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Nele Noppe

Once Again, Using Industry's Own Methodology Shows That Copyright Exceptions Contribute... - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...o-economy-than-copyright.shtml

copyright industry methodology fair_use

shared by Nele Noppe on 27 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Nele Noppe on 27 Jul 11
     
    or a few years now, CCIA has countered these claims from the copyright industry with its own study, using the exact same methodology, but counting up how much "exceptions to copyright" contribute to the economy, and showing that it's actually much larger than copyright. It's not hard to figure out that they're doing this to point out just how ridiculous the numbers from the copyright industry are. What's really funny is when totally clueless copyright maximalists, such as the folks at The Copyright Alliance, attack the methodology of the CCIA fair use/exceptions report, not realizing that they're attacking their own methodology at the same time.
Nele Noppe

Of Otakus and Fansubs - 0 views

www.law.ed.ac.uk/...hatcher.asp

academic anime copyright fans fansubbing internet fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 23 Dec 08 - Cached
  • hindrances in a digital world that copyright laws pose for creative works that, while technically infringing, should perhaps be valued and allowed.6 Certain features of digital technologies and the internet,7 according to Lessig, can permit greater restrictions on remix than were allowed in the past.8
  • hindrances in a digital world that copyright laws pose for creative works that, while technically infringing, should perhaps be valued and allowed.6 Certain features of digital technologies and the internet,7 according to Lessig, can permit greater restrictions on remix than were allowed in the past.8
  • Lessig and other legal scholars such as Mehra have pointed to dojinshi in Japan as an example of how permitting more “remix” can contribute to a vibrant cultural industry.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • some artists make a living off producing dojinshi.
  • In the west, fans of anime, the term for Japanese animation, behave much like fans of Star Wars and Star Trek: they “remix” the characters and ideas from the stories they watch.
  • Trekkies or Star Wars fans do the same activities as otaku, but one practice sets anime fans apart from other avid fans: fansubs.
  • Manga also has its own form of fansubs called scanlations
  • Fansubs and scanlations don’t quite match the “traditional” forms of remix that Lessig and others mention. They do not create a “new” work in the same sense as dojinshi, fan films, or AMVs because their aim is to remain faithful to the original work.
  • Fansubs as a cultural product sit at an interesting boundary—between the dojinshi-like fan culture that authors such as Lessig want to encourage and the massive online file trading so vilified by the recording and motion picture industries.
  • examines the anime industry’s unique relationship with fansubbers in the context of the suggestion that it represents a new policy model for online copyright.
  • Section 7 concludes by stating that it is too soon to claim the anime industry as a victory for alternative business models incorporating what most would think of as widespread copyright infringement.
  • Otaku create fansubs because they love anime—in fact, most love all things Japanese.
  • Fansubs predate BitTorrent, broadband, the dotcom boom and bust, and even the World Wide Web.
  • Fansubbers distributed or traded the finished videocassette tapes to others, but because of the time and cost involved of mailing out a physical medium, distribution was limited.
  • At one time fansubs were virtually the only way that fans could watch (and understand) anime.
  • But as with the music industry, the benefits of digital technology and the internet brought problems.46 Fansubbers started to take advantage of faster computers that allowed them to subtitle anime without the need for expensive, specialized equipment.47 This made it easier for more people to fansub because of the lower cost barriers to becoming a fansubber. The internet also meant that fans could meet from around the world, thus making it more likely that fansub groups would form. Today, groups now make digital video files instead of videocassettes.
  • Fansubbed videocassettes offered a poor quality picture and sound that encouraged fans to buy the licensed product when it came out and also limited the number of copies that could be made from a single original cassette (or from 2nd and 3rd generation cassettes).49 Digisubs offer a quality comparable to official (DVD) releases and the ability to make limitless copies.
  • Fansubbers then “release” their fansubs to fans. Distribution happens through all of the regular internet channels, including p2p services (Kazaa, eMule, etc), BitTorrent, IRC, and newsgroups.
  • Lessig essentially asks the question, “Do our laws stifle creativity and sharing to the point where it harms society?”78 Some point to fansubs and anime as part of the answer to this question—when a company allows some illegal activity it actually benefits.
  • Unfortunately for fansubbers, copyright law does not condone their activities.80 International copyright treaties such as the Berne Convention, state that its signatories (such as the United States and Japan) should grant authors the exclusive right to translation.
  • copyright law construes translations as “derivative works”.82 Derivative works are any work “based upon one or more preexisting works.
  • Within Japan, fansubs could potentially be within the law because the Japanese take a more relaxed attitude towards some aspects of copyright law and include private use and non-profit exceptions into their law.
  • The Japanese legal system may also, as a practical matter, discourage litigation towards fansub groups within Japan,
  • For infringements outside of Japan, it is no small wonder that Japanese companies do not bother with the expense of enforcing a right against a group whose infringement affects a distant market with a different legal system.
  • In his article regarding selective copyright enforcement and fansubs, Kirkpatrick argues for a fair use defense under U.S. law for fansub activities based on the cross-cultural value of translations, the non-commercial nature of fansub groups, and the potential market enhancement for the original work.
  • The fact remains that fansubs may create a preferable product for otaku—thus decreasing any market enhancement arguments.
  • One wonders what could be easier than a few clicks of the mouse and a few hours (or less) wait for a file to download, for free. Many video files deliver comparable picture quality and fandubs do exist.
  • Regardless of any potential defense, the law sufficiently tilts towards copyright holders so that they can easily use the threat of suit as enforcement.
  • The sheer cost of defending a copyright suit makes for a powerful incentive for fansubbers to settle, especially since fansubbers make no money from their activities and are unlikely to have any assets.
Nele Noppe

