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Nele Noppe

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

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    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

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

  • 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."
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  • 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

Open source - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • 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

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

  • This situation deserves scrutiny, especially because fan fiction is becoming [End Page 118] increasingly visible to non-initiates through major media outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom, indicating that the genre is moving away from the margins of American and British culture
  • The mainstreaming of an alternative form of cultural production is nearly always synonymous with commercialization;
  • Over the past decades of sharing their transformative works, fan fiction readers and writers have generally felt wary of commodifying a form of cultural production that is essentially derivative and perhaps subject to copyright infringement lawsuits.
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  • Digital appropriation artists have developed a number of monetization models: royalties, distribution agreements, reasonably priced licenses that permit remix practitioners to sell their appropriations legally, and small-scale compensation intended only to reimburse remixers for their outlay. Although fan filmmakers and game modders have experimented with these models, fan fiction writers have not conducted similar experiments in marketing their works.
  • Fanfic authors who think that selling appropriative art is always and absolutely against the law are mistaken. No such case law exists, and many appropriating artists make money from their work today without constantly encountering legal trouble.
  • Why, then, do fic writers resist earning income from their output? Many scholars of fan studies claim that fan fiction is, and must remain, free—that is, "free of charge," but also "free of the social controls that monetization would likely impose on it"—because it is inherently a gift culture, as Hellekson describes in this issue. In fact, even the fan organization, the Organization of Transformative Works, one of whose goals is to redefine fan works as transformative and therefore legal, states: "The mission of the OTW is first and foremost to protect the fan creators who work purely for love and share their works for free within the fannish gift economy."
  • Therefore, writing fan fiction for personal gain—financial, psychological, or emotional—aligns with the fact that self-enrichment is already inherently an important motivation for women to produce and consume fanfic. For some women, belonging to an affinity group or discussing stories with fellow writers and readers is not the primary reason for engaging with this type of fiction.
  • The rewards of participating in a commercial market for this genre might be just as attractive as the rewards of participating in a community's gift culture; and the existence of commercial markets for goods does not typically eliminate parallel gift economies.
  • If fans successfully professionalize and monetize fan fiction, the amateur culture of fic writing will not disappear.
  • Although fans have legitimate anxieties about fan fiction being corrupted or deformed by its entry into the commercial sphere, I argue that there is far greater danger of this happening if fan fiction is not commodified by its own producers, but by parties foreign to fandom who do not understand why or for whom the genre works, and who will promote it for purposes it is unsuited for, ignoring the aspects that make it attractive and dear to its readers.
  • However, an even greater danger than this is that fan fiction may not be monetized at all, in which case no one, particularly women authors, will earn the financial rewards of fanfic's growing popularity. Only the corporate owners of the media properties that fic authors so creatively elaborate on will see economic gain from these writers' volunteer work.
  • if women can formulate a model for the monetization of their artworks, the gap will be narrowed.
  • In the absence of such experimentation, women writing fanfic for free today risk institutionalizing a lack of compensation for all women that practice this art in the future. Woolf asked of her forebears, "What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?" Will our generation answer that we have been giving our talents away as gifts, rather than insisting on the worth of our work?
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  • [End Page 124]
  • [End Page 122]
  • [End Page 120]
  • [End Page 119]
Nele Noppe

melannen: So, a long, long time ago, before I had - 0 views

  • Given that I generally approve of fair use and quotation and derivative/transformative work with or without permission, and am pretty radically anti-intellectual-property in general, and strongly support acafandom in using internet postings in published papers, I ought to just be happy that somebody (somebody who I rather admire as a writer and scholar) has noticed my un-expert little translation and thought it worth talking about.But, well, what pisses me off? Is that the journal's publisher wants 25 dollars from me in exchange for the privilege of looking for only 24 hours at the article about my work that they published without even notifying me.
  • I am not, I want to note here, upset at the author of the paper, or its existence, or the fact that he chose to publish in the venue he did. I am *deeply* upset at the system in which venues of choice for academic work lock away professionals' discussions while amateurs can actually have the free and unfettered forum for sharing thought that academics of a hundred years ago could only have dreamed of, and academics of the modern world are expected to choose not to participate in.
  • What bothers me, I guess, is when that locked professional world doesn't stay immured behind its walls. Someone who has probably spent his entire adult life in an academic world, where everybody has institutional support that lets them access things like ridiculously expensive subscription journals, is coming in to *my* world, where everybody works for nothing and publishes for the joy of sharing freely, and dragging our work back behind the wall with him, where we can't touch it anymore.
Nele Noppe

