Do they upload it?

Are you one of those fuckwads who has a fucking problem with my gay son getting married?

FCKH8.com is a new initiative by non-profit media campaigner Luke Montgomery in support of LGBT issues. The website gives a big, ol’ Fuck You to the haters of gay marriage and the proponents of denying gay couples benefits like health insurance.

I came across FCKH8 because a gay friend from high school had posted the video to his Facebook wall, and it had turned up in my newsfeed. The bright pink background caught my eye, and the “You will be offended.” tagline inspired the final clickthrough.

Although the embed contains enough expletives to ward off some viewers, especially if they’re viewing in their workplace, it’s a professionally produced video: great aesthetic quality, good caliber of sound, and an energetic cast that gets the point of “screwing hate” across strongly and proudly.

And the marketing has done pretty well so far. Spanning across all of the major sharing sites — Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon — the pink FCKH8 message has already as of yesterday raised close to $30,000 selling T-shirts and other schwag.

But the most interesting part of the FCKH8 campaign is the video strategy. And this strategy is bringing a whole new perspective to how we think about virality, spreadability, whatever you want to call it.

The FCKH8 channel hosts two official videos on their YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1amIrR-VMAI (“NSFW”) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwLaOtOlQ8 (censored).

However, yesterday, the FCKH8 Twitter account announced that the video had been flagged for removal: “YOUTUBE CENSORS: H8ers campaigned to flag R main video. Uploaded again! Share the FCK out of it!,” seemingly by anti-GLBT protestors.

The interesting note to be made about this message, though, is that “Share the FCK out of it” meant more than just “Share the video, embed it, send the link to your friends, etc.” Instead, dozens of users were inspired and allowed to reupload the original FCKH8 video on their own YouTube channels. Searching “FCKH8″ on YouTube yields “96″ videos, most of which are the original with its iconic hot pink background, with a sprinkling of other response and support vids.

To which I have to say… Fuck. Yes.

When we think about online video strategy by brands, entertainment companies, and producers, we tend to focus on two elements:

1. A piece of media uploaded in lieu of the copyright holders is considered by them, and then — given a positive reception of the illegal uploading — allowed to remain online, an existence from which the copyright holders can reap additional monetary benefits (usually in the form of ads).

2. A piece of media is intended to be spread by users, moving from the “influentials” to their followers and hopefully spreading amongst diverse communities. But this usually includes spreading one piece of media through multiple groups. If there are multiple pieces of media to be spread, companies tend to follow some sort of “transmedia” initiative, where the brand or media is adapted — or sometimes just copied without any change — to other media forms (such as from TV to film to webisode, etc.).

But with this FCKH8 case study, I believe it’s one of the first times when an initiative to spread has allowed users to copy the original media and subsequently spread it, be in via the same or entirely new communities and networks. If we think in terms of the current discourse on piracy, this is astounding.

What makes this case study doubly interesting is that we’re talking about collaborative disruption. Although this initiative is small (less than 100 videos), they are in practice bombing YouTube with repetitive information. Yes, it’s in the face of censorship — although it appears that YouTube has collaborated with the videomakers to reupload the original video after it was flagged for removal. And we can’t necessarily call it “bombing,” because all of the videos either have the same title or append a [MIRROR] tag to the video. In other words, it wouldn’t be difficult for YouTube to suppress the collective action.

But we can compare this to the DDoSing recently by 4chan against the MPAA and other anti-piracy websites or even Justin Bieber fans taking over Twitter’s trending topics (and Bieber’s subsequent complaint about the removal of his fans’ signs of devotion).

Of course, the benefit of FCKH8′s grassroots mass uploading is the eventual spread of a meaningful human rights campaign. Go check out the video, and share it with your friends!

Online manga: where is it? Some would say it’s passed around via the Internet as scanlations. And that’s a problem.

That problem, though, is two-sided. The obvious first side is that scanlations are technically illegal. But the second — and more important — side is that legal alternatives to online manga distribution do not exist. Yes, you can say that there are experiments with online distribution (such as Viz’s online Signature Ikki magazine), but the fact remains that a universal and ubiquitous legal alternative for online distribution of every English-language manga published in the United States does not currently exist.

There are some subsequent problems as well, and I would like to take the opportunity of this post to go through them. I feel like these issues have not been addressed, particularly since no alternative to illegal distribution websites has been offered by the Coalition as of this writing.

The Problem of Terms: Scanlations, Scans, and RAWs

When people talk about the issues surrounding the illegal, global distribution of printed Japanese comics, they encapsulate the issues with the term “scanlations.” Instead of one issue, though, there are three issues at stake: scanlations, scans, and RAWs. The problem with the discourse surrounding online distribution of manga is that it’s a bi-national issue, though critics tend to come at it from one of the two perspectives. So, to break it down:

1. Japanese (and others) are uploading scans of original Japanese comics to the Internet and are distributing them illegally.
2. Americans (and others) are uploading scans of original English translations of original Japanese comics to the Internet and are distributing them illegally.
3. Americans (and others) are uploading fan-translated scans of original Japanese comics to the Internet and are distributing them illegally.