The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World - 0 views

questioncopyright.org/promise

copyright history fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 25 Jan 10 - Cached
  • copyright was never primarily about paying artists for their work, and that far from being designed to support creators, copyright was designed by and for distributors — that is, publishers, which today includes record companies.
  • For three centuries, the publishing industry has been working very hard to obscure copyright's true origins, and to promote the myth that it was invented by writers and artists.
  • make sure the public never asks exactly who this system is meant to help.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • They're fighting to maintain a state of mind, an attitude toward creative work that says someone ought to own products of the mind, and control who can copy them. And by positioning the issue as a contest between the Beleaguered Artist, who supposedly needs copyright to pay the rent, and The Unthinking Masses, who would rather copy a song or a story off the Internet than pay a fair price, the industry has been astonishingly successful. They have managed to substitute the loaded terms "piracy" and "theft" for the more accurate "copying" — as if there were no difference between stealing your bicycle (now you have no bicycle) and copying your song (now we both have it).
  • Copyright is an outgrowth of the privatization of government censorship in sixteenth-century England. There was no uprising of authors suddenly demanding the right to prevent other people from copying their works; far from viewing copying as theft, authors generally regarded it as flattery. The bulk of creative work has always depended, then and now, on a diversity of funding sources: commissions, teaching jobs, grants or stipends, patronage, etc. The introduction of copyright did not change this situation. What it did was allow a particular business model — mass pressings with centralized distribution — to make a few lucky works available to a wider audience, at considerable profit to the distributors.
  • For the vast majority of artists, copyright brings no economic benefits. True, there are a few stars — some quite talented — whose works are backed by the industry; these receive the lion's share of distribution investment, and generate a correspondingly greater profit, which is shared with the artist on better than usual terms because the artist's negotiating position is stronger. Not coincidentally, these stars are who the industry always holds up as examples of the benefits of copyright.
  • The first copyright law was a censorship law.
  • The method the government chose was to establish a guild of private-sector censors, the London Company of Stationers, whose profits would depend on how well they performed their function. The Stationers were granted a royal monopoly over all printing in England, old works as well as new, in return for keeping a strict eye on what was printed.
  • The system was quite openly designed to serve booksellers and the government, not authors. New books were entered in the Company's Register under a Company member's name, not the author's name. By convention, the member who registered the entry held the "copyright", the exclusive right to publish that book
  • The Stationers' right was a new right, though one based on a long tradition of granting monopolies to guilds as a means of control. Before this moment, copyright — that is, a privately held, generic right to prevent others from copying — did not exist.
  • Dissolution of the monopoly might have been good news for long-suppressed authors and independent printers, but it spelled disaster for the Stationers, and they quickly crafted a strategy to retain their position in the newly liberal political climate.
  • The Stationers based their strategy on a crucial realization, one that has stayed with publishing conglomerates ever since: authors do not have the means to distribute their own works. Writing a book requires only pen, paper, and time. But distributing a book requires printing presses, transportation networks, and an up-front investment in materials and typesetting. Thus, the Stationers reasoned, people who write would always need a publisher's cooperation to make their work generally available. Their strategy used this fact to maximum advantage. They went before Parliament and offered the then-novel argument that authors had a natural and inherent right of ownership in what they wrote, and that furthermore, such ownership could be transferred to other parties by contract, like any other form of property.
  • The first recognizably modern copyright, the Statute of Anne, was passed in 1709 and took effect in 1710.
  • The Statute of Anne, taken in historical context, is the smoking gun of copyright law. In it we can see the entire apparatus of modern copyright, but in still-undisguised form. There is the notion of copyright as property, yet the property is really intended for publishers, not authors. There is the notion of benefitting society, by encouraging people to write books, but no evidence was offered to show that they would not write books without copyright. Rather, the Stationers' argument was that publishers could not afford to print books without protection from competition, and furthermore that printers could not be depended to reproduce works faithfully if given unfettered freedom to print. The corollary, they implied, was that without the prospect of reliable distribution, authors would produce fewer new works.
  • The authors who succeeded in selling this new right to printers had no particular motivation to complain — and naturally, we don't hear very much about the authors not so favored. T
  • This is the secret that today's copyright lobby never dares say aloud, for once it is admitted, the true purpose of subsequent copyright legislation becomes embarrassingly clear.
  • Having granted the premise that copyrights should exist at all, the English government found themselves under pressure to extend copyright terms further and further.
  • The industry's centuries-long campaign for strong copyright law is not merely a reflexive land grab, however. It's a natural economic response to technological circumstances. The effect of the printing press, and later of analog sound recording technology, was to make creative works inseparable from their means of distribution. Authors needed publishers the way electricity needs wires. The only economically viable method of reaching readers (or listeners) was the bulk print run
  • There is nothing inherently exploitative about this; it's just straightforward economics. From a business point of view, a print run is a daunting and risky project.
  • When one realizes that all this must happen before the work has generated a penny of revenue, it is little wonder that publishers argue hard for copyright. The publisher's initial investment — that is, their risk — in any individual work is greater, in economic terms, than the author's
  • The arrival of the Internet fundamentally changed this equation.
  • But today, the medium over which content is distributed can be unrelated to the medium in which it is ultimately consumed. The data can be sent over a wire, at essentially no cost, and the user can print up a copy at her own expense, and at whatever quality she can afford, on the other end [7]. Furthermore, it is no longer important to possess the master; in fact, the concept of the master copy itself is obsolete. To make a perfect copy of a printed work is actually quite hard, although making a corrupt or abridged copy is very easy. Meanwhile, to make a perfect copy of a digital work is trivially easy — it's making an imperfect copy that requires extra effort.
  • Thus, a publisher's total expense was proportional to the number of copies distributed. In such a situation, it is reasonable to ask that each user bear a portion of the costs of distribution.
  • Thus the practice of charging the same fee for each copy, regardless of how many copies there are or who made them, is now unjustifiable. The cost of producing and distributing the work is now essentially fixed, no longer proportional to the number of copies
  • From society's point of view, every dollar spent beyond the amount needed (if any) to bring the work into existence in the first place is a waste, an impediment to the work's ability to spread on its own merits.
  • The Internet did something the Company of Stationers never anticipated: it made their argument a testable hypothesis. Would creators still create, without centralized publishers to distribute their works? Even minimal exposure to the Internet is enough to provide the answer: of course they will.
  • Imagine the simplest scenario: you walk into the neighborhood print shop and tell the clerk the Web address of the book you want. A couple of minutes later, the clerk comes back with a freshly printed, hardbound book, straight off the Internet. He rings up the sale. "That'll be eight dollars. Would you like to add the one dollar author's suggested donation?" Do you say yes? Perhaps you do, perhaps not — but note that when museums charge a voluntary admission fee, people often pay it. The same sort of dynamic is at work in the copy shop. Most people are happy to pay a tiny extra bit on top of some larger amount, if they have their wallet out already and think it's for a good reason.
  • This is not the only possible system, and it can easily coexist with others. Those not convinced by voluntary donations should consider another method: the Fund and Release system (also called the Threshold Pledge system [9]).
Nele Noppe