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

  • 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]).
David Sydney

Inspiring and Sensational Sales Training - 1 views

Dave as a motivational speaker was extraordinarily exciting and entertaining. He gave us really great insights and we were engaged in all that he was about to share all throughout the train-ing. As...

started by David Sydney on 04 Oct 12 no follow-up yet
Nele Noppe

Excludability - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • In economics, a good or service is said to be excludable when it is possible to prevent people who have not paid for it from having access to it, and non-excludable when it is not possible to do so.
  • An architecturally pleasing building, such as Tower Bridge, creates an aesthetic non-excludable good, which can be enjoyed by anyone who happens to look at it. It is difficult to prevent people from gaining this benefit (although people have tried, by forbidding amateurs from taking photographs of certain sites [1]).
  • The ease and availability of file sharing technology has made many forms of information, especially music, films and ebooks non-excludable, often to the disagreement of the content producers.
Nele Noppe

Rivalry (economics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • In economics, a good is considered either rivalrous (rival) or nonrival. Rival goods are goods whose consumption by one consumer prevents simultaneous consumption by other consumers[1]
  • Most goods, both durable and nondurable, are rival goods.
  • A hammer is a durable rival good. One person's use of the hammer presents a significant barrier to others who desire to use that hammer at the same time. However, the first user does not "use up" the hammer, meaning that some rival goods can still be shared through time. An apple is a nondurable rival good: once an apple is eaten, it is "used up" and can no longer be eaten by others. Non-tangible goods can also be rivalrous. Examples include the ownership of radio spectrums and domain names. In more general terms, almost all private goods are rivalrous.
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  • Most examples of nonrival goods are intangible.
  • More generally, most intellectual property is nonrival.
  • Goods that are both nonrival and non-excludable are called public goods.
  • generally accepted by mainstream economists that the market mechanism will not provide public goods, so these goods have to be produced by other means, including government provision.
Nele Noppe

Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values - 1 views

  • there are different strains of digital humanities. Bethany might define those strains as “old” and “new.” I’d probably divide things along more disciplinary lines, looking to a tradition of digital humanities that comes out of literature and one that comes out of public history. If I had to place myself along these axes I’d probably land where the “new” and “history” strains meet. There are, of course, lots of other ways to slice the pie.
  • digital humanities starts to look a lot like a social network. Indeed, in some ways digital humanities increasingly is a social network built, for better or worse, on Twitter’s platform.
  • It takes its values from the Internet
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  • The procrastination principle (or “end-to-end argument”) is a design principle that states that most features of a network should be left to users to invent and implement, that the network should should be as simple as possible and that complexity should be developed at its end points not at its core, that the network should be dumb and the terminals should be smart. This is precisely how the Internet works. T
  • There is an analogous value in digital humanities. Innovation in digital humanities frequently comes from the edges of the scholarly community rather than from its center—small institutions and even individual actors with few resources are able to make important innovations.
  • Digital humanities makes some similar assumptions in its commitments to open access, open source, and collaboration. As Bethany has said elsewhere, “how many other academic disciplines or interdisciplines work so hard to manifest as ‘a community of practice that is solidary, open, welcoming and freely accessible’ — a ‘collective experience,’ a ‘common good?’” We allow allow all comers, we assume that their contributions will be positive, and we expect that they will share their work for the benefit of the community at large.
  • It follows, therefore, that if digital humanities is a social network, then one of the things that will help us understand it better is looking at the things around which the network coalesces, the stuff digital humanists like
  • Like: Twitter / Don’t like: Facebook.
  • Like: Agile development / Dislike: long planning cycles
  • Like: DIY / Dislike: Outsourcing.
  • Like: PHP / Dislike: C++.
  • Like: Extramural funding / Dislike: Intramural funding.
Nele Noppe

