAM fiction and I love reading WAM fiction. I have mourned every time the various iterations of the WSA shut down. I would have no issue with my stuff posted on the Library; I wrote it for free. I'm not trying to say "I don't have problem so neither should you". I'm trying to understand your point of view, but it does not come naturally. I do understand you are upset that he reposted your stories without permission. I want to understand the why.

Can I ask where your stories were originally posted? Was it a Pay website or a personal blog or a free forum?


This whole comment seems incredibly unfair. Based on what WL and Briff1es have said, there is no reason to believe WL is getting paid. Couching it in terms of "even if" makes it clear you don't believe it and don't believe others should as well. Innocent until proven guilty. Unless you have some proof, this is little better than slander and, quite frankly, hypocritical of you considering you are accusing him of wrongdoing.

Second of all, you cannot attack him for using a Forum Hosting site that gets ad revenue. That is pretty much every website ever.

I understand your point, and even noted it in my own post. But there is a difference here, I think, not from a legal point of view but a moral one.

Most of the pics from the web I see posted here are out there for all to see through a simple image search on google. They're not on pay sites, or forums such as this one where material is only seen by registered members for the most part. Anyone who posts on Twitter or Facebook or instagram and makes their accounts public knows full well that those images are going to do the rounds. Anyone and everyone copies and reuses pictures on the web - it may not be legal, but it's the norm. We all know it happens, and we all know it's going to happen - especially of content made freely available.

I don't consider a lengthy creative piece of prose as the same thing. Firstly, I very much doubt that a story posted here would come up in a google search. It is clearly intended for a select group of individuals who belong to the forum/website. Reusing non-freely available material is a very different thing to saving a picture and reposting it. If the writers wanted their material out there and freely available to all, they would publish it on a tumblr or a blog. Not here. I would say the same thing for pics original to this site that are then borrowed for tumblr pages. The same principal applies.

I have already explained how I see it.

Photos that most bring to this forum from elsewhere are freely available online. Yes, theoretically they are copyrighted. But, on the other hand, those pics come from youtube vids, twitter, instagram, flickr, and so on. From accounts that make those pictures public. No-one writing a story for UMD has agreed or understood that their story could or should be made available to anyone OUTSIDE OF THIS FORUM. A Twitter picture can be retweeted by anyone - thousands of times. A Youtube vid can be seen by anyone. A facebook picture, set to public, can be shared thousands of times. Sharing or stories are not what people are buying into when they post here. That is my point.

You don't seem to quite get the point. This isn't about just me, this is about every author he just re-published without any permission. He's basically said "These stories are free. Therefore, they're mine to upload wherever I like." And while you might not have an issue with him reposting your work? There's at least 40 other authors who probably don't read UMD, or don't know that he's doing this, and thus can't respond. They are given no say in this, and their works are being used, and stolen, as a result of it.

You don't need to understand the reasons why an author might not want their works reposted, because there are likely endless possible reasons for it. What needs to be understood is that these authors own their works, and it's their decision where it gets put, not WamLibrarian. And he has not given them that choice, because again, more than half of them probably don't even know.



"Pretty much every other website" also gets the author's permission to post stuff first, so they actually have permission to make ad revenue off of it. I'm attacking him because he's posting stuff without permission, and the ad revenue follows that, regardless of whether he takes his cut or lets Tapatalk keep it. And I can literally see the banner ads, so that's proof that this is happening.

Some people get unhappy about pics being taken from youtube vids, twitter, instagram, flickr, and so on. Those people haven't agreed or necessarily understood that their photos could [or should] be made available to anyone outside of the platform they originally uploaded them to.

Whether or not people get unhappy will depend on a huge number of different factors and even then, quite a bit of it is open to interpretation.

Nobody is going to be making any revenue from a WAM story library or archive. Let's just be fair about that one lol.

Stories on UMD are available freely and so accessible to anyone and everyone anyway. Some will end up being copy and pasted onto other forums / blogs / websites / tumblr pages / who-know-where. That's just how these things work, after all, people repost web finds.

Everyone just has to play fairly and be reasonable with each other. Credit the original author, maybe credit the site or group that the story is from. It's the difference between posting (to whatever site / forum / blog / etc etc) a load of teaser pics from producers complete with the website address watermark included or posting the same pics with the website address watermark cropped out of the photos.

Be friendly and reasonable with everything and you'll avoid at least 99% of the possible problems.

Everything to do with WAM Library is going to become theoretical because if the owner insists on forcing people to register before they can view the site then it'll die a slow death or it will die a very quick death when tapatalk pull the plug on it. Either way, the owner is ultimately just wasting their own time and that's their lookout.

Damn all this stuff is boring. Ah well, at least WamLibrarian has given everyone a nice example of how not to launch a wam story site. You don't appreciate just how much of this headache has been caused by requiring people to register to view the website. If people want their content taken down then that is their right, you don't argue the point, you just remove it.

I don't know if any of the stories I wrote years ago are on his site, I don't really care but I do hope he's given the username(s) I used when I originally wrote them. As I can't even look at the site, I care even less,

Again, I'm surprised - maybe people didn't frequent WSA, but that *also* required users to register to see stories other than submissions. I feel like this new site is mostly just trying to follow the WSA template, so it maybe just goes to show that it's only the people who didn't visit the old WSA surprised by the approach.

Now the T&Cs and having the banhammer hanging overhead is maybe one thing in common with WSA I'd rather it didn't...

1. Copyright. The author has a say in where it is published.
2. The author, by publishing it on UMD, is choosing to support THIS site, not others.
3. On UMD, they can choose for their blog posts, pics, stories, and profile to be only seen by "users only," and therefore they know they are not going to land up on google searches or seen by non-members of THIS website.
4. They might be planning to compile their stories into a Kindle book, or similar, and thus make money out of their own work.
5. With pics and videos on tumblrs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc, people are encouraging the sharing of those items if they set them to public. They know they might be retweeted or reblogged etc. No-one expects that of a 2000 piece of prose written for a fetish community.
6. We haven't got a clue who WAM Librarian is. He suddenly signs up a couple of weeks ago with the sole purpose of advertising his website/library. If he was a well-known member, respected on the website, then we (and he) would not be in this position. You can't join a website in order to steal work and expect people to go "yeah, great."



No, they are not. It depends on your profile settings. If you set it so your profile is available to members only, then any stories written on your "blog" will be seen only by people on this website.