Why PROTECT IP Will Fail: Cultural Acceptance, Not Fear Of Punishment, Makes People Abi... - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...-makes-people-abide-laws.shtml

censorship copyright cultural_acceptance law crime internet united_states

shared by Nele Noppe on 13 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Nele Noppe on 13 Jul 11
     
    This new proposed law is a terrible way to try to solve [infringement]. Its passage would only drive the culture further yet from any respect for the rule of law as it applies to intellectual property. But if Big IP hasn't figured out yet that it is cultural acceptance of legal norms, not fear of punishment, that makes a free society a law-abiding one -- if Big IP doesn't understand what the de facto attitude of consumers regarding copyright has already become, and where it is already going -- then heck, maybe at this point the law professors and the rest of us should just let Congress already go ahead and give them enough rope. This is the key point that many of us have been trying to drive home for years. It's the same key point that the SSRC report made in pointing out that "enforcement" and "education" are simply not strategies that work. And that wasn't based on theory. It was based on years and years of detailed research. And yet, to the industry and to the government there seems to be only one single tool in the box for dealing with the challenges of infringement: to scare people. But that only works if people are stupid. And we now have plenty of experience in recognizing that people don't culturally accept the claims of the industry on this issue, and no amount of threats and punishment are likely to change that.
Nele Noppe

Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex - 0 views

www.wired.com/...ff_manga

anime dojinshi fans fanwork manga manga_industry fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Manga sales in the US have tripled in the past four years.
  • Europe has caught the bug, too. In the United Kingdom, the Catholic Church is using manga to recruit new priests. One British publisher, in an effort to hippify a national franchise, has begun issuing manga versions of Shakespeare's plays, including a Romeo and Juliet that reimagines the Montagues and Capulets as rival yakuza families in Tokyo.
  • Circulation of the country's weekly comic magazines, the essential entry point for any manga series, has fallen by about half over the last decade.
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08
       
      malaise in commerciële industrie
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Fans and critics complain that manga — which emerged in the years after World War II as an edgy, uniquely Japanese art form — has become as homogenized and risk-averse as the limpest Hollywood blockbuster.
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08
       
      belang zelfexpressie, vrijheid in dojinshi
  • The place is pulsing with possibility, full of inspired creators, ravenous fans, and wads of yen changing hands. It represents a dynamic force
  • future business model of music, movies, and media of every kind.
  • Nearly every aspect of cultural production — which is now Japan's most influential export — is rooted in manga.
  • Comics occupy the center, feeding the rest of the media system.
  • About 90 percent of the material for sale — how to put this — borrows liberally from existing works.
  • Japanese copyright law is just as restrictive as its American cousin, if not more so.
  • known as "circles" even if they have only one member
  • by day's end, some 300,000 books sold in cash transactions totaling more than $1 million
  • "This is something that satisfies the fans," Ichikawa said. "The publishers understand that this does not diminish the sales of the original product but may increase them.
  • As recently as a decade ago, he told me, creators of popular commercial works sometimes cracked down on their dojinshi counterparts at Super Comic City. "But these days," he said, "you don't really hear about that many publishers stopping them."
  • "unspoken, implicit agreement."
  • "The dojinshi are creating a market base, and that market base is naturally drawn to the original work," he said. Then, gesturing to the convention floor, he added, "This is where we're finding the next generation of authors.
  • They tacitly agree not to go too far — to produce work only in limited editions and to avoid selling so many copies that they risk cannibalizing the market for original works.
  • It's also a business model
  • He opened Mandarake 27 years ago, well before the dojinshi markets began growing more popular — in part to provide another sales channel for the work coming out of them. At first, publishers were none too pleased with his new venture. "You think I didn't hear from them?" he tells me in a company conference room. But in the past five years, he says, as the scale and reach of the markets has expanded, the publishers' attitude "has changed 180 degrees." It's all a matter of business, he says.
  • triangle. "You have the authors up there at this tiny little tip at the top. And at the bottom," he says, drawing a line just above the widening base of the triangle, "you have the readers. The dojin artists are the ones connecting them in the middle."
  • The dojinshi devotees are manga's fiercest fans.
  • provides publishers with extremely cheap market research
  • the manga industrial complex is ignoring a law designed to protect its own commercial interests.
  • Intellectual property laws were crafted for a read-only culture.
  • the copyright winds in the US have been blowing in the opposite direction — toward longer and stricter protections. It is hard to imagine Hollywood, Nashville, and New York agreeing to scale back legal protection in order to release the creative impulses of super-empowered fans, when the gains from doing so are for now only theoretical.
  • mutually assured destruction. What that accommodation lacks in legal clarity, it makes up for in commercial pragmatism.
Nele Noppe