Project MUSE - Cinema Journal - Introduction - 1 views

  • These fans feel a deep sense of community and are engaged in a complex subcultural economy—using work time to write about copyrighted characters, teaching one another how to use complex technological equipment to create zines for free, and so on
  • fan vids address many of the issues raised during my search for a perfect cover image: each draws from a variety of sources that may be familiar to a particular community of media fans but often are more obscure to other TV viewers. Explaining how and why a particular scene resonates for a fan may indeed rely on the shared knowledge of a story, vid, or central fan discussion.
  • The story of media fandom is one steeped in economic and gender concerns, from the beginning, when women began creating the narratives commercial media wouldn't offer—dominated as it is by male producers—
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  • Some scholars posit that today all viewers are interpellated as fans, that they are invited to engage fannishly by creating content and engaging within an imaginary online community. Does this mean that the old subcultural stance of media fandom has become obsolete in the face of a general shift in media consumption? Moreover, if such convergence can allow fans to become parts of the media industry, should fans embrace these options? And how are these economic issues deeply gendered if predominantly female spaces embrace gift cultures while men are more likely to turn their fannish endeavors into for-profit projects?
  • Fandom is always more complicated than the stories we tell about it, and scholars need to be careful not to create an imaginary feminist idyll. Simply inverting the gaze may keep subject/object relations unquestioned—a concern that has become especially important as queer and trans studies have complicated any naive feminist binaries that may have held sway during early years of media fandom. Likewise, as [End Page 106] De Kosnik and Russo illustrate, an unequivocal embrace of noncommodified fan work remains problematic within a world that requires paying the bills.
Nele Noppe

A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture - 0 views

  • Fan community clearly cannot be constituted by anyone other than the fans themselves. This tenet remains central to the constitution of fan culture, just as it is continually renewed by the exchange of symbolic gifts.
  • they exchange personally charged aspects of themselves in a gift culture whose field of value specifically excludes profit, further separating their community from the larger (male-gendered) community of commerce.
  • To engage is to click, read, comment, write, make up a song and sing it; to hotlink, to create a video, to be invited to move on, to come over here or go over there—to become part of a larger metatext, the off-putting jargon and the unspoken rules meaning that only this group of that people can negotiate the terrain. Within this circle of [End Page 113] community—and in media fandom, women overwhelmingly make up this community1—learning how to engage is part of the initiation, the us versus them, the fan versus the nonfan.
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  • At the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation. The general understanding is that if no money is exchanged, the copyright owners have no reason to sue because they retain exclusive rights to make money from their property
  • The notion of the gift is thus central to fan economy as it currently stands, although, as Abigail De Kosnik argues in her essay in this issue, it may be time for the community to consider creating an alternative model that will permit women to profit.
  • This exchange in the fan community is made up of three elements related to the gift: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.2 The tension and negotiation between the three result in fan creation of social relationships that are constructed voluntarily on the basis of a shared interest—perhaps a media source like a TV show or, perhaps, fandom itself. Fan communities as they are currently comprised, require exchanges of gifts: you do not pay to read fan fiction or watch a fan-made music vid.
  • Fans insist on a gift economy, not a commercial one, but it goes beyond self-protective attempts to fly under the radar of large corporations, their lawyers, and their cease-and-desist letters. Online media fandom is a gift culture in the symbolic realm in which fan gift exchange is performed in complex, even exclusionary symbolic ways that create a stable nexus of giving, receiving, and reciprocity that results in a community occupied with theorizing its own genderedness.
  • But the items exchanged have no value outside their fannish context. In fact, it is likely that they do not literally exist; fandom's move to the Internet means that the items exchanged are hyperreal and capable of being endlessly replicated.
  • Money is presented less as a payment than as a token of enjoyment.
  • The items offered as gifts are not destroyed but are incorporated into a multivocal dialogue that creates a metatext, the continual composition of which creates a community, and the rhetorical stance of that dialogue is to create a gendered space.
  • The gifts have value within the fannish economy in that they are designed to create and cement a social structure, but they themselves are not meaningful outside their context.
  • Each proffered item represents an aspect of the giver: time, talent, love, desire. The result—"personally charged"12 gifts, responses in kind—generates a female-gendered community, but the role of the individual within that community is equally crucial.
  • When the rules of exchange are broken, the punishment is swift. One recent incident that exemplifies this was the attempt of (male) venture capitalists to profit financially from (female-generated) fan fiction.
  • The FanLib debacle illustrates that attempts to encroach on the meaning of the gift and to perform a new kind of (commerce-based) transaction with fan-created items will not be tolerated. Henry Jenkins notes, "They simply hadn't really listened to, talked with, or respected the existing grassroots community which surrounded the production and distribution of fan fiction."17 The site attempted to bypass the artwork-generating [End Page 117] fan community altogether—a serious misreading of FanLib's audience. FanLib broke the rules of the community's engagement by misreading "community" as "commodity," and the site failed thanks to intense backlash, an expression of fannish defense of their field of value.
Nele Noppe