These are the three issues at stake, and they all account for different parts of the “scanlation” debate. To apply terms to each of the situations above, (1) is a RAW issue, (2) is a scan issue, and (3) is a scanlation issue. And to define these words for those unfamiliar with the terms:

- A “RAW” is a scan of the original Japanese comic, untranslated (the term “RAW” actually presupposed translation, hence the original untranslated print material being “unprocessed” by fans).
- A “scan” is basically the same thing as a RAW, but it is a scanned copy of officially translated material distributed by publishing companies outside of Japan (eg., Viz, Vertical, Dark Horse, etc.).
- A “scanlation” is a fan-produced translation of a RAW comic. A scanlation cannot be a translation of a scan, unless said scanlation is translated into a language other than the original scan’s language (eg., a French scanlation of Vertical’s production of Osamu Tezuka’s works, originally translated into English by Vertical, Inc.).

So, besides the issue of petulantly defining terms and situations, what’s the importance of drawing these distinctions? Well, to quote the first sentence of the Publishers Weekly article (above), “An international Coalition of Japanese and American-based manga publishers have joined together to combat what they call the ‘rampant and growing problem’ of scanlations, the practice of posting scanned and translated editions of Japanese comics online without permission of the copyright holders.” The article states that the Coalition will be addressing the issue of “scanlations,” but there are really two more ways to slice this phrasing:

1) Japanese publishers and English publishers are (or should be) more concerned about the illegal distribution of their own properties. That is, for Japanese publishers, they first and foremost do not want to see the illegal distribution of original Japanese language scans (ie., “RAWs”). For American publishers, they first and foremost do not want to see the illegal distribution of scans of their original English-language translations (namely, “scans”).

2) Less important — though still important — is that both Japanese and American publishers want to see a reduction in or end to the illegal distribution of scanlations.

Why make this distinction further? Well, if you have seen the argument about the illegal distribution of English-language fansubs or even the reverse importation of American DVDs into Japan, you’ll note that publishers want to make the most money possible. The most money, therefore, lies within the original products of these publishers. Japanese comic readers should read the original Japanese manga, so having these online negatively impacts the market in Japan. American comic readers should read the official English-language translation of the manga, so having these online also negatively impact the market in America. For scanlations, it’s a bit trickier: they obviously represent a direct opposition to official publications, but the draw to buying official publications is the physical material: “better” translations, “better” physical quality (image and book), etc. But, of course, “better” does not always happen: be it in the failure of companies to produce a better product (eg., the translation might actually suck) or be it in the personal aesthetic values of different fans (eg., some fans will argue that scanlations are better because they avoid localization with a more literal translation).

There have been some arguments that scanlations help the American side of the distribution industry because it helps introduce titles to fans. While this was true in the past, I personally will deny this to be true today: the fans that are reading manga online already seek out or are at least introduced to titles in respective online communities (forums, chatrooms, social networks, etc.). In the end, there are no numbers to support this assertion. Entirely separate from these numbers are the numbers that illustrate the effect of scans and RAWs on distribution companies, of which there are statistics (and you can hear about them in this episode of the ANNcast with guest Ed Chavez, from Vertical, Inc.).

So, as I’ve introduced above, the scanlation debate is complex and definitely does not aid fans in understanding how the industry works (since there are practically no case studies publicized anywhere). But the debate really does have to be contended distinctly, because there are many issues at stake which without well-defined boundaries will confuse a lot of people. Ultimately, the problem with the Coalition will be competing companies and differing cultural modes of print consumption (eg., serialized compilations in Japan versus tankoubon-style paperbacks in the U.S.).

The Debate Over Numbers

OneManga.com was recently revealed to be in Google’s Top 1000 visited websites (via Google AdPlanner). You can check out the page on which OneManga is listed here (using April 2010 data).*

* You’ll notice that the page states OneManga.com does not use advertising, but I believe the page account for Google Ads (because OneManga.com does in fact use ads on practically every page of its website).

Google states that OneManga.com has achieved a 0.3% penetration rate. According to the “about” page, “You can see a list of the largest 1000 sites worldwide, based on Unique Visitors (users), as measured by Ad Planner. This list is updated monthly as new Ad Planner datasets are released. The list defines sites as top-level domains.” The key here is that Google is calculating the size of a website based on its community. But even more interestingly is that while OneManga draws in 4.2 million unique visitors monthly, it achieve 1.1 billion page views (which, if you go examine the page, is waaay larger than most of the sites in that range). The reason for this is that 1) with such a loyal audience (who go to the website primarily to read manga, 2) they achieve a higher visit duration compared to other websites, and therefore 3) we see many more pages visited per user (particularly because the majority of the OneManga website is constructed of pages upon pages of comics).

