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Nele Noppe

Why poor countries lead the world in piracy | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...or-countries-lead-world-piracy

phd copyright

shared by Nele Noppe on 03 May 11 - No Cached
  • Media Piracy's core thesis is simple: people in the poor world don't pay for software, games, music and movies because these goods cost too much. Whereas a DVD here might cost you an hour's wage, the same DVD in a poor country could cost a day's work, or a week's, or even more
  • But that's not what the media companies say they believe. In their official narrative – bolstered by a long line of studies with undocumented methodologies and assumptions – is that poor countries simply lack a "culture of copyright" that can be reinforced through education and enforcement.
  • Karganis and co have much to say on this score. They document the way that the airwaves and newspapers in poor countries are dominated by the official, Hollywood view of piracy, presented uncritically and at length. The message is even integrated into the school curriculum through official teaching units produced by American entertainment conglomerates and given to teachers to be delivered verbatim to their students.On the enforcement side, entertainment companies often secure a kind of rough, streamlined justice that allows them to race to the head of the justice line, pushing past criminal and civil cases of much larger magnitude. They get their own police forces tasked to them, and their own special high-grade punishments that treat offences against them as inherently graver than offences against local firms and people.
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  • But by asking taxpayers – here in the rich world and also in the poor world – to foot the bill for trade sanctions, enforcement, new civil and criminal penalties, even global treaties like ACTA, the entertainment industry can still get a profit out of the poorest people in the world by externalising the costs and reaping whatever sliver of legit market they can drag out of the poor world by brute force.
Nele Noppe

Rebecca Tushnet's 43(B)log: Is copying theft? - 0 views

tushnet.blogspot.com/...is-copying-theft.html

copyright phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 04 May 11 - No Cached
  • Jonathan M. Barnett, What’s So Bad About Stealing? The paper skips straight to the proposition that any kind of unauthorized copying (including copying of ideas and expression, but also and of more present interest mechanical reproduction) is theft, then concludes that “Some positive level of tolerated theft is an essential component of any transaction structure that maximizes the social wealth generated by creative production.” I don’t quite understand how you can call copying theft without first establishing that the copied thing is owned.
  • What really struck me here about the language of theft (second-comer side), rather than the more apparently neutral language of property (first-comer side), was the ways in which it highlights that intellectual property isn’t about theft.
  • This paper is also another datum for my theory that copyright restrictionists like to talk about “readers” and maximalists like “users.” Or anyway, they like to use that name for them.
Nele Noppe

Repackaging fan culture: The regifting economy of ancillary content models | Scott | Tr... - 1 views