Information Age Without Humanities = Industrial Revolution Without Steam Engine | HASTAC - 0 views

www.hastac.org/...evolution-without-steam-engine

academia humanities fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 24 Jan 10 - Cached
  • without the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution would not have happened.  Steam powered everything.  What powers the Information Age?  It's not computation--that's a foundational component but we could each have a fabulous desktop or laptop or mobile device now that connected to some gigantic All Powerful centralized mainframe and we would not have the Information Age.  
  • It's not even the Internet. 
  • What is responsible for an Information Age, where all levels of habits and procedures of communication and interaction have changed dramatically in less than two decades, is the World Wide Web. 
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The World Wide Web is the steam engine of the Information Age.  And without the humanities, virtually everything about the World Wide Web is a muddle.  All of the key issues of how knowledge is exchanged, how it is created, what its role is in the world, how it functions and changes, how one kind of idea influences another, how knowledge travels, leads to a complex History of Ideas the likes of which we have not seen before.  
  • Dinner table conversation, Berners-Lee notes in his memoir Weaving the Web, often center on the key humanities question:  what it means to be human. 
  • everything that was constantly shaped by the environment and then constantly selecting environments associationally, driven by interest, pleasure, desire, fear, superstition, belief, understanding, and other deeply human conditions that had nothing to do with even the most powerful of computers.  These humanistic questions haunted the small boy; he wanted from earliest age to make a computer that could be like the human brain.   The World Wide Web approximated that because it is based on a human, social, interactive, creative, associational concept of thought and humanity. 
  • clearly universities under stress are finding ways to cut back courses and programs and are looking at the humanities as not relevant to the student of today.  They have it entirely wrong.  The humanities are the most important tool we have for understanding, with any kind of historical perspective and critical depth, all of the new arrangements of our world, precisely because those new arrangements of our world are rooted in an associational, interactive, qualitative humanistic concept of mind and society, not in a machinic, quantitative, linear, hardwired, fixed, or even measurable computational model.  
  • Of course, I have also spent the last decade arguing that the humanities are missing the boat by not claiming our centrality to the Information Age.   This is our age, I keep saying, if only we take responsibility for our role in its shape and its future.  That's the challenge, should we choose to accept it.  
Nele Noppe

Knock it off: Global treaty against media piracy won't work in Asia - 0 views

www.sfgate.com/...article.cgi

copyright dojinshi fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 23 Nov 09 - Cached
  • That partnership between content provider and consumer is exactly what's missing in the Western world's debate over intellectual property, where movie studios and record labels talk about their customers as potential criminals. In Asia, media companies have a much closer and more interactive relationship with fans, treating them as partners in evangelizing their products -- even when that means blurring the lines of copyright restrictions. Kai-Ming Cha, manga editor of Publishers Weekly, notes that Japan's media industry has "developed a detente" with fans. She points to the example of doujinshi -- amateur "homage" publications that depict popular anime and manga characters in original, sometimes pornographic storylines. "They realize these unauthorized spinoffs help to build the fandom, and ultimately drive sales of the original," she says.
  • Nele Noppe on 23 Nov 09
     
    "That partnership between content provider and consumer is exactly what's missing in the Western world's debate over intellectual property, where movie studios and record labels talk about their customers as potential criminals. In Asia, media companies have a much closer and more interactive relationship with fans, treating them as partners in evangelizing their products -- even when that means blurring the lines of copyright restrictions. Kai-Ming Cha, manga editor of Publishers Weekly, notes that Japan's media industry has "developed a detente" with fans. She points to the example of doujinshi -- amateur "homage" publications that depict popular anime and manga characters in original, sometimes pornographic storylines. "They realize these unauthorized spinoffs help to build the fandom, and ultimately drive sales of the original," she says. "
Nele Noppe