The key point of the Top 1000 ranking, therefore, is not that OneManga gets visited by a lot of people, but that it retains a highly devoted audience. While the reason can be debated (it is perhaps likely that the internal community continually attracts users, rather than the manga pages; or, perhaps a small handful of series gathers 80% of the traffic), the point is that this audience is loyal to OneManga.com and not manga per se.

The Seclusion of Illegal Online Fandoms

Early media fandoms operated covertly in terms of distribution: most limited the dissemination of media objects to internal distribution within the (usually moderated) community. For example, many media-related LiveJournal communities still function as moderated hierarchies, carefully controlling the selection and admission of new members to the community. Even checking out Baka-Updates Manga illustrates that a large number of translation communities for manga still rely on IRC or similar communication protocols to distribute their translations amongst acquaintances. At the Media in Transition 6 conference, Professor Carolina Acosta-Alzuru (University of Georgia) accounts for similar gated community practices amongst the foreign, online audiences of telenovelas, which — as must be noted — do not have an official, legal translator-distributor outside of Latin America (in converse to the manga and anime industries in the United States).

I predict that, just like the online telenovela audiences, scanlation teams and communities will — in the face of legal action — retreat away from prying eyes into further gated communities, allowing only internal (sometimes P2P-enabled) distribution. But it remains to be seen what stances and strategies the international Coalition will adopt, particularly if they primarily target large distribution websites (like OneManga) or also go after smaller communities (like smaller scanlation groups). The equation pretty much comes down to the relative opposition between exposure (how noteworthy each community is), resources (how many people and how much effort the Coalition will be able to expend on this endeavor), and fan activity (how well they can maneuver around old and new online spaces).

Therefore, scanlations will not end, particularly since a small number of fans still produce fan translations as celebratory fan activities (or just to practice their translation skills).

Marketing to Online Communities: From Grassroots to Forced Seeding

One of my points of research is into how ideas spread online. Over the past few years, one term has been co-opted to describe popular trends in content (usually video) online: viral. Viral came to be adopted after the concept of memetic spread (for Internet memes) became popular, borrowing from the word meme‘s roots in Richard Dawkin’s 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. If you follow the online marketing space, then, you might have come across viral marketing as a new trend in getting as many people as possible to watch (and hopefully share) your advertisement (or other piece of media).

The problem with virality, though, is that mapping how users share content within an online community (or across multiple communities) is pretty damn complicated. It requires figuring out what audiences reside where and who acts as the links between distinct communities. My mentor, Henry Jenkins, has described that form of sharing as “spreadability” (which you can read about in his white paper, If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead: Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace). Anyway, one point that is never really discussed among marketers operating in “viral marketing” is the process of injecting content into communities that might appreciate and then spread said content. Ironically (since we’re talking about online piracy), the marketers have co-opted another term to describe the process of community injection: seeding (from the seeding of P2P BitTorrent sharing). Unlike strange, popular Internet phenomena (like Susan Boyle) which spread organically among friends, colleagues, etc., raising hit counts as people honestly visit them, these marketers have to literally introduce their media forcefully to communities that have been targeted as potentially finding value in that media. The spread, therefore, is not necessarily organic, due to this seeding process.

I bring up seeding, though, because it identifies one key component of the online manga fandom (also applying to other media fandoms online) that the Coalition will have to leverage (and perhaps exploit) when they decide to introduce a new legal alternative to online manga distribution: spreading content through communities. The undisclosed problem being that the manga readers the Coalition assumes to exist are actually just part of the community of each respective illegal manga website. Rym and Scott, in a recent GeekNights episode, purported that manga fans do not exist in the capacity that publishers think they do. Instead, there are teenagers without disposable incomes that utilize sites like OneManga but are extracting more value than just the manga. The manga buying audience, though, does not exist on these websites. They argue, therefore, that closing down scanlation websites will do nothing to help the American industry.

I am tempted to agree with the GeekNights hosts, but lets assume that the Coalition does introduce a new online distribution system: how are they going to find an audience for it? Or, more pressing, how are they going to find an audience for each particular licensed title, so that each can be monetized? Because while the system itself might attract some viewers, each title will have to fend for itself in the online ecosystem. At the moment, OneManga (as I hinted at above) creates an ecosystem where fans become acclimated to titles through a specific community, be it OneManga or another online forum. In order to create a fiscally successful distribution system, the Coalition will have to learn and be able to seed these titles to the correct communities (as well as set up a system that accounts for a potentially non-monetizable user base, aka. kids without credit cards). Otherwise, it will ultimately fail.

Years of Waiting: Where’s the Crunchyroll for Manga?

