stuff & nonsense
May. 30th, 2005 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xparrotJust a few recent musings.
Whenever the issue of the protective, proprietary attitude Japanese fanartists and doujinshi creators have toward their works comes up--specifically, that they get very offended/upset by Western fen posting their art or doujinshi scans--one of the popular defending arguments is that the J fen are stealing other peoples' characters to begin with, and therefore have no right to get so huffy about us stealing their work in return. Which seems to point to a fundamental problem with our understanding of intellectual property that I blame in part on our currently insane copyright laws.
Plagiarism, duplication, and creating derivative works are all various forms of 'stealing' intellectual property, but they are not at all the same and I wish people would stop equating them. (And none of these are equivalent to actual, physical theft, despite the insistence of certain anti-downloading ads. Shut up, RIAA, you're confusing the issue.)
Plagiarism is claiming someone else's work as your own; it's the worse artistic crime, in my book, not just for the victim of the theft, who loses their rightful credit; but for the thief, who is in essence admitting to the world that their own works have no value, that what comes from their own creative soul isn't worth sharing. Tragically pathetic. Duplication is copying and disseminating someone else's work, but not claiming it as your own creation. Sometimes this can be dishonest, such as bootleggers, turning a profit on someone else's hard work without giving them any real compensation. Most fen, on the other hand, do it with purer motivations - they're simply trying to share something they enjoyed with others who will enjoy it. Lastly, there's derivative works, in which one takes someone else's ideas and applies one's own creative efforts. The original creator is credited for the ideas; the derivative creator is credited for the actual work. To my mind, derivative works are the least objectionable and frankly should be totally legal. Ideas are cheap; it's the execution that's difficult. And a derivative work doesn't impinge on consumption of the original; almost no fan reads fanfic instead of watching the original show or reading the original manga.
So, to my mind, Japanese fen are perfectly justified in appropriating another mangaka's characters to create doujinshi but still getting upset when those doujinshi get scanned and posted online without their permission. Especially since self-publishing is quite expensive, and some doujinshi creators make part of their income off the doujinshi they sell. Every person who reads a doujinshi for free instead of buying it from them is depriving them of the money they'd need to print more doujinshi.
Except the problem is, most American fans wouldn't be buying the doujinshi anyway. Most American fen can't buy it - it's not that we're cheapskates; it's not an option for us. We can't go to Comiket, and a lot of circles don't ship internationally even if they do sell online, or have any English language support. And I honestly don't think most Japanese fen appreciate this; doujinshi is so readily available in Japan that they probably don't have a good grasp of how difficult it is to get here. There's also the language issue; the majority of American fen not being literate in Japanese, the only doujinshi we can actually read are scanlations. Most of us who scan and share doujinshi aren't doing it because we want to rip off our fellow Japanese fen. We're doing it because we want to share wonderful stories with other fans and we don't have any other way of going about it. We often see it as honoring the creator, because we want to share it so much; but it's not truly honoring if the creator sees it as an insult or a threat. It's not fair to the creator--but it's not really fair to the audience to deny them the opportunity to see it at all. Or, for that matter, for the creator to lose all those potential fans (and buyers) who wouldn't otherwise know they existed.
I'm not sure how we can explain this to the Japanese fen, though. Especially since they have such a different perspective on fanning in general--not only do they not scan manga so much, but they don't even use official art, generally, for layouts or icons or anything. I'm not sure if this is out of respect for the original creators, or something else, but it's a reason why they're often upset by American fen appropriating their own fan art without permission. (I've wondered if it's also because it's difficult to differentiate plagiarism from duplication when one can't read the surrounding text--many Japanese fen aren't that fluent in English, so they might not realize that someone posting a picture isn't in fact saying it's their own work. Especially since a lot of people don't bother giving credit when sharing a pretty fanart they found somewhere). There's a cultural and linguistic rift here that I hope can eventually be bridged. Some fanartists have taken their sites offline rather than risk getting their work stolen (as they see it); I've even heard some doujinshi circles refuse to sell to Americans. It's sad to have this conflict, when in the end we're all fans, all loving manga and anime, even if we express that love differently.
