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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

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

Japanese copyright law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Japanese_copyright_law

copyright law phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 24 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Japanese copyright laws consist of two parts: "Author's Rights", and "Neighboring Rights", and as such, "copyright" is a convenient collective term rather than a single concept in Japan.
  • Author's rights
  • Neighboring rights
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • "Neighboring rights" refer to the rights of performers, broadcasters, and other individuals who do not author works, but play an important role in communicating them to the public.
  • Exceptions
  • As in many other countries, the term "public domain" is not mentioned in Japanese copyright laws, and thus, even though some materials are claimed to be "public domain", there can be some restrictions. Sometimes the term copyright-free is used instead.
  • Works authored by an individual, under his own name or a known pseudonym, are protected for fifty years following the individual's death. Works authored anonymously or under an unknown pseudonym, as well as works authored by corporations, where the individual author or authors are unknown, are protected for fifty years following publication. Japan is considering extending the duration of protection to seventy years to be more in line with the United States and other nations.
  • Very soon,[when?] CDs will be copy-protected in Japan.
  • Once implemented, it may become impossible to play copyright-protected CDs on the CD-ROM drive of a computer.
  • In 1992, the "Compensation System for Digital Private Recording" was introduced. According to this system, those who make digital sound or visual recordings for personal use should pay compensation to the copyright owners. This compensation is added in advance to the prices of specified digital recording equipment (DAT, DCC, MD, CD-R, CD-RW), and specified recording media (DVCR, D-VHS, MVDISC, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM) (Japan Copyright Office 2001, 17; ibid. 24).
  • In other words, the clever user who tries to free-ride on the original genius of the creator of this or that tune has to be educated, and forced to participate in a trusted system in order to obtain the desired tunes. No one has so far mentioned about either fair use or the reach of the public domain.
  • In 1997, the Japanese Copyright Law was updated to expand the coverage of the author's "right of communication to the public" (established in 1986 under the name of Rights of Broadcasting and Wire Transmission) to the stage of making it transmittable. The objects of the right of communication to the public are the activities of connecting a server to a network, and the activities of transmission
  • Besides these two definitions, Article 23 (1) of the Copyright Law provides that "(t)he author shall have the exclusive right to make the public transmission of his or her work (including the making transmittable of his or her work in the case of the interactive transmission)". This can be considered an expansion of the right of public transmission of authors to the preceding stage of making transmittable, available (Fujiwara 1999, 98-99; Japan Copyright Office 2001, 31), and even of a right of making transmittable that goes further than the WIPO Copyright Treaty (Ficsor 2002, 506). Apart from this, and in order to comply with the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, a right of making transmittable was also granted to performers and phonogram producers. The scope here is especially to regulate the internet broadcasting of live performances (Fujiwara 1999, 98; Japan Copyright Office 2001, 31).
  • when we look at it from the viewpoint of the public domain, the wider reach of the concept of communication to the public means a big limitation of the reach of this public domain. This is not a discourse against "copyright protection". Indeed, in a lot of cases, copyright protection seems to work as a system, and creates an incentive to produce. We only should be aware that the current transformations in the legislation concerning intellectual property rights — in Japan and in other countries — is moving very fast, and do not seem to take into account all facets of the story, nor remember the very basic goal of copyright, which is "to contribute to the development of culture".
  • In November 2000, the "Copyright Management Business Law" (4.2.2.3) was enacted. Its main purpose is to facilitate the establishment of new copyright management businesses, in order to "respond to the development of digital technologies and communication networks" (Japan Copyright Office 2001, 27). In general, we can say that this law will facilitate the rise of copyright management businesses, and possibly create a further limitation to the reach of the public domain.
  • In its book, "Copyright System in Japan", the title of this section is "(t)o secure the effectiveness of rights by utilizing new technologies" (Japan Copyright Office 2001, 32). This shows clearly that the Japanese government considers software to be a tool for enforcing copyright legislation. Not mentioned, however, is the possible negative side-effects concerning fair use (limitation on rights), or the reach of the public domain.
  • It is quite clear that with this regulation, it becomes impossible to circumvent the copyright-protection of intellectual property in the context of fair use. This means that when a CD, etc. is copyright-protected, there is not only technically no space for fair use, but also from the legislative side, there is no support for copying in the context of fair use.
Nele Noppe

