Cyber-Slaying Media Fans: Code, Digital Poaching, and Corporate Control of the Internet

This article examines media fans’ Web sites devoted to Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to determine how the code of the Internet allows fans some creative control over media artifacts of interest to them and how such actions pose a challenge to media corporations and their copyrights. However, this challenge is also limited by the changing code of the Internet, at varying levels, as corporations seek to change open code to closed-proprietary code and limit such actions. Thus, this article explores the resistances of fans to corporate actions and how the code of the Internet is gradually changing into a system more conducive to corporate capitalism than community creation or any other transformative space.