journal.transformativeworks.org/...122

gift_economy law fans fanwork

shared by Nele Noppe on 24 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • n particular, recent work on online gift economies has acknowledged the inability to engage with gift economies and commodity culture as disparate systems, as commodity culture begins selectively appropriating the gift economy's ethos for its own economic gain.
  • My concern, as fans and acafans continue to vigorously debate the importance or continued viability of fandom's gift economy and focus on flagrant instances of the industry's attempt to co-opt fandom, is that the subtler attempts to replicate fannish gift economies aren't being met with an equivalent volume of discussion or scrutiny.
  • There are a number of important reasons why fandom (and those who study it) continue to construct gift and commercial models as discrete economic spheres. This strategic definition of fandom as a gift economy serves as a defensive front to impede encroaching industrial factions. H
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  • at the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation"
  • Thus, there is both a legal and social imperative to view fandom as transforming the objects of commodity culture into gifts, a transformative process "where value gets transformed into worth, where what has a price becomes priceless, where economic investment gives way to sentimental investment" (Jenkins et al. 2009b), and where bonds of community are formed and strengthened.
  • For other scholars, who foresee the commercialization of fandom's gift economy as an alternately unnerving and empowering inevitability, the possibility of fans monetizing their own modes of production is posed as an alternate form of preemptive "protection."
  • though monetizing fan practice to preserve the underlying ideals of fandom's gift economy might seem counterintuitive,
  • Richard Barbrook, reflecting back on his 1998 essay "The Hi-Tech Gift Economy" in 2005, acknowledges that constructing commodity culture and gift economies in binary terms is problematic.
  • commodity economies and gift economies are always already enmeshed,
  • Although De Kosnik asserts that "the existence of commercial markets for goods does not typically eliminate parallel gift economies"
  • Media producers, primarily through the lure of "gifted" ancillary content aimed at fans through official Web sites, are rapidly perfecting a mixed economy that obscures its commercial imperatives through a calculated adoption of fandom's gift economy, its sense of community, and the promise of participation.
  • The regifting economy that is emerging, I argue, is the result of the industry's careful cultivation of a parallel fan space alongside grassroots formations of fandom.
  • regifting economy is meant to synthesize the negative social connotations tied to the practice of regifting with a brief analysis of why acafans and existing fan communities should be aware and critical of these planned communities and their purpose as a site of initiation for the next generation of fans.
  • Henry Jenkins and others (2009a), adopting the term moral economy from social historian E. P. Thompson and questioning its applicability to the exchange of digital media, state that the moral economy is "governed by an implicit set of understandings about what is 'right' or 'legitimate' for each player to do."
  • the social stigmas attached to regifting are rooted in the act's inherent subterfuge, breaking the rules of the moral economy by masking something old as something new, something unwanted as desirable. If "the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange [is] that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people" (Hyde 1983:57), then "we cannot really become bound to those who give us false gifts" (70).
  • This construction of men as agents of capitalism with no understanding of the (frequently feminized) gift economy or its functioning continues to be evoked in anxieties surrounding the masculine/corporate exploitation of female fan communities and their texts.
  • media producers pushing these ancillary content models as the "white man keepers" of online fan culture who have failed to understand that it is the reciprocity and free circulation of fan works within female fan communities that identifies them as communities.
  • restricting the circulation o
  • its unrestricted movement.
  • Positioned precariously between official/commercial transmedia storytelling systems (Jenkins 2006:93–130) and the unofficial/gifted exchange of texts within fandom, ancillary content models downplay their commercial infrastructure by adopting the guise of a gift economy, vocally claiming that their goal is simply to give fans more—more "free" content, more access to the show's creative team. The rhetoric of gifting that accompanies ancillary content models, and the accompanying drive to create a community founded on this "gifted" content, is arguably more concerned with creating alternative revenue streams for the failing commercial model of television than it is with fostering a fan community or encouraging fan practices.
  • By regifting a version of participatory fan culture to a general audience unfamiliar with fandom's gift economy, these planned communities attempt to repackage fan culture, masking something old as something new
  • Although it could be argued that fandom also polices its boundaries and subjects, its motivations for doing so are ultimately about protecting, rather than controlling, the ideological diversity of fannish responses to the text. As Hellekson (2009) notes, "learning how to engage [with fandom and its gift economy] is part of the initiation, the us versus them, the fan versus the nonfan."
  • Although fandom responds to its own mainstreaming within convergence culture by fortifying its borders and rites of initiation, ancillary content models are opening their doors to casual viewers unfamiliar with what fandom has historically valued and how it functions
  • Whether or not ancillary content models are being actively deployed as a device to rein in and control fandom, they are serving as a potential gateway to fandom for mainstream audiences, and they are pointedly offering a warped version of fandom's gift economy that equates consumption and canonical mastery with community.
  • As this example suggests, ancillary content models offer few incentives for fans already enmeshed in grassroots creative fan communities to contribute, and there is consequently less opportunity for participants to be exposed to and initiated into those fan communities.
  • More frequently than not, fannish participation is restricted to enunciative forms of fan production (Fiske 1992:38), such as posting to message boards and the collaborative construction of the show's wiki.
  • The result, according to Kristina Busse (2006), is that "certain groups of fans can become legit if and only if they follow certain ideas, don't become too rebellious, too pornographic, don't read too much against the grain."
  • Perhaps one of the central reasons why fans continue to cast a wary eye at these planned communities and their construction of a "legitimate" fandom is because they recognize the gifts being given mass audiences as their own.
  • spectacular case that potentially overshadows more covert examples.
  • male fans have historically sought professional status or financial compensation for their creative works more frequently than their female counterparts
  • media producers shape their definition of an ideal fandom, it is increasingly one that is defined as fanboy specific, or one that teaches its users to consume and create in a fanboyish manner by acknowledging some genres of fan production and obscuring others.
  • ancillary content models
  • Given the long, gendered history of fan communities and their relationship with producers, and the frequent alignment of gift economies with "feminine" forms of social exchange
Nele Noppe

