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(Chatsworth, CA) The Animation Co-Op Defense League (ACDL), a consortium of Adult Animation Distributors & Studio's, is pleased to announce they have made significant progress in their efforts to educate and combat the proliferation of web sites illegally hosting and offering for sale selling unlicensed content which is owned by the major Animation studios.

Said Crawford, “Every day we speak with web sites, tube sites, and affiliate programs, who have knowingly or unknowingly displayed content that they do not have the rights for. We have discovered that some of them were misinformed and want to legally comply with the Co-Op's members to obtain legitimate licenses to resell the material. This year alone we have already taken down a total of 10,738 infringers, including: 5006 Movie file-sharing links, 2123 Picture file-sharing links and 3609 Blog posts.

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.

Manga sales in the US have tripled in the past four years.

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.

It is about the spread of ideas, Mr Lu said. A comic does not need to be anti-government to be restricted from being printed; it simply needs to offer ideas that could be interpreted as being so. In essence, the world’s next super power is not keen on super heroes.The first Chinese comics were used as propaganda during the Japanese occupation as a way to build resentment. During Mao’s 10-year Cultural Revolution, manga was used to teach communist ideals to the largely illiterate masses. “We want to export our own culture,” said Zheng Jun, the rock star turned writer behind the comic Tibetan Rock Dog, which is gaining interest from the Japanese animation company Mad House towards turning it into a movie.As China continues to export its own culture, it could be used as part of the nation’s soft power, Mr Douglas said.

                                  H-JAPAN                                April 5, 2009 From: David Slater <d-slater@sophia.ac.jp> Graduate Fieldwork Workshop April 18th, 2009 Sophia University (Yotsuya Campus) http://www.fla.sophia.ac.jp/about/location.html Bldg. #10, room 301 10 am-noon ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Title: Economic competitive advantage and cultural exports: how Japan got round cultural distance to claim global leadership in comic book publishing. Julien Vig (Sociology MSc candidate at Hitotsubashi University and research student at the Institute of Innovation Research) ABSTRACT: Since the 1990s, the joint influences of nation branding efforts and the increasing globalization of the economic and technological contexts within which media organizations operate have brought upon an era where America's dominant position as an exporter of contents is becoming increasingly challenged by new entrants, often industrial consortia backed by state agencies. Serious contenders may include India's Bollywood movies, Brazil's telenovelas, or South Korea's array of dynamic entertainment industries. Yet beyond the cultural significance of the phenomenon, their actual export performance only qualifies them as cultural niches when compared to the incumbent transnational American corporations, whose distribution monopolies and market power make their economic control of global flows a reality that remains hardly escapable. Japan, however, distinguished itself by securing global leadership in no less than three content industries. In videogames, animation and comic books, it stands out a leading exporting country, boasting impressive trade surpluses with America and Europe. There is a solid, established interdisciplinary body of international literature dedicated to Japan's videogame industry, and the anime industry has been similarly attracting increasing attention in the past ten years. The comic book industry on the other hand, arguably because of its limited legitimacy and economic significance outside the $4bn+ Japanese domestic market, remains largely understudied except for comic book and popular culture scholars. An overlooked specificity of the comic book industry stems from the most peculiar pattern of globalization it has experienced. From the 1950s onwards, the United States, France and Japan each developed their own publishing paradigm and standard formats: *comic book*, *album* and *manga*. These path-dependent creative and industrial trajectories would hardly interact until the second half of the 1990s. After their late encounter, Japanese manga emerged as the undisputed winner, reaching shares of about 1/3 of total comic book sales in value in both France and America in 2007. This achievement has interesting theoretical implications. On the one hand, media scholars showed that the primary vehicles for the development of * contra-flows* (defined as non-Western media flows which counter the previously established one-way information flow from western to non-west countries) are geographic, cultural or linguistic regionalism; yet this framework cannot account for how Japanese manga could succeed in Western markets, as none of the above patterns seems to apply. On the other hand, management scholars, in the dominant models of firm- and industry-level internationalization, accept as a prerequisite that agents are actively and strategically trying to internationalize; yet Japanese manga publishers long maintained a passive attitude towards market expansion outside of Asia. Drawing upon fieldwork in France and Japan, international comparisons of industry data and evidence from a consumer survey conducted in France in December 2008, my research aims to uncover the economics at work behind the success of Japanese manga on the global comic book scene. What are the conditions for the emergence of sustainable contra-flows? The study of Japan's prominent success in exporting domestic contents may hold the answer to this question and provide a blueprint for later entrants in the global cultural market. -- David H. Slater, Ph.D. Faculty of Liberal Arts Sophia University, Tokyo The Sophia server rejects emails at times. Should your mail to me get returned, please resend to: dhslater@gmail.com. Sorry for the inconvenience. 

The study found that about 35% of people were influenced by a manga to get into their hobby. By contrast, anime and movies came in at around 15% each, novels at 14.5%, games at 11.5%, and TV dramas at 8.4%.

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.