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What Lawyers Can Learn From Manga
jedigeek links to this article from Lawrence Lessig, writing "This article explains the interesting phenomenon of dojinshi, and why dojinshi helps fuel the production of original manga. From a western-perspective, dojinshi breaks copyright laws, but, according to the article's author: 'The law is a rough-edged tool. It was not crafted by geniuses of economics.' In a time when laws like the DMCA exist and are being exploited, this is certainly food for thought."
Lawyers do NOT want companies thinking like this article suggests. They WANT companies starting lawsuits over the smallest of violations, real or imagined.
It's how they get themselves paid.
Why would they want anything else? They coach their clients strongly to persue every available legal option by using the tried and true "scare tactic" marketing technique: "If you DON'T sue them, think what the NEXT person might do - you don't want your product to get away from you!".
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
"There's a lesson in this example that executives in the content industry should think about before they sign away their businesses to lawyers. The law is a rough-edged tool. It was not crafted by geniuses of economics. How it affects new and different markets is uncertain. A smart business therefore asks not whether the use of its content is "theft," but whether the use of its content will (eventually at least) benefit it. The business of business is to make business, not to purify the world of copyright violations..."
Is it just me or doues this sound like the definition of business for it's own sake? I realize the business of business is to make profit, but that statement make it sound as if the law is a secondary concern, an inconvinience that need be followed only if you're in a good mood.
And of course the law is a rough edged tool when viewed upon from a purely business stand point. That's because most laws aren't designed with only business in mind. There are these things called "people" too...
Oh, and didn't they know that purging the world of copywrite violations creates business too? Maybe they should have had somebody else write this piece...
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From the article:
Management should begin to demand a business justification for copyright litigation. How does this legal action advance the bottom line? How will it grow markets or increase consumer demand for our products? Will calling our customers criminals increase consumer loyalty?
If only more executives would ask these questions. Few businesses have realized the true power of fans and fan or user created content. Just look at the classic example of Half Life and Counter Strike. Where did these ideas that copyright law trumps the copyright holder's profits come from anyway?
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Apparently, in Japan, creating works based on someone's creations is considered flattery towards the creator. Sounds good to me - I'd be pretty happy if someone thought enough of my work to want to make works derived from it.
Bear in mind, though, that there is a very fine line between flattery and profiteering off someone elses hard work...
Dude... what is your problem? Some people enjoy anime, let them be. Personally, I enjoy anime AND I'm married. So much for your theory about pimply faced teens that can't get any action. My wife watches it with me and enjoys it just as much as I do. The story lines are facinating and MUCH more interesting than most movies with flesh and blood people in them. Of course I also enjoy porn... nuthin' wrong with that either. My wife agrees on that point too. Methinks YOU may have been the pimply faced teen with no action. Come on... admit it. You'll be a lot happier once you do and move on...
Un-news
As usual, Lessig makes some great points. Unfortunately, expecting the litigation industry to learn from dojinshi is like expecting the pharmaceutical industry to embrace naturopathic healing. As he says at the end, it's really the business leaders themselves who have to learn this lesson and put it into action, taking their companies back from their attorneys, and in the process (quite incidentally) letting us participate in our own culture rather than merely "consuming" it.
Does it occur to you guys that most of the stories worth telling have already been told? Try sitting down for 30mins and creating a short-story. Then submit it here and watch all the flames come in about how you just ripped off a, b, and c to hack together your story.
Originality is one of the rarest things around. We've all been exposed to so many different stories, movies, etc that there's really not much we haven't seen. If one in 10,000 artists actually does something original, how do you propose to build an economy off of that?
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
"To many, business is beneath the law. When a Sony lawyer threatened a fan of the company's Aibo robotic dog, who had posted a hack online to teach the dog to dance to jazz, he or she no doubt never thought to ask exactly how making the Aibo dog more valuable to customers could possibly harm Sony. Harm was not the issue, a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was: consumers should be banned from hacking Sony dogs, whether or not it was to Sony's benefit."
You know, I'm a little surprised Sony (of all places) doesn't understand this concept. It would be hard to argue that one of Quake n's most appetizing features was the mods available to it. Though ID didn't make money off the mods themselves, it helped make sure that many many MANY copies of Quake were sold. Sony, with its game division, should be eyeballing Id more carefully than that.
