stuff & nonsense

[xparrot]

Just 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.

Comments

[beckerbell.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this since you posted and I think you've hit on something that not too many people have really commented on before. There's often the whole "money aspect" (ie, they're selling their works as a product, so we feel less guilt about sharing scans of it, that fanart should be left alone), but I think you've got an excellent point about the Japanese not really understanding where Western fans are coming from with this. Whatever the reasons we may or may not have, it's not necessarily an excuse, but perhaps an explanation.

For one thing, it is really difficult to get our hands on doujinshi, despite places like eBay, JPQueen, Rinkya, or even some of the on-line stores that sell them. Plus, the shipping is painful--you can pick up a doujinshi book for about $7US, but then you'll pay the same amount for shipping, which doubles the price. (And it's difficult to combine orders to lower shipping, because you run the risk of getting up into hundreds of dollars then. I've still bought well over a hundred various books myself, I wince to think of all the money I've sunk into this over the last four or five years.) You also often don't get a chance to get a feel for the doujinshika's work until you've already bought it and paid a ton of shipping (which is why I like anthologies so much better <3) and it's just easier after awhile to download them on-line. And when they're scanslated and I can actually understand them? Fabulous. So, so fabulous.

I have seen one or two doujinshika beginning to sell to Western fans, but the prices are often still ridiculously high. I know Bambi Takada (who did Gundam Wing doujinshi) had a partnership with some Western anime merchandise store, that they would 'legally' sell her works to Western fans, but they were something like $40US per book. Which was ridiculously expensive, no matter how pretty they might have been.

The more I think about this, the more I compare it to the way manga is being distributed in the West, especially the US. As they're properly brought over and made easily available on the shelves of bookstores, scanslators often drop their projects and ask distrobution of their earlier work be ceased. Not all places do this (you can still find One Piece or Bleach or Fruits Basket scanslations on-line if you look long enough), but people will buy the manga, quite happily. They really do like having it to hold in their hands if they like a series. I think doujinshi would be the same, but we don't have the option, especially when they often refuse to ship internationally.

It's interesting to ponder whether or not the J-fen have an idea of how much more difficult it is for Western fen to enjoy these sorts of thing. I think, perhaps, more and more they might understand we're not trying to plagiarize their fanart (given the way I've seen more and more people start to link to the original sites where the art was found), but I don't think it matters, because it's still terribly offensive that we just take the fanart/doujinshi and do whatever we like with it, whether it be layouts or icons or just sharing the pretty with fellow fans.

(As a random/tangentinal note, I find it interesting that J-fen are the ones who have more of the amazing artists, but Western fen are the ones who make decent site layouts. The j-fen have all this gorgeous fanart of their own, they could make beautiful layouts, yet... I could probably count on one hand the number of layouts that have genuinely impressed me. I wonder how much that affects layout afficionados, if they just itch to do something with it because NO ONE does?)

It's a shame there's not something like OFP to explain something like this to the J-fen. Not that I'm sure it would really do much good, honestly. I suspect they'd still feel stealing is stealing is stealing.

[luxetumbra.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how we can explain this to the Japanese fen, though.

Translate this to Japanese? But then, where to post is the problem. Still, I thought this was one of the best explanations/justifications for W-fan use of J-fanproduct I've ever seen. It's a pity that the people who would really get the most benefit out of it, will probably never get a chance to read it. ;_;

Thanks for writing it though. You really captured why I think it's ok for Western fans to use (as long as they attribute) J-fanworks. Can't tell you how many doujinshi I've purchased (when I can ;_;) based on seeing someone's work in an icon or layout. It's a free viral advertising, more than anything.

[halcyonjazz.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, I had an email from a Japanese person a week ago, bitching me out (rather politely!) about having a handful of manga scans in a hidden folder (maybe 5 or 6 pages of something random)? My guess is she probably found it accidentally by googling it. She gave me a pretty hard time.

It's odd trying to explain that showing official images if not a crime in bad Japanese. I think she got rather annoyed with me. But since I didn't see why to refuse, I took it down anyway XD