chosaq » More Japanese book lending madness - 0 views

chosaq.net/...nese-book-lending-madness.html

copyright law libraries literature manga manga_industry manga_kissa phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 24 Feb 10 - Cached
  • the main goal of the (Japanese) copyright law is a public one: “to contribute to the development of culture” (Art. 1 Japanese Copyright Law).
  • Nele Noppe on 24 Feb 10
     
    the main goal of the (Japanese) copyright law is a public one: "to contribute to the development of culture" (Art. 1 Japanese Copyright Law).
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.
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  • 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

Open source - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/Open_source

openness open_source

shared by Nele Noppe on 23 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology.
  • The open source model includes the concept of concurrent yet different agendas and differing approaches in production, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial software companies
  • peer production by bartering and collaboration, with the end-product, source-material, "blueprints" and documentation available at no cost to the public.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Most economists agree that open source candidates have an information good[12] (also termed 'knowledge good') aspect. In general, this suggests that the original work involves a great deal of time, money, and effort.
  • Others argue that society loses through open sourced goods. Because there is a loss in monetary incentive to the creation of new goods, some argue that new products will not be created. This argument seems to apply particularly well to the business model where extensive research and development is done, e.g. pharmaceuticals. However, this argument ignores the fact that cost reduction for all concerned is perhaps an even better monetary incentive than is a price increase. In addition, others argue that visual art and other works of authorship should be free. These proponents of extensive open source ideals argue that monetary incentive for artists would perhaps better be derived from performances or exhibitions, in a similar fashion to the funding of provision of other types of services.
  • Many fields of study and social and political views have been affected by the growth of the concept of open source.
  • Advocates in one field often support the expansion of open source in other fields. For example, Linus Torvalds said, "the future is open source everything."[14]
  • The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public
  • Open source hardware is hardware whose initial specification, usually in a software format, are published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the hardware and source code without paying royalties or fees.
  • Beverages
  • Open-content projects organized by the Wikimedia Foundation — Sites such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary have embraced the open-content GFDL and Creative Commons content licenses.
  • Digital content
  • Health and science
  • Medicine Pharmaceuticals — There have been several proposals for open-source pharmaceutical development,[31][32] which led to the establishment of the Tropical Disease Initiative. Ther
  • Science Research — The Science Commons was created as an alternative to the expensive legal costs of sharing and reusing scientific works in journals etc.[33] Research — The Open Source Science Project was created to increase the ability for students to participate in the research process by providing them access to microfunding
  • Other Open source principles can be applied to technical areas such as digital communication protocols and data storage formats. Open design — which involves applying open source methodologies to the design of artifacts and systems in the physical world.
  • There are few examples of business information (methodologies, advice, guidance, practices) using the open source model, although this is another case where the potential is enormous. ITIL is close to open source. It uses the Cathedral model (no mechanism exists for user contribution) and the content must be bought for a fee that is small by business consulting standards (hundreds of British pounds). Various checklists are published by government, banks or accounting firms. Possibly the only example of free, bazaar-model open source business information is Core Practice.
  • Open source culture is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection, are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations.
  • The rise of open-source culture in the 20th century resulted from a growing tension between creative practices that involve appropriation, and therefore require access to content that is often copyrighted, and increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws and policies governing access to copyrighted content.
  • The idea of an "open source" culture runs parallel to "Free Culture," but is substantively different. Free culture is a term derived from the free software movement, and in contrast to that vision of culture, proponents of Open Source Culture (OSC) maintain that some intellectual property law needs to exist to protect cultural producers. Yet they propose a more nuanced position than corporations have traditionally sought. Instead of seeing intellectual property law as an expression of instrumental rules intended to uphold either natural rights or desirable outcomes, an argument for OSC takes into account diverse goods (as in "the Good life") and ends.
  • One way of achieving the goal of making the fixations of cultural work generally available is to maximally utilize technology and digital media. I
  • Government Open politics (sometimes known as Open source politics)
  • Ethics Open Source ethics
  • Ess famously even defined the AoIR Research Guidelines as an example of open source ethics.[38]
  • Media Open source journalism
  • Open source movie production is either an open call system in which a changing crew and cast collaborate in movie production, a system in which the end result is made available for re-use by others or in which exclusively open source products are used in the productio
  • OpenDocument is an open document file forma
  • Education Within the academic community, there is discussion about expanding what could be called the "intellectual commons" (analogous to the Creative Commons). Proponents of this view have hailed the Connexions Project at Rice University, OpenCourseWare project at MIT, Eugene Thacker's article on "Open Source DNA", the "Open Source Cultural Database" and Wikipedia as examples of applying open source outside the realm of computer software. Open source curricula are i
  • stead of keeping all such knowledge proprietary. One of the recent initiatives in scientific publishing has been open access — the idea that research should be published in such a way that it is free and available to the public.
  • Open innovation is
  • also a new emerging concept which advocate putting R&D in a common pool.
  • Arts and recreation Copyright protection is used in the performing arts and even in athletic activities. Some groups have attempted to remove copyright from such practices.[45]
Nele Noppe