Project MUSE - Cinema Journal - Introduction - 1 views

muse.jhu.edu/...48.4.busse.html

fans fanwork gender gift_economy

shared by Nele Noppe on 28 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • These fans feel a deep sense of community and are engaged in a complex subcultural economy—using work time to write about copyrighted characters, teaching one another how to use complex technological equipment to create zines for free, and so on
  • fan vids address many of the issues raised during my search for a perfect cover image: each draws from a variety of sources that may be familiar to a particular community of media fans but often are more obscure to other TV viewers. Explaining how and why a particular scene resonates for a fan may indeed rely on the shared knowledge of a story, vid, or central fan discussion.
  • The story of media fandom is one steeped in economic and gender concerns, from the beginning, when women began creating the narratives commercial media wouldn't offer—dominated as it is by male producers—
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  • Some scholars posit that today all viewers are interpellated as fans, that they are invited to engage fannishly by creating content and engaging within an imaginary online community. Does this mean that the old subcultural stance of media fandom has become obsolete in the face of a general shift in media consumption? Moreover, if such convergence can allow fans to become parts of the media industry, should fans embrace these options? And how are these economic issues deeply gendered if predominantly female spaces embrace gift cultures while men are more likely to turn their fannish endeavors into for-profit projects?
  • Fandom is always more complicated than the stories we tell about it, and scholars need to be careful not to create an imaginary feminist idyll. Simply inverting the gaze may keep subject/object relations unquestioned—a concern that has become especially important as queer and trans studies have complicated any naive feminist binaries that may have held sway during early years of media fandom. Likewise, as [End Page 106] De Kosnik and Russo illustrate, an unequivocal embrace of noncommodified fan work remains problematic within a world that requires paying the bills.
Nele Noppe

Project MUSE - Cinema Journal - Should Fan Fiction Be Free? - 0 views

muse.jhu.edu/...48.4.de-kosnik.html

fans fanwork law economy fan_fiction feminism

shared by Nele Noppe on 25 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • This situation deserves scrutiny, especially because fan fiction is becoming [End Page 118] increasingly visible to non-initiates through major media outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom, indicating that the genre is moving away from the margins of American and British culture
  • The mainstreaming of an alternative form of cultural production is nearly always synonymous with commercialization;
  • Over the past decades of sharing their transformative works, fan fiction readers and writers have generally felt wary of commodifying a form of cultural production that is essentially derivative and perhaps subject to copyright infringement lawsuits.
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  • Digital appropriation artists have developed a number of monetization models: royalties, distribution agreements, reasonably priced licenses that permit remix practitioners to sell their appropriations legally, and small-scale compensation intended only to reimburse remixers for their outlay. Although fan filmmakers and game modders have experimented with these models, fan fiction writers have not conducted similar experiments in marketing their works.
  • Fanfic authors who think that selling appropriative art is always and absolutely against the law are mistaken. No such case law exists, and many appropriating artists make money from their work today without constantly encountering legal trouble.
  • Why, then, do fic writers resist earning income from their output? Many scholars of fan studies claim that fan fiction is, and must remain, free—that is, "free of charge," but also "free of the social controls that monetization would likely impose on it"—because it is inherently a gift culture, as Hellekson describes in this issue. In fact, even the fan organization, the Organization of Transformative Works, one of whose goals is to redefine fan works as transformative and therefore legal, states: "The mission of the OTW is first and foremost to protect the fan creators who work purely for love and share their works for free within the fannish gift economy."
  • Therefore, writing fan fiction for personal gain—financial, psychological, or emotional—aligns with the fact that self-enrichment is already inherently an important motivation for women to produce and consume fanfic. For some women, belonging to an affinity group or discussing stories with fellow writers and readers is not the primary reason for engaging with this type of fiction.
  • The rewards of participating in a commercial market for this genre might be just as attractive as the rewards of participating in a community's gift culture; and the existence of commercial markets for goods does not typically eliminate parallel gift economies.
  • If fans successfully professionalize and monetize fan fiction, the amateur culture of fic writing will not disappear.
  • Although fans have legitimate anxieties about fan fiction being corrupted or deformed by its entry into the commercial sphere, I argue that there is far greater danger of this happening if fan fiction is not commodified by its own producers, but by parties foreign to fandom who do not understand why or for whom the genre works, and who will promote it for purposes it is unsuited for, ignoring the aspects that make it attractive and dear to its readers.
  • However, an even greater danger than this is that fan fiction may not be monetized at all, in which case no one, particularly women authors, will earn the financial rewards of fanfic's growing popularity. Only the corporate owners of the media properties that fic authors so creatively elaborate on will see economic gain from these writers' volunteer work.
  • if women can formulate a model for the monetization of their artworks, the gap will be narrowed.
  • In the absence of such experimentation, women writing fanfic for free today risk institutionalizing a lack of compensation for all women that practice this art in the future. Woolf asked of her forebears, "What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?" Will our generation answer that we have been giving our talents away as gifts, rather than insisting on the worth of our work?
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Nele Noppe