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

  • 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
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  • 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

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

  • 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
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  • 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

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

  • 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
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  • 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.
Nele Noppe

Of Otakus and Fansubs - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • 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

Scans_Daily TOSed off Livejournal: If Only Someone Owned The Goddamned Servers | Organi... - 0 views

  • To destroy this kind of discussion in the name of preventing piracy is exactly the kind of act that ISPs and social networking services like Livejournal protest when, for instance, copyright holders demand that they be shut down because some fraction of their users are using their infrastructure to share pirated content.
  • "if Scans_Daily were a male dominated community it would have not been suspended like this. Why? Because I don’t think it would have been on a site like Livejournal."
  • Female fans populate social network sites run by panicky male-dominated corporations who want to make money from selling advertising to women, but don’t really have the brass ovaries to deal with hosting female interaction on the internet. It’s like they expect feathered sugar with a hint of spice and are shocked to discover girls have locker room talk and smoke in the bathroom. Male fan communities seem to be owned and operated by like-minded males
Nele Noppe

mary_j_59 - 19th-century Mores (yay!) - 0 views

  • Snape is the head ot Slytherin house, and that house has a foreign taint; while all the other founders of Hogwarts have good Anglo Saxon names, Salazar Slytherin shares a Christian name with a Portuguese dictator. Naturally, Slytherin must be the “evil” house. Then there are the foreign students who participate in the tournament in GOF.
  • Worse yet, they have no compunction about "cheating" humans, and have, it seems, started several wars. This picture of the goblins combines several of the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes.
Nele Noppe

Semantic Shifts: where 'The Tudors' resembles OEL manga « A Face Made for Rad... - 0 views

  • clothes are as loaded with meaning as language. Visual semantics matter too.
  • In Tudor homes, where bedrooms were often pathways to other rooms or shared by several people, where there was no heating except open fires and fuel was scarce, well-to-do people usually dressed for bed in a nightgown, a nightcap and stockings. Even with a fire burning in  the hearth, glass or horn in the windows, and heavy bed-curtains, Tudor bedrooms could be chilly places. The modern viewer doesn’t take all this into account and expects to see near-total nudity in sex scenes.
  • Calling this historical drama, its clothes historical costumes, is like calling comics made by non-Japanese people in their own countries ‘manga’.
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  • The name raises the expectation that there will be some relationship to the genuine article,
  • Maybe I’ll find it less annoying if I re-label it titillation, or visual chocolate: it certainly isn’t history
  • Maybe I’ll find it less annoying if I re-label it titillation, or visual chocolate: it certainly isn’t history
  •  
    "clothes are as loaded with meaning as language. Visual semantics matter too."
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