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

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

copyright law asia politics

shared by Nele Noppe on 27 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • That's because in Asia, "intellectual property" as we think of it is an alien concept, recently imported from the West and hastily transplanted with limited success at best. "It's almost like there's an institutional disrespect for copyright in Asia," says Seung Bak, cofounder of the video streaming startup DramaFever, which brings free, English-subtitled Asian television to U.S. audiences. "People feel like, 'If I can't touch it, why should I have to pay for it?'"
  • But Lam points out that things are fundamentally different now. For one, hardware used to be differentiated by where it was manufactured.
  • You have name-brand stuff and knockoff stuff being made side by side, maybe even coming off the same assembly line."
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Indeed, an entire consumer subculture has sprung up around counterfeit goods in China, what Chinese refer to as shanzhai or, literally, "mountain village" products (the name comes from the fact that, in ancient times, bandits would often build their redoubts in high passes, out of reach of the short arm of the law). Though its name suggests something remote and marginal, in reality shanzhai is now a mainstream phenomenon. It's estimated, for instance, that one of every five cellphones produced in China -- some 150 million devices -- are shanzhai.
  • One could argue that, by duplicating existing feature sets while striving to offer more, shanzhai may actually be driving innovation (of sorts), contrary to the argument made by those who suggest that without airtight and infinitely extended IP protection, there's no incentive for the development of groundbreaking new products and technologies. Of course, the truth is somewhere in between. Not all of the "innovations" of shanzhai products are particularly useful (one shanzhai Blackberry Pearl clone offers a built-in electric razor, for instance). But the knockoffs have certainly exerted downward pressure on price, forced major brands to compete on quality and service, as opposed to perceived prestige and appearance, and derailed artificial constraints imposed by manufacturers and governments that are ultimately harmful to consumers.
  • Which explains why, when Apple finally partnered with China Unicom to officially introduce the iPhone to the market earlier this month, the response was tepid at best: The official iPhone was crippled at launch (its WiFi connectivity disabled by government mandate), cost a cool grand and was locked to the Unicom network. "The rumor -- it's all water cooler gossip at this point -- is that they sold around 5,000 units in the first week," says Lam. "That's a shockingly low number. But you have to consider that anyone who's wanted an iPhone in China has been able to get one for years now, unlocked, fully functional, at a cheaper price. The 'official' launch is meaningless -- the unofficial launch happened so long ago that no one even cares." The estimated tally of grey-market iPhones in use in China? More than 1.5 million.
  • in today's frictionless global market it's harder to put barriers between consumers and the stuff they want. If something is available anywhere, people can get it everywhere.
  • Welcome to contemporary Korea, where a titanic digital public works program in the '90s resulted in 85 percent of the population having home broadband access that's faster than anything commercially available in the U.S. "What they think is normal in Seoul is vastly different from what we think is normal here -- the stuff we read about in Popular Science, they take for granted," says DramaFever's Seung Bak. "A show will air on TV, and 10 minutes later it'll be uploaded in HD quality to a sharing site where anyone can download it in about 10 seconds." So Korea can be thought of as something of a laboratory for the future of digital media, because it's just a matter of time before the rest of the world's bandwidth catches up.
  • Call it the can't-beat-'em, might-as-well-join-'em syndrome. Strict enforcement has prompted an endless game of whack-a-mole, with pirates moving on to new platforms as their old ones are shut down. But by giving filesharers and sharing platform operators incentives to offer legal, licensed services -- while ensuring that the user experience their audiences have been drawn to remains the same -- a solution emerges that might just allow everyone to benefit.
  • Two strokes of good fortune helped CrunchyRoll survive, both occurring in the fall of 2008. The first was the cable channel Cartoon Network's surprising decision to cancel its venerable Toonami programming block -- for years one of the most reliable sources of anime on broadcast television. The second was an unique deal the company was able to negotiate with TV Tokyo, the broadcaster that airs more anime than any other Japanese network. "TV Tokyo controls 40 percent of Japan's anime series, and we were able to get them to agree to let us put episodes of their shows up on our site within one hour of broadcast," says Gao. "Not even Hulu can do that. It effectively means that we're the 'first window' for content. And the reason they agreed is that they know we're growing their audience: We're getting them viewers they'd never be able to access on their own."
  • The deal prompted other broadcasters to fall in line. Now, CrunchyRoll simulcasts English-subtitled editions of 20 out of the 40 anime programs currently on the air in Japan. Free programming is bookended with advertising; a premium option costing as little as $5 a month eliminates the ads, provides access to high-definition content and subscriber-only programming, and puts a little premium member badge on a user's profile. "That's more important than you'd think," says Gao. "One of the things we realized early on was that CrunchyRoll isn't just a video sharing site, it's a social network for fans of Japanese animation. The little badge is social proof that you're a real supporter of the site."
  • 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.
  • "They realize these unauthorized spinoffs help to build the fandom, and ultimately drive sales of the original," she says.
  • "Japanese tend to resolve things in extralegal fashion, whereas in the U.S., Disney will send out a whole battalion of lawyers," notes manga historian Fred Schodt. "It's not an exaggeration to say that much of the current state of U.S. copyright law has come about due to Disney's efforts to keep Mickey Mouse from falling into the public domain."
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.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • 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?
  • . [End Page 123]
  • [End Page 124]
  • [End Page 122]
  • [End Page 120]
  • [End Page 119]
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