Comic Market: How the World's Biggest Amateur Comic Fair Shaped Japanese Dōji... - 0 views

muse.jhu.edu/...5.lam.html

academic manga dojinshi fans manga_industry

shared by Nele Noppe on 26 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • the world's largest regular gathering of comic fans today is Tokyo's biannual Comic Market
  • dōjinshi phenomenon did not start with Comic Market, Comike and dōjinshi are inextricably linked, having shaped each other's history for three decades.
  • Comike convention has shaped the most important trends defining the development of dōjinshi in Japan today
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • In 1975, a woman who had made critical remarks about the Manga Taikai was excluded from that convention, and [End Page 234] subsequently a firestorm of anger among fans produced a movement against the Manga Taikai led by the famous circle Meikyū (Labyrinth), which resulted in the conception of a new alternative convention. On December 21, 1975, the first Comic Market—"a fan event from fans for fans"—was held in Tokyo.6
  • [End Page 232]
  • [End Page 233]
  • Comike's underlying vision was of an open and unrestricted dōjinshi fair, offering a marketplace without limitations on content or access.
  • With the advent of these fan-consumers (as opposed to fan-creators), dōjinshi became demand-driven publications. Greater competition gradually fostered rising standards of quality, which in turn attracted more circles and buyers. Higher sales shrank production costs and boosted profits, which could then be reinvested in the dōjinshi themselves. Small printing companies, many of which had begun in the minikomi (microcommunication) boom of the early 1970s, were able to use the profits derived from greater demand for their services to modernize their equipment, lowering production costs further and enabling them to construct their production schedules around each Comike.8 Additionally, lower printing costs freed smaller groups from the dependence on bigger groups, which often had strict rules on content and style to avoid conflict among their many members. Having lost their raison d'être, these big clubs and circles gradually faded away, leaving dōjinshi creators to produce stories they liked, in the manner they liked.9
  • [End Page 235]
  • aniparo parodied popular anime series, and in doing so, attracted a new type of fan to Comike, beyond its core group of 2000 or so attendees. These were female fans, mostly middle and high school students strongly influenced by the 1970s florescence of shōjo manga. They began to create and consume dōjinshi in which the (bishōnen or "pretty boy") male protagonists of popular anime and manga were transposed into a very particular sort of erotic story typified by the phrase: "without tension" (yama nashi), "without punchline" (ochi nashi), and "without meaning" (imi nashi)—and hence the contemporary genre title, yaoi.10
  • The eleventh Comic Market in spring 1979 saw the popularity of the cute and pure bishōjo or "pretty girl" (strongly influenced by 1970s shōjo manga) skyrocket among men's dōjinshi circles, attracting many new male participants.
  • The Comic Market was dominated by women from the beginning (90 percent of its first participants were female), but in 1981, thanks to lolicon, male participants numbered the same as female participants for the first time in Comike's history.13
  • [End Page 236]
  • Internal conflicts on the Comike planning committee underlay some of these developments: they marked the ascendancy of the faction led by Yonezawa Yoshihiro, who favored Comike's unlimited expansion.15 Though he was criticized for purportedly selling dōjinshi out to commercialism, Yonezawa couched his plans for Comike in terms of a collective organization of the convention by all participants, including staff, circles, and visitors.16 Whatever the underlying reality, these public principles remain little changed today.17
  • Faced with this loss of identity, talent, and space, every other large fan convention except Comike dissolved. Yaoi Boom But in the middle of the decade, one manga and its anime not only saved dōjinshi fandom from near extinction but was responsible for its biggest boom yet. Takahashi Yōichi's Captain Tsubasa (1981–88, Kyaputen tsubasa),
  • [End Page 237]
  • New dōjinshi conventions appeared, and manga shops began selling dōjinshi on commission. Comparatively lush, custom-made, oversized dōjinshi with more than one hundred pages became common, and popular circles could now live on their fanworks' profits
  • professional creators like Toriyama Akira of Dragonball fame participating,
  • [End Page 238]
  • Despite the self-censorship brought on by the mass media's criticism, Comike nevertheless continued to thrive. Young men tired of new, tighter restrictions on professional manga turned to Comike, and attendance once again swelled to 230,000 in the summer of 1990.23 Hardcore lolicon was now passé, and erotic dōjinshi for men had greatly changed. New genres were introduced with such aspects as fetishism and a new style of softcore eroticism enjoyed by men and women alike; in particular, yuri (lily), or lesbian stories, emerged.24Dōjinshi also became smaller and shorter due to professional publishers recruiting talented dōjinshi creators en masse: the bulk of dōjinshi were the works of the less talented creators left behind.25
  • Other factors contributing to the increased interest in dōjinshi and in fanworks were the development of fixed otaku landmarks and the spread of computers. Almost everyone could now afford to make digital dōjinshi as well as audiovisual or even interactive dōjinshi (i.e. dōjin music and dōjin games).
  • The personal technology revolution meant [End Page 239] simplification of fanworks' production processes as well as completely new possibilities for communication and new digital genres. With the growth of dōjinshi in other media, the term "dōjin products" (dōjin seihin) has gradually come into use to describe fanworks of all genres.
  • Further, the conversion of Tokyo's Akihabara "Electric Town" into a district full of shops selling otaku-related goods, as well as the nationwide expansion of otaku-goods retailers and the establishment of Internet communities and message boards in the late 1990s, enabled otaku to live out their interests and to communicate nonstop with like-minded people everywhere. Their interests and culture were easily shared, and consequently information on Comic Market and dōjin culture spread around the world.
  • The rise of the Internet also meant that Comike lost its monopoly as the center of otaku and dōjinshi culture. Nevertheless, Comike remained the most important event for Japanese fans, especially after companies with otaku-related products started to exploit it.28 Firms had been interested in Comic Market for decades as a never-ending pool of promising new talent and as a place to exploit them commercially, and they were willing to pay much money for direct access to these masses of otaku.29 Starting with NEC in the summer of 1995, companies were granted exhibition space to market or to sell their newest products. This was the birth of the dealer booth at Comike, and, as with dōjinshi circles, the number of applicant companies was much higher than that of available spaces: a self-sustaining event with such high attendance was too important for any related company to ignore.30 Companies accepted the existence of unlicensed parody dōjinshi using copyrighted material (albeit in a transformative and thus arguably fair-use manner) since they could now sell exclusive goods at Comike (Figure 3) or use it as a marketing place, attracting to the convention people who were not interested in dōjinshi.
  • In the summer of 2004, 5 percent of all circles participating in Comike were headed by a professional mangaka or illustrator, while another 10 percent had some professional experience.
  • Despite its relative newness, Higurashi became one of Japan's biggest media phenomena, and at the seventy-sixth Comic Market in summer 2009, Tōhō Project became the first dōjin title ever to receive the honor of being considered its own genre.
  • [End Page 243]
  • It seems that dōjinshi circles are not switching entirely to the Internet but rather are using it as an informational and marketing platform for themselves and their creations, spreading the knowledge of and fascination with Comic Market to new spheres.
  • With high attendance, positive media attention, and industry support, Comike's position seems invulnerable. Even the deaths of important figures such as Iwata Tsuguo in 2004 and Yonezawa Yoshihiro—who was the face of Comike for decades—in 2006 did not harm its position. But unresolved problems, such as the use of copyrighted material in parody dōjinshi and the child pornography questions inherent in lolicon and shotakon, remain.
  • Comike was neither the first nor the biggest dōjinshi fair when it was established; its main purpose was to provide the freest market possible, and that freedom has come at a price. The dream of a Comic Market open to every one and everything was never realized, as there were too many physical, financial, and legal restrictions. Even today, the Comic Market suffers from a lack of space, a lack of money, and a lack of legal security. Only two-thirds of applicant circles can participate due to constraints, since, as a small independent operator Comike's financial resources are limited and most of the work is done by volunteers.
  • s the center of attention, with its size and its links to the industry, it is undeniable that Comike possesses the power and the means to influence social, market, and even political developments. In [End Page 244]
  • recent years it has not been reluctant to use this power. Whether through conferences on copyright issues or on the establishment of a "National dōjinshi fair liaison group" (Zenkoku dōjinshi sokubaikai renrakukai) in 2000, it has taken on the responsibility of representing and of regulating Japanese dōjinshi culture.
Nele Noppe

