fanfic forensics

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."

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

Some possible pitfalls of crowdsourcing include the following: Added costs to bring a project to an acceptable conclusion. Increased likelihood that a crowdsourced project will fail due to lack of monetary motivation, too few participants, lower quality of work, lack of personal interest in the project, global language barriers, or difficulty managing a large-scale, crowdsourced project. Below-market wages[20] or no wages at all. Barter agreements are often associated with crowdsourcing. No written contracts, non-disclosure agreements, or employee agreements or agreeable terms with crowdsourced employees. Difficulties maintaining a working relationship with crowdsourced workers throughout the duration of a project. Susceptibility to faulty results caused by targeted, malicious work efforts. Though some critics believe crowdsourcing exploits or abuses individuals for their labor, studies into the motivations of crowds have not yet shown that crowds feel exploited. On the contrary, many individuals in the crowd experience significant benefits from their participation in crowdsourcing applications.[21][22][23][24] Further authors discuss both risks and rewards of using crowdsourcing as a means of balancing global inequalities.[25]

The term has become popular with businesses, authors, and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.

In 2006, the FLOSSPOLS survey (a broad survey of open source usage and development, funded by the EU) found that only 1.5% of open source contributors are women.

Some open source projects, like Ubuntu and Drupal, are known as more women-friendly environments. Ubuntu’s code of conduct, for instance, set expectations about appropriate behaviour and help foster an environment where women feel more welcome and less threatened. DrupalChix say that Drupal has 10% women on the project, thanks to the supportive environment that group helps create. But to the best of my knowledge, there are only two open source projects in the world which a) have a significant number of developers, and b) are majority female. They are An Archive Of Our Own (a project of the Organization for Transformative Works) and Dreamwidth.

Though I’m loath to draw sweeping conclusions from these two projects, I do see commonalities that might help answer the eternal question of “How do we get more women into Open Source?” Start with women from day one, in leadership and other roles. Stand for something that women actually care about, and don’t be afraid to state it up front and loudly. Make efforts to recruit women regardless of technical experience. Recruit from existing, active, creative communities who know how to communicate and collaborate online. Offer training, peer support, and activities to teach coding from the ground up.

Fanwork The creative work done by fans for fannish purposes.

Media fandom ''Media fandom is generally used to refer to fictional, Western fandoms based on movies or television'' (from http://fanlore.org/wiki/Media_fandom). Books, comics, video games, anime/manga, and real people fandoms often intersect with, but also exist in parallel to, media fandom.

Remix culture Remix culture is a neologism that describes a culture of creativity based on previous creations. This is in contrast with permission culture, which aims to bind derivative creativity to the permission of the license holders. Both terms are simplified abstractions for current political and legal positions. (adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_culture)

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.

But then that’s an argument Henry Jenkins has repeatedly made, here, for example, that parody tends to be male- and industry-preferred whereas the more emotional engagement of fanvids is often dismissed out of hand.

Vidding thus is an art form that is both too subtly critical (because always inflected with fannish passion) and too polished aesthetically (because the aesthetic dimension does matter above and beyond the critical point being made) to, perhaps, fit into a quick overview of YouTube remixes. Still, as both a vibrant subculture of critical interpretive if not outright political remix culture and an sophisticated artistic subculture with its own aesthetic value system, fan vids certainly deserve to be included in any “Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing.”

The academy has often been accused of unrealistic attempts of objectivity in the humanities in particular but even in the sciences. After English departments in the seventies destroyed the idea of an objectively created value system that can separate great from merely mediocre and bad literature, after anthropology departments realized in the eighties that observers cannot ever remain neutral and always bring their own biases to their field research; after queer theory and gender theory and critical race studies have brought the personal into the academic in the nineties; after affect theory has established itself as a field of study since–it amazed me that vidding may indeed have been overlooked in its merging of love and inquiry, affect and analysis, celebration and criticism.

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.

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.

Information is particularly suited to gift economies, as information is a nonrival good and can be gifted at practically no cost.[18][19]

Traditional scientific research can be thought of as an information gift economy. Scientists produce research papers and give them away through journals and conferences.

In his essay "Homesteading the Noosphere", noted computer programmer Eric S. Raymond opined that open-source software developers have created "a 'gift culture' in which participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity away".[22]

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.