Thought Police Can't Protect Real Children - 0 views

www.translativearts.com/thoughtpolice2010ej.html

non-academic manga anime sexual_content children law censorship crime games phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 08 Apr 10 - Cached
  • would have established the catagory of "nonexistent youth"
  • The banning of fictional depictions of child abuse would likely be as meaningless as the banning of fictional depictions of car chasing with the aim toward reducing motor vehicle accidents in real life.
  • If content alone was the issue, war footage and horror films should be banned as well.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Content in itself is not the issue--Child pornography has been outlawed because the methods involved in production involve real children in possibly abusive circumstances. How the material was produced is what makes it criminal, not what impression it conveys on the audience. 
  • Child pornography involving real children being sexually abused is horrid beyond words. For that very reason, I find it reprehensible to mix together such acts of human misery and suffering with illusionary fantasy that exists only in the author's imagination. Widening the definition of child pornography to include fictional material belittles the gravity of real sex abuse.
  • Many convicted criminals also cite the Bible as their inspiration of conducting astonishingly savage acts, and yet few would attribute the Bible as the root cause of such criminal behavior. Why?--Because free societies accept the principle that people are responsible for their own actions.
  • It is very dangerous to restrict the actions and rights of citizens based on the principle that some limited number of individuals may act irresponsibly. This is the equivalent of removing knives from the household kitchen because someone used a meat cleaver to commit a crime. Again, this logic is unbelievably reckless as well.
  • Furthermore, crime statistics published by the Japanese police themselves show no causality between the proliferation of erotic material and sex crimes. The crime rate has dramatically decreased since WW2 while the availability of erotica and violent fictional entertainment has risen by leaps and bounds during the same period.
  • It is easily imaginable that an endless cycle of accusations and denials will unfold regarding establishing the "true age" of fictional characters. Authors and publishers will more than likely attempt to proclaim that the characters look young, but they are actually above the age of 18. Physical attributes vary between widely depending on race and ethnicity, not to mention fictional non-human characters.
  • Publishers and authors are extremely proficient in adapting toward new regulations. If graphical depictions are banned, then abstract or comedic depictions will increase.
  • Either an ever increasing set of symbols will be deemed to be inappropriate to be linked to a core human attribute--human sexuality--or the futility of the ban will lead the law to become impotent over all.
  • Even today, numerous adult manga publications have self censorship standards that are mind-boggling. Authors have complained about how some editors have insisted on having all female characters appearing in their works be endowed with large breasts because drawing women as they appear more like in real life was deemed "too childish looking." 
  • Banning the fictional depictions of minors involved in sexual situations will make a fundamental core human attribute taboo.
  • Such a ban will stifle creativity and impoverish the cultural landscape.
  • The value attributed to works of literature and art change over time. The works of modern art and literature from the last two centuries are filled with examples where they were deemed to be vile, corruptive trash by contemporary authorities, but now these same works enjoy high status as priceless cultural treasures.
  • A culture grows richer through addition, not by subtraction.
  • A ban on fictional depictions of minor engaged in sexual situations has the very real potential to brand individuals as sex offenders even though they have had no sexual contact with real people. I believe there could be no legal justification for destroying people's lives simple because they drew doodles on paper, but the proposed ban would create such a legal precedence. 
  • I am absolutely certain that history will not look back kindly upon such a ban, and it will join a long list of colossal failures of regulatory policy, such as the prohibition of alcohol in the US between 1920 to 1933, various sodomy laws, the comic book code, and bans on socialist literature in Japan during the prewar era. It is important to note that all these failed moral crusades were led by virtuous and diligent individuals intent on making the world a better place. 
Nele Noppe

Project MUSE - Cinema Journal - Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Chall... - 0 views