The Road to Comiket - 0 views

heiseidemocracy.com/...the-road-to-comiket

comiket_ibento dojinshi fans fanwork non-academic fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • held twice a year in August and December at the Tokyo Big Sight in Tokyo, Japan, and attracts over 450,000 participants over its three day run.
  • primary focus of the event is the buying and selling of doujinshi
  • Comiket is also known colloquially as the birthplace of cosplay and thousands of visitors come dressed as their favorite anime, manga and game characters as well.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • establishment of an official industry presence in the form of an industry booth dealers’ section
  • alternate media such as software, music, and character goods.
  • doujin circle (同人サークル). A doujin circle is an individual or group of creators who collaborate as a discreet entity to produce doujin items for sale;
  • Recently the so-called “kojin circle” (個人サークル, personal circle) composed of a single member has been increasing, as individuals take on all aspects of doujin production from the application process, illustration, post-production, printing, and staffing of the table space allotted at the event.
  • Step 1 Purchase an application packet.
  • Step 2 File the application correctly and on time.
  • Comiket is an all genre event, meaning literally anything goes
  • Step 3 Wait for the election results.
  • Step 4 Produce a doujin.
  • Also, copyright considerations that apply to other events such as Wonder Festival are in effect here when it comes to certain types of character goods (no unauthorized figures), and while most IP is considered fair game for parody in the doujin community, a few exceptions such as Disney stand out as taboo.
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08
       
      This is interesting- dojinshi using copyrighted characters may be sold, but no unauthorized figures of said characters? Is this because figures cost just a little too much for copyright holders to be comfortable with letting fans produce them? I'm not surprised about the Disney exception, non-Japanese companies with little experience with the dojin economy are probably a lot more likely to come down like a ton of bricks on anyone selling things based on their copyrighted characters.
  • Step 5 Coordinate replication.
  • Step 6 Make final preparations.
  • This broadening of distribution means that it’s no longer necessary to attend events in person to obtain many professionally produced books at a reasonable price. While they’re still cheaper at Comiket, many circles have recognized the need to provide something more to encourage fans to attend (or just to show gratitude to those who do show up), and that’s where the copy book comes in.
  • Step 7 Show up and sell!
  • At some point before 9:30 an event staff member will visit you at your table where your participation will be officially registered. You must provide both a sworn statement that you’re not selling anything illegal and copies of the books you’ll be releasing that day to the staff, and then you’re clear to go.
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08
       
      I wonder if the staff sometimes takes away merchandise or closes entire boots at the last minute because they've found something objectionable in the advance copies provided to them (apparently only hours or minutes before the opening of the event)?
Nele Noppe

