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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."
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?
new and better ways of tentacle rape that they can then apply to their clients.
Oh, wait...
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
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
Doujinshi is fan drawn and developed. This is not a new phenomenon as copying original work has always been viewed as flattery in Japan. It is our application of Western laws and thinking that sparks the copyright debate.
I am me...I think
"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...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
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?
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
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?