Whenever the issue of the protective, proprietary attitude Japanese fanartists and doujinshi creators have toward their works comes up--specifically, that they get very offended/upset by Western fen posting their art or doujinshi scans--one of the popular defending arguments is that the J fen are stealing other peoples' characters to begin with, and therefore have no right to get so huffy about us stealing their work in return. Which seems to point to a fundamental problem with our understanding of intellectual property that I blame in part on our currently insane copyright laws.
Plagiarism, duplication, and creating derivative works are all various forms of 'stealing' intellectual property, but they are not at all the same and I wish people would stop equating them. (And none of these are equivalent to actual, physical theft, despite the insistence of certain anti-downloading ads. Shut up, RIAA, you're confusing the issue.)
Plagiarism is claiming someone else's work as your own; it's the worse artistic crime, in my book, not just for the victim of the theft, who loses their rightful credit; but for the thief, who is in essence admitting to the world that their own works have no value, that what comes from their own creative soul isn't worth sharing. Tragically pathetic. Duplication is copying and disseminating someone else's work, but not claiming it as your own creation. Sometimes this can be dishonest, such as bootleggers, turning a profit on someone else's hard work without giving them any real compensation. Most fen, on the other hand, do it with purer motivations - they're simply trying to share something they enjoyed with others who will enjoy it. Lastly, there's derivative works, in which one takes someone else's ideas and applies one's own creative efforts. The original creator is credited for the ideas; the derivative creator is credited for the actual work. To my mind, derivative works are the least objectionable and frankly should be totally legal. Ideas are cheap; it's the execution that's difficult. And a derivative work doesn't impinge on consumption of the original; almost no fan reads fanfic instead of watching the original show or reading the original manga.
So, to my mind, Japanese fen are perfectly justified in appropriating another mangaka's characters to create doujinshi but still getting upset when those doujinshi get scanned and posted online without their permission. Especially since self-publishing is quite expensive, and some doujinshi creators make part of their income off the doujinshi they sell. Every person who reads a doujinshi for free instead of buying it from them is depriving them of the money they'd need to print more doujinshi.
Except the problem is, most American fans wouldn't be buying the doujinshi anyway. Most American fen can't buy it - it's not that we're cheapskates; it's not an option for us. We can't go to Comiket, and a lot of circles don't ship internationally even if they do sell online, or have any English language support. And I honestly don't think most Japanese fen appreciate this; doujinshi is so readily available in Japan that they probably don't have a good grasp of how difficult it is to get here. There's also the language issue; the majority of American fen not being literate in Japanese, the only doujinshi we can actually read are scanlations. Most of us who scan and share doujinshi aren't doing it because we want to rip off our fellow Japanese fen. We're doing it because we want to share wonderful stories with other fans and we don't have any other way of going about it. We often see it as honoring the creator, because we want to share it so much; but it's not truly honoring if the creator sees it as an insult or a threat. It's not fair to the creator--but it's not really fair to the audience to deny them the opportunity to see it at all. Or, for that matter, for the creator to lose all those potential fans (and buyers) who wouldn't otherwise know they existed.
I'm not sure how we can explain this to the Japanese fen, though. Especially since they have such a different perspective on fanning in general--not only do they not scan manga so much, but they don't even use official art, generally, for layouts or icons or anything. I'm not sure if this is out of respect for the original creators, or something else, but it's a reason why they're often upset by American fen appropriating their own fan art without permission. (I've wondered if it's also because it's difficult to differentiate plagiarism from duplication when one can't read the surrounding text--many Japanese fen aren't that fluent in English, so they might not realize that someone posting a picture isn't in fact saying it's their own work. Especially since a lot of people don't bother giving credit when sharing a pretty fanart they found somewhere). There's a cultural and linguistic rift here that I hope can eventually be bridged. Some fanartists have taken their sites offline rather than risk getting their work stolen (as they see it); I've even heard some doujinshi circles refuse to sell to Americans. It's sad to have this conflict, when in the end we're all fans, all loving manga and anime, even if we express that love differently.