Learning From Culture Pirates - 0 views

chronicle.com/...64294

copyright internet law technology phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Mar 10 - Cached
  • The history of publishing is swimming with pirates—far more than Adrian Johns expected when he started hunting through the archives for them. And he thinks their stories may hold keys to understanding the latest battles over digital publishing—and the future of the book.
  • Along with the practice itself, "pirates" in publishing just keep resurfacing, and Johns argues that the label is no accident. He sees it as the pirates' attempt to evoke romantic notions of seafaring swashbucklers. Sure, the copying done by culture pirates may be technically illegal, but they have long claimed the moral high ground, arguing that they are not petty thieves, but principled heroes rightfully returning creative work to a public commons by making free or cheap copies available.
  • The weighty work, more than 550 pages, covers hundreds of years of history of copyright and intellectual property in the West, focusing on the stories of those angling to disrupt prevailing practices.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • If we listen to those pirates of old, we'll learn that there is nothing sacred or natural about our basic ideas of intellectual property, he argues, characterizing those notions as imperfect conventions formed in and by the Industrial Revolution. In fact, he suggests, it may be time to cast our models of patents and copyright overboard.
  • This nemesis is a shadowy collective rather than a person. Johns calls it "the intellectual-property defense industry," and says it emerged in the 1970s or so, in the form of trade associations and entities like the Interpol Intellectual Property Action Group. He sees these groups as remarkable in that they bring together ex-military and police officials, surveillance techniques, and data-scrambling to try to stamp out piracy and in some cases to limit reform, in unprecedented ways. "One could certainly track, and perhaps account for, the increasing consistency of intellectual property in the age of globalization by following this expansion of its practical enforcement across new regions and realms," Johns writes in Piracy.
  • No piracy, we might say, no Enlightenment.
  • Maybe copyright and patents should be scrapped, and whole new categories of intellectual property created. One category could be for mechanical inventions, one for genetics and other life sciences, one for analog creative works, one for digital books and movies. Or some other mix-and-match. "We might have a system of classification that would have more basic entities but might practically be a lot simpler, because it would correspond to existing ways of carrying on in the world," he says.
Nele Noppe

Creative Industries - 0 views

www.amazon.com/...ref=sr_1_1

open_work literature internet copyright fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 17 Jan 10 - No Cached
  • Nele Noppe on 17 Jan 10
     
    by John Hartley, to read
Nele Noppe

Turntable.fm Showing How Sharing Music Is Communication | Techdirt - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...g-music-is-communication.shtml

remix sharing music communication

shared by Nele Noppe on 27 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Nele Noppe on 27 Jul 11
     
    In many ways, it's a further manifestation of a point about culture that Julian Sanchez raised a couple years ago, about how culture is built off of shared cultural experiences. It's the sharing part of culture that makes the culture valuable. If only you experience it, it just doesn't have the same power. Turntable.fm's key reason for being so addictive is that it's one of the first operations, whether on purpose or not, that has effectively taken that key aspect of culture, and turned it into a service. However, separate from just how Turntable.fm highlights this key point, I think it also helps explain why the legacy recording industry and many politicians have made so many wrong and counterproductive moves concerning dealing with music in the internet era. Rather than realizing that music is communication, they look at it solely as a unit of content. When you view music as a unit of content, even as the fans of music actually view it as a form of communication, you're going to clash. That's because many of the ways that people communicate via music break down the concept of music being a unit of content. And, in the end, that's what a lot of the legal and policy battles have been about over the past couple decades. A very large group of people are communicating with music... and some big legacy players are simply not set up to even comprehend that, let alone cater to it.
Nele Noppe

How Copyright Lobbyists Are Making The Child Porn Problem Worse | Techdirt - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...child-porn-problem-worse.shtml

censorship copyright children pornography net_filtering law crime

shared by Nele Noppe on 13 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Nele Noppe on 13 Jul 11
     
    But more emotionally, we turn to a German group named Mogis. It is a support group for adult people who were abused as children, and is the only one of its kind. They are very outspoken and adamant on the issue of censoring child pornography. Censorship hides the problem and causes more children to be abused, they say. Don't close your eyes, but see reality and act on it. As hard as it is to force oneself to be confronted emotionally with this statement, it is rationally understandable that a problem can't be addressed by hiding it. One of their slogans is "Crimes should be punished and not hidden". This puts the copyright industry's efforts in perspective. In this context they don't care in the slightest about children, only about their control over distribution channels. If you ever thought you knew cynical, this takes it to a whole new level. The conclusion is as unpleasant as it is inevitable. The copyright industry lobby is actively trying to hide egregious crimes against children, obviously not because they care about the children, but because the resulting censorship mechanism can be a benefit to their business if they manage to broaden the censorship in the next stage. All this in defense of their lucrative monopoly that starves the public of culture.
Nele Noppe