Is it just me or does this sound like the definition of business for it's own sake? I realize the business of business is to make profit, but that statement make it sound as if the law is a secondary concern, an inconvinience that need be followed only if you're in a good mood.
Lessig is NOT arguing that businesses should break the law, he's arguing that content holders should recognize when it is in their best interest to enforce their "legal rights" and when it's best to just let it pass.
If my rights are violated, I can CHOOSE whether or not to press charges. If I choose not to, then there's nothing stopping anyone from violating those rights, especially if I make my intentions public. If I decide that certain rights aren't worth defending, or as Lessig points out are actually more profitable to me if I allow them to be "violated," then no one else can come in and tell me I must defend myself. In general it's not a smart idea to give away your rights, but perhaps Lessig has a point here that some laws and rights don't always protect they way you want them to and in fact you'd be better off not enforcing them.
In practice this may happen more often than you think. Sometimes it's not worth the trouble hauling someone into court when you can deal with it person to person. Even the GPL itself "gives away" rights the law gives to copyright holders. In this case, such free software advocates feel the loss of traditional copyright privileges is outweighed by the gains of free-as-in-speech software.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
"Originality is one of the rarest things around. We've all been exposed to so many different stories, movies, etc that there's really not much we haven't seen. If one in 10,000 artists actually does something original, how do you propose to build an economy off of that?"
You mean like the entertainment economy that's doing very well today?
"Does it occur to you guys that most of the stories worth telling have already been told?"
Did it occur to you that there's a lot more to content than getting from act I to act IV?
Was the interesting part about Ghostbusters the way they defeated Zuul, or was the interesting part about it watching these 3 guys (eventually 4) start an unusual business?
I swear, people ridiculously over-value plot.
The original poster had it all wrong, the point is not to ignore the law to do whatever you want but rather realizing the law is a tool that you need not always apply. Just because someone copies content of yours does not *nessicarily* mean your business will suffer as a result, and a smart business that realizes that can take advantage over another that spends precious resources fighting for ill-thought governmental policy.
It's all about being a tool of the law, vs. using the law as a tool. I guess that's the short summary I was trying to arrive at before.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I doubt the RIAA or MPAA really cares that much about derivative works. You don't hear Weird Al getting sued for doing parodies of popular songs, for instance. The RIAA and MPAA are concerned about bootleg copies of their work. Examples like this are not going to convince them that p2p sharing of their material and burning copies of cds is not costing them business.
Vote for Pedro
Before technology made that theoretically possible, having elected representatives was probably supposed to get as close to that as practically possible. Of course there would need to be VERY strong community stability controls to prevent the law swinging wildy with fads. Even something as simple as a slashdot discussion has layers of moderation and meta-moderation, and you still get a ton of junk posts just because they can. Something like the Linux kernel depends on a trusted dictator, which is works when you can have many different software implementations and ignore all but the effective ones. We can't afford to allow that with laws, we have to pick ONE right law for everyone before implementation.
Today, I think the biggest barrier to progress towards the community ideal is that in America campaign contribution money can apparently override logic via blitz advertising for votes. That effectively breaks "one man, one vote". I'm not an American nor do I live in America so I can't directly participate in that process, but it still affects me at home because those policies are exported via political pressure on other countries.
DMCA-like policy is only one of a number of unpopular policies that are being pushed on legislatures worldwide by corporate lobbying. In most countries corporations don't have as much influence over politics, so more and more internationally we are seeing government-to-government pressure from American politicians who are apparently legally allowed to owe big contributors big favors.
Maybe American campaign finance reform is the way to break that barrier down, make American individuals votes count more than dollars again, and other individuals in their own countries too.
Where I live, political campaigning by individual politicians is limited to 6 weeks before the election and must stop the day before the election. Individual electorate politicians have a campaign budget limited to merely thousands of dollars, enough for volunteers to put up posters and local some local media advertising but not enough to blitz the mass media. Penalties for exceeding this spending limit go beyond removal of that individual from office. The budgets for political parties are not as limited, but any party that can prove signed up membership of more than a certain number of people can get government contribution towards equal TV advertising time. This means that campaign money is not essential to a party getting a message publicised. No guarantee people will watch, but still a better chance.
Not having to listen to a two-year run-up to every four-yearly election is one of the minor benefits of fairer campaign finance, the major one is that people's votes would count for more in making the law.