muse.jhu.edu/...48.4.lothian.html

fans fanwork vidding law

shared by Nele Noppe on 28 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • In particular, it commemorates the practices of online media fan communities: female-dominated networks that cohere around affective investments in media properties and that produce and share textual, visual, and video art that is based on "their" TV shows or films.
  • "den of thieves,"
  • For most vidders, valid fears of not being recognized as owning the product of their recombinatory labor—often, as in Russo's case studies, perceived as an undifferentiated feature of the online "public" domain—are of more concern than whether their disregard of copyright is likely to usher in new forms of digital ownership. Many valid arguments for the righteousness of Lim's artistic production leave intellectual property laws intact, insisting that the geek girl poses no threat. Putting transformed images to music [End Page 131] in a new order creates a new artwork worthy of recognition, and (as Hellekson outlines and De Kosnik challenges) Lim does not profit from her production. These arguments have been publicized by the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit organization of media fans who work for "a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity."4
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • I am a member of OTW and support their advocacy unequivocally. But it seems essential to me to recognize that fans' appropriative art is not necessarily complicit with legal and economic structures as they stand. It is worth determining who defines the use as fair, and what it might mean to place a value on unfair uses.
  • What does appropriative art imply if we don't try to justify it within the terms of existing legal systems, but rather use its potential illegality to imaginatively liberate music and images from structures of corporate ownership?
  • den of thieves that nurtures "Us" and other artworks that are based on mainstream media properties for which "copyleft" licensing would be unimaginable.
  • Freedom is a slippery concept, especially when it comes to digital media. When we think about questions of copyright and digital ownership through cultural theft, freedom from domination lines up with freedom from having to pay—at least on the surface. Theft, piracy, and the commons are all concerned with getting things for free, and current configurations of online media and culture are hospitable to their insurrectionary modes of ownership.
  • In recent years, media producers have explicitly sought to solicit fan participation as labor for their profits in the form of user-generated content that helps build their brand. Many fans perceive these developments as a desirable legitimation of fan work, but they can also be understood as an inversion in the direction of fannish theft. Rather than fans stealing commodified culture to make works for their own purposes, capital steals their labor—as, we might consider, it stole ideas from the cultural commons and fenced them off in the first place—to add to its surplus.
  • transformation as an undercommons: an unofficial and transient space in which work simultaneously reproduces and undermines the structures that enable it.13 Fans mobilize for a purpose that is neither radically disruptive of, nor fully incorporated into, the media industry's systems of ownership, but simultaneously supports and undercuts them while producing a collectivity of its own. And that collectivity, while it holds the media properties up, steals from them: abusing the hospitality of those who own the servers, the ISPs, the copyright, and taking its productions more seriously than they intended.
Nele Noppe

Martha Woodmansee - The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetic... - 0 views

muse.jhu.edu/...110.4br_woodmansee.html

to_read authors art economy aesthetics history germany literature theory patronage gender fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 22 Feb 10 - Cached
  • What, given these circumstances, was a "high culture" author to do as his/her books piled up unsold in boxes at the press? As Martha Woodmansee shows in her very insightful and elegantly written account of the history of eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory, The Author, Art, and the Market, they set out to exorcise these ghosts from the sphere of "true" or "fine" art. Turning to the material conditions that underlie and prompt the re-evaluation of art by these theorists, Woodmansee details