Electronic Literature: What is it? - 0 views

eliterature.org/elp.html

literature hypertext open_work phd phd_unfinished to_read

shared by Nele Noppe on 08 Sep 10 - Cached
  • the practices, texts, procedures, and processual nature of electronic literature require new critical models and new ways of playing and interpreting the works.
  • "literature" has always been a contested category.
  • To see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, is by contrast "digital born," a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer
  • At the same time, because electronic literature is normally created and performed within a context of networked and programmable media, it is also informed by the powerhouses of contemporary culture, particularly computer games, films, animations, digital arts, graphic design, and electronic visual culture
  • Digital technologies are now so thoroughly integrated with commercial printing processes that print is more properly considered a particular output form of electronic text than an entirely separate medium. Nevertheless, electronic text remains distinct from print in that it literally cannot be accessed until it is performed by properly executed code
  • immediacy of code to the text's performance is fundamental to understanding electronic literature, especially to appreciating its specificity as a literary and technical production
  • How to maintain such conventional narrative devices as rising tension, conflict, and denouement in interactive forms where the user determines sequence continues to pose formidable problems for writers of electronic literature, especially narrative fiction.
  • . "Giving the audience access to the raw materials of creation runs the risk of undermining the narrative experience," she writes, while still acknowledging that "calling attention to the process of creation can also enhance the narrative involvement by inviting readers/viewers to imagine themselves in the place of the creator.
  • Hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, "codework," generative art and the Flash poem are by no means an exhaustive inventory of the forms of electronic literature, but they are sufficient to illustrate the diversity of the field, the complex relations that emerge between print and electronic literature, and the wide spectrum of aesthetic strategies that digital literature employs
  • . Such close critical attention requires new modes of analysis and new ways of teaching, interpreting, and playing. Most crucial, perhaps, is the necessity to "think digital," that is, to attend to the specificity of networked and programmable media while still drawing on the rich traditions of print literature and criticism.
  • One problem with identifying the hyperlink as electronic literature's distinguishing characteristic was that print texts had long also employed analogous technology in such apparati as footnotes, endnotes, cross-reference, and so on, undermining the claim that the technology was completely novel. Perhaps a more serious problem, however, was the association of the hyperlink with the empowerment of the reader/user. As a number of critics have pointed out, notably Espen J. Aarseth, the reader/user can only follow the links that the author has already scripted.
  • ergodic literature
  • The shortcomings of importing theoretical assumptions developed in the context of print into analyses of electronic media were vividly brought to light by Espen J. Aarseth's important book Cybertext: Explorations of Ergodic Literature.
  • ," texts in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text"
  • The deepest and most provocative for electronic literature is the fifth principle of "transcoding," by which Manovich means the importation of ideas, artifacts, and presuppositions from the "cultural layer" to the "computer layer" (46).
  • arguing that print texts also use markup language, for example, paragraphing, italics, indentation, line breaks and so forth.
  • Complementing studies focusing on the materiality of digital media are analyses that consider the embodied cultural, social, and ideological contexts in which computation takes place.
  • electronic literature can be seen as a cultural force helping to shape subjectivity in an era when networked and programmable media are catalyzing cultural, political, and economic changes with unprecedented speed.
  • Liu urges a coalition between the "cool" — designers, graphic artists, programmers, and other workers within the knowledge industry — and the traditional humanities, suggesting that both camps possess assets essential to cope with the complexities of the commercial interests that currently determine many aspects of how people live their everyday lives in developed societies.
  • The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information
  • Realizing this broader possibility requires that we understand electronic literature not only as an artistic practice (though it is that, of course), but also as a site for negotiations between diverse constituencies and different kinds of expertise.
  • Nele Noppe on 08 Sep 10
     
    Hayles
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
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • 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

Affective Aesthetics « Symposium Blog - 0 views

symposium.transformativeworks.org/...affective-aesthetics

video vidding fans gender

shared by Nele Noppe on 24 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • But then that’s an argument Henry Jenkins has repeatedly made, here, for example, that parody tends to be male- and industry-preferred whereas the more emotional engagement of fanvids is often dismissed out of hand.
  • Vidding thus is an art form that is both too subtly critical (because always inflected with fannish passion) and too polished aesthetically (because the aesthetic dimension does matter above and beyond the critical point being made) to, perhaps, fit into a quick overview of YouTube remixes. Still, as both a vibrant subculture of critical interpretive if not outright political remix culture and an sophisticated artistic subculture with its own aesthetic value system, fan vids certainly deserve to be included in any “Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing.”
  • The academy has often been accused of unrealistic attempts of objectivity in the humanities in particular but even in the sciences. After English departments in the seventies destroyed the idea of an objectively created value system that can separate great from merely mediocre and bad literature, after anthropology departments realized in the eighties that observers cannot ever remain neutral and always bring their own biases to their field research; after queer theory and gender theory and critical race studies have brought the personal into the academic in the nineties; after affect theory has established itself as a field of study since–it amazed me that vidding may indeed have been overlooked in its merging of love and inquiry, affect and analysis, celebration and criticism.
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—
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 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

How doujinshi will take over the world (or not) - 0 views

www.icaruscomics.com/wp_web

dojinshi fan_fiction fanart fans fanwork manga_industry non-academic united_states fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • First, doujinshi are not commercial products, and this is one of the most important distinctions that allows its very existence. 
  • Many doujinshi conventions (Comiket included) require doujin circles to provide print run information, and enforces a cap.  Quite simply, there aren’t enough books to export en mass. 
  • This is also why doujinshi has continued to grow while other media like manga, anime, and music have suffered with the advent of peer to peer trading on the internet…the doujinshi market is a collector’s market, where the physical book itself is highly valued
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • that’s not to say that doujinshi isn’t profitable…a few artists never “go pro” because they make quite a healthy living on their doujinshi,
  • The much better road for the American manga industry and fans to take is not to import doujinshi, but to import the doujinshi ideal and ethics, and foster a domestic doujinshi community of our own.  This road is beset by its own share of hurdles, though, and they have very deep roots.
  • While fanzines and fanfiction have been around in the U.S., we have nothing even close to the doujinshi scene in Japan, because of American corporate mentality which values “perpetual properties” instead of new creations, and these properties are guarded visciously.
  • in America properties are created and owned by the corporation.
  • They simply have no reason to support budding artists in such a way, when their raison detre are still characters created decades ago.  Fan comics are not seen as extending the life of a property, but as competition. 
  • The truth is a significant portion of Japanese doujinshi are erotic works, many based on children’s shows.  It isn’t hard to imagine the kind of moral outrage most doujinshi would illicit. 
  • American manga companies need to take a hard look at doujinshi in Japan and understand its benefits, and readers and artists should take a stand because this is an opportunity for the status of the creator to take precedence over the corporation.
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