Aestheticism Articles: HP doujinshi - 0 views

www.aestheticism.com/...index.htm

dojinshi fan_fiction fans fanwork harry_potter non-academic fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Japanese doujinshika---at least at this sort of amateur level---are often very leery of publicity. This might be a reaction to the arrests of several doujinshika in apparently random, token copyright enforcement cases in recent years (such as the infamous Pokemon doujinshika incident), or it might simply be a sign of how negatively "fringe" behavior is viewed in Japanese society
  • Snape is gorgeous---or at least that's what the djka at this show seemed to believe.
  • Doujinshika are infamous for "prettifying" real-life (or real-text) actors/characters, and who can blame them?
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  • it's how Snape is depicted emotionally that's most telling on a cross-cultural level.
  • None of the doujinshi that I saw on the Snape side of the event depicted Angsty!Snape. Or Traumatized!Snape, or for that matter Unhappy!Snape. Instead, almost all of the books showed variations on the same thing: Cranky!Snape.
  • I've been told repeatedly that Japan just doesn't do psychology---certainly not to the same dogged degree as the West.
  • Western Fanfic Snape is physically attractive but brooding, miserable, and emotionally damaged. Japanese Doujinshi Snape is physically attractive and cranky because he's surrounded by horny goofballs.
  • Still, it was interesting to see so many similarities of concept and characterization between Japanese writers and Westerners Sirius/Remus 'shippers.
  • The only real difference I can see between the Japanese depictions and the Western is that sense of ominousness I mentioned. The majority of Western Sirius/Remus 'fics I've read have been hopeful/positive in tone.
Nele Noppe

Doujin's Commercial Evolution - 1 views

heiseidemocracy.com/...k-doujins-commercial-evolution

anime dojinshi fans fanwork games manga manga_industry non-academic fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Over the first years of the new millennium these trends continued, with a robust market emerging that combined improved distribution with wider interest to generate revenue for some circles that could no longer be termed “amateur” in any meaningful sense.
  • The doujinshi market grew steadily via promulgation through the internet and pop culture media. This resulted in the viability of the doujin as a means of part time and increasingly full time employment. “Kojin circles” emerged, consisting of a sole creator (kojin) who handled all aspects of production and received all the benefits of income from publications. Larger circles formed semi-professional units to produce doujin software that would compete with professional releases. Otaku goods shops expanded their scope as doujin vendors, acting as proxy sellers for hundreds of circles both via brick and mortar outlets and via online mail order. Online-only doujin shops such as DLsite emerged, selling digital copies of doujinshi via download. Advances in printing technology and cheap, high quality labor (mostly Chinese) allowed for the proliferation of doujin items to media beyond the traditional books (and less tradtional CD-Rs), including towels, pillowcases, fans, cups, trinkets, and figures.
  • new class of semi-pro and professional creators
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  • an increasingly large class of professional creators uses doujin sales as a substantial segment of their income, acting as freelance illustrators, mangaka, and designers when they’re not doing doujin work (and vice versa).
  • Perhaps the biggest issue raised by the emergence of this group of professional and semi-pro doujinka is that of intellectual property rights and copyright infringement.
  • in many instances the people producing the doujinshi are the same as those producing the original works being parodied. The doujin scene is so interbred with that of professional anime, manga, and game creators that it would be impractical for all but the largest IP holders to crack down on the parody doujin scene.
  • soft circles
  • Lilith’s business model is the culmination of doujinshi as commerce - small, versatile, ubiquitous, and high quality.
  • The doujin world now spans works from the rank amateur to the polished professional and everything in between,
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