Slashdot Mirror
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."
I dont know if I would call it an "obsession" any more than I would call the US' dependence (to one level or another) on newspapers and "obsession". Manga is more of a cultural thing.
Apparently, slash is big in japan.. except they actually have the talent to do slash with art, rather than slash with badly-spelled-web-log-entries.
*sigh*
I was given a book on how to draw Manga.. and the
"rules" of character design, etc, are very very interesting.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
One argument for the types of laws and number of lawyers in America is that we have a very complex society that happens to provide a very good environment for business. Only a small percentage of lawyers are litigators, the majority are part of business. Business benefits not just from laws and lawyers to protect its interests, but also from predictability of its relationships. That's why all the big companies are incorporated in Delaware -- its corporation law is considered very good, and it is a consistent standard.
Anyway, businesses ask themselves all the time whether what they're doing will increase profit (that's about *all* Enron, Worldcom, et al. apparently did) rather than suing over an abstraction of intellectual property theft. The DMCA and Sonny Bono Art were pushed because it was thought they would be profitable.
BTW, it is frequently represented that the U.S. has many time more lawyers than Japan, overlooking another cultural difference. Many Japanese "lawyers" work for companies and perform the sorts of tasks that in the U.S. would be done by someone with a JD. We have this in the U.S. to a lesser extent, as with accountants who are in a gray area of practicing law by interpreting, applying, and advising clients on the tax code.
I welcome the cultural comparisons. It's always interesting to see how the next guy does things. Isn't is funny, though, how quickly all the calls of the 80's for America to follow the Japanese business model evaporated several years ago? Different tactics work at different times -- and different philosophies for different cultures.
On copyright violations -- it's a shame that the maturation of fair use signalled by Acuff-Rose has been reversed by recent legislation.
Nor can Hilary Rosen, or Jack Valenti or any of those pinhead types. See, they probably have never heard 99.9% of the music they represent, nor seen 99.9 % of the movies. They're a perfect example of the cancer that's killing innovation (and with it, the economy) in the U.S. Today.
Here's an even better example:
E-Books:
My wife loves E-books, they're cheap and she can buy and download them online (read: Impulse buy for instant gratification). What does drive her crazy though is that she can't print most of them. She has to be tied to a computer to read them. So, she winds up buying a mix of books or goes to the library.
Enter Elcomsoft...a Russian company that can fix this...which will make my wife happy so she'll buy even MORE e-books. Another thing that Elcomsoft's product can do is open up an entire NEW MARKET..the blind book market. See, the millions of blind people in the world can't USE
E-books, but with Elcomsoft's program these books can be read on a standard text reader that many of these blind people use. Instead of JUMPING FOR JOY at this innovative product that can result in MILLIONS MORE E-books being sold, the industry sues it out of existance. Now, explain to me how THAT made any sense? Like I'm a six year old.
About a year and a half ago or so, an Everquest player had his game account banned and was asked to remove some fan fiction from a website by Sony (and I believe there was a threat of legal action if he did not). That fiction involved a 14-year-old dark elf female being raped.
But, as was frequently pointed out in the resulting furor (the player in question apologized and took it like a man, but some players want any reason to bitch), the general policy on EQ fan sites is to let them be, and even throw them bones now and then. People post screenshots, walk-throughs, fan fics, and all kinds of other game-related content all over the web. And apparently Sony Online Entertainment and/or Verant Interactive realize that this is a *good* thing, so long as it doesn't hurt their image. They also realize that if they decide a particular work is hurting them more than helping them (as they decided with the depiction of child rape), they have the right to enforce their copyright selectively.
It seems that perhaps copyright law needs a proof of damage clause attached to it, similar to slander and libel. This could be used to expand the doctrine of Fair Use, for example. In many cases such a clause wouldn't be appropriate; you could, if it were done badly, end up with situations where someone loses their copyright because "they weren't using it." (Of course, that happens now, too... see the Darwin fish. But anyway.)
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?