  • Mendelssohn, writing in mid-century, argued that the singular purpose of a work of art was to have an effect on its audience and hence ought to be evaluated by its ability to move us. Three decades later Mendelssohn's pupil, Moritz, broke away from his teacher's enormously influential theories, removing art from the constraints of affectivity to which it had been subjected and arguing instead for its existence sui generis, responsible only for being a "coherent harmonious whole" (quoted on p. 18). Woodmansee explains this remarkable shift from Mendelssohn's theory of artistic instrumentality to Moritz's theory of artistic autonomy through an examination of the "far-reaching changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of reading material that marked the later eighteenth century" (p. 32).
  • too many readers . . . reading too many of the wrong books for the wrong reasons and with altogether the wrong results" (p. 90). Moritz responds to this problem by "rescuing" art from the market and making a virtue of necessity: bad sales become the hallmark of "good" art.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • turning a defeat in the marketplace into a victory in the aesthetic realm--the "fine" arts were now precisely those that did not have a big impact on the public.
  • Having traced the impact of the newly developed marketplace on the definition of art, Woodmansee turns in her second chapter to an examination of its impact on the development of the modern concept of the author.
  • As writers moved from an aristocratic patronage system to a democratic market-based system, attempting for the first time to earn a living on their own as professionals, they found the legal foundation necessary for this shift not yet in place. Germany had not yet developed a concept of intellectual property and, consequently, book piracy was rampant. In order to put an end to piracy and claim a portion of the profits from book sales for themselves, writers had to prove that ownership of a work extends beyond the mere physical foundation to which pirates had reduced it.
  • Succeeding copyright legislation turned Fichte's financially-motivated theory into law
  • Recent theory has made much of the "death" of the author; Woodmansee completes the sketch by narrating the story of the author's birth.
  • If Moritz, Fichte, and Schiller were interested in reforming the "supply side" of artistic production in response to the crisis of the new reading market, Johann Adam Bergk sought to work on the "demand side." Woodmansee shows how Bergk's hefty 416-page tome "The Art of Reading Books" (1799) was a response to Addison's advocacy of widespread leisure reading in the early years of the century.
  • Bergk seeks "to carry forward Addison's project under the radically altered conditions of literature in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century" (p. 93) by expressly detailing not so much what should be read as how books should be read, advocating an active and creative reader who, he hoped, would "automatically make the 'right' choices" once he/she learned to read, becoming "too sophisticated to derive much pleasure from the growing literature of sheer diversion" and turning instead to classical authors for leisure reading (p. 100).
  • After a brief, but interesting, excursus on the role of gender in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory that focuses on the career of the first popular German woman writer, Sophie von La Roche, whose gender denied [End Page 967] her (theoretical) ownership of her works,
  • Woodmansee ends her book by returning to the legal realm, detailing Wordsworth's defense of the Copyright Bill of 1842, which in effect legislated his anti-market aesthetic theory of 1815 and encouraged the production of "difficult" art for posterity rather than for the contemporary book-buying public. The law had finally intervened and provided support for those who would "rescue" art from the market.
  • In The Author, Art, and the Market, Woodmansee provides an exemplary model for integrating aesthetics and cultural studies,
  • In her insistence that "art" is not a stable concept, but rather is contingent upon material concerns, Woodmansee points a way to treating this larger history, in whose legacy we live and which we help to fashion.
Nele Noppe

Big Content's depraved indifference - Boing Boing - 0 views

www.boingboing.net/...big-contents-deprave.html

copyright law censorship economy politics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 08 May 10 - Cached
  • But they are indifferent to the point of depravity to the totalitarian, censorious and restrictive consequences of DRM, filters and liability. They aren't moustache-twirling supervillains. They're greedy, blinkered provincials and hypercompetitive macho bullies who are unwilling to look past the short-term benefits to the consequences. They think only of how things will work, not how they'll fail.
  • But they're a distant second to a rearchitecting of our law and technology to create the preconditions for repression, corruption and suppression of dissent.
  • Or will we allow a small gang of selfish and short-sighted entertainment companies to fatally compromise the infrastructure of the 21st century to add a few points to its bottom line?
Nele Noppe

Otaku2 - Doujinshi and Law - 0 views

www.otaku2.com/articleView.php

non-academic dojinshi manga manga_industry fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 20 Apr 09 - Cached
  • An increasingly popular outlet for manga enthusiasts is doujinshi, meaning both fan-produced manga and the “circles” that create them. They flout copyright law and rearticulate the characters they love, and their numbers are many—the largest public get-together in Japan is not a World Cup or Olympic gathering, but rather a doujinshi market called Comike.
  • Legally, fans can produce whatever they want insofar as it’s not blatantly for profit or obscene.
  • Researcher Gunnar Hempel, 27, a Sophia University MA who wrote his thesis on the phenomenon, estimates there are 8,000 Japanese living off doujinshi, but stresses the number could be greater thanks to digital publishing. A “professional doujinshi” artist scrapes by on some 12,000 yen a month, but can gross 32,000 yen from large sales events.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • that allowing fans to produce keeps them interested, provides free market research, and cultivates new talent.
  • This year, Kadokawa made a landmark deal allowing “mad movies” of their "Suzumiya Haruhi" anime as long as fans marked posts on YouTube and Nico Nico Douga with Kadokawa logos. Haruhi remains their flagship series, in part because of internet support.
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