And then there’s one final point: how come nobody tried the whole Coalition thing five years ago? Crunchyroll started to craft a business model to capitalize on fans’ online modes of anime consumption back in mid-2006, but we still haven’t seen one distribution system that aggregates thousands of manga streams around a centralized community (à la Crunchyroll). The interesting bit is the potential for OneManga to become the next Crunchyroll, following the same historical progression of illegal-to-legal distribution website. A hypothetical, but: What if OneManga received enough venture funding to go legit by partnering with Japanese companies? And how does such a hypothetical reshape our understanding of the space that OneManga inhabits as an illegal site but also a hotbed for media fans in a thriving online community?

Then, too, what if we see ventures like OpenManga directly competing with any effort that the Coalition puts forth? (Of course, there’s also the subsequent question of how OpenManga will also drive its own community.)

A Conclusion of Open-Ended Questions

So, where do we go from here? Unfortunately, we just have to sit tight and wait it out. Not many (if any) publishers have made official statements regarding their involvement in the Coalition, strategies for tackling scanlation/scan/RAW websites, or announcements about further solutions to legal online manga distribution. But at the very least, I hope these issues have been fleshed out at least a little to provide some insight into the multifaceted problem with the problem of online manga.

Been pretty busy this week (as evidenced by the lack of updates). Right now, I’m done in New York, prepping for the Open Video Conference, being held at NYU Law.

I’ll be presenting a talk on Saturday at 5:00 pm called “Online Video Culture: The Case of Fansubs, Anime Music Videos, and Copyright.” What I’m “supposed” to talk about:

The first fansubs (episodes of Japanese animation subtitled by fans, for fans) and AMVs (anime music videos, in which Japanese animation is timed to music) were produced in the United States in the 1980s in fans’ homes on VCR players. Twenty years later, these pieces of videography have proliferated across the Internet, creating an online video culture that has clashed with commercial forces as new issues of distribution and copyright have arisen. Alex Leavitt, a researcher of anime & manga studies and an analyst on the YouTomb project, will discuss the involvement of these fan groups with “illegal” production and file sharing; the videos’ ramifications on copyright law and discussions of free use; and the cultural flow of these fan-produced videos in contention with the new commercial and legal models of streaming sites (Crunchyroll, FUNimation, & Hulu) and sharing hubs (YouTube & Nico Nico Douga).

If you’re interested in awesome talks and interesting people, check out the Open Video Conference website starting on Friday at 10:00 am, because all of the talks will be streaming online for your viewing pleasure. Also, if you can’t take the time out this weekend, all of the talks will be recorded and made available to the world. Check out all the details here.

TED.com officially announced today a project that will crowdsource translations of every TED video in more than forty of the world’s most-vocalized languages. The splash page is viewable here.

The video above is a Japanese translation of Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ demo of Photosynth, one of the more interesting yet much shorter videos available at the TED website. As you can see, the subtitles work pretty well and the timing is for the most part up to par. The only petulant remarks I can make about meticulous details would be: 1) there’s no furigana… but that only applies to Japanese anyway, and 2) the subtitles cover up the images when the projector is shown… but that’s unavoidable, and it’s not that important a matter.

The important issue to take away from TED’s audacious project is something that Ethan Zuckerman summed up quite nicely on Twitter: “TED’s approach to translating video is a first step towards translating the web.” He links to an article of his own that gives a brief background to TED’s translation project. Of course, my stance on the issue of social translation is that fansubs in the anime community have been doing it for years, so it’s not necessarily something “new.” At the same time, however, the social element has never really been an active component of fansubbing. But there was an attempt, one that might have had huge repercussions for the anime industry.

When I attended Otakon in the summer of 2008, I decided off the cuff to drop in on Crunchyroll‘s industry panel, held on Saturday from 1:00 to 2:00 pm in Workshop 1. There’s a lot of information that was passed around at Otakon 2008 in regards to fansubbing and translation — the Fansubs and Industry panel probably the most discussed (note: you can watch the panel via that link to Anime News Network) — but Vu Nguyen announced that Crunchyroll had plans to release tools for the creation of community-driven subtitles.

Keep in mind, the announcement took place before Crunchyroll went “legal.” At the time, the website still hosted anime and Asian dramas that may or may not have been licensed. Putting that aside, though, Crunchyroll provided fans a platform on which to watch subtitled anime and a community through which dialogue could take place about that anime.

However, those subtitles were usually in English. In fact, most subtitles of anime roaming the Net are translated in English, though a good number have been written in other languages, such as French and Spanish (I’m not quite sure the balance of statistics between languages or how many languages are frequently used as goals for translation). Clearly language is a barrier to the wide dissemination of anime to potential fans around the world. Another limitation to translation is the structure of the fansub community. Basically, it takes the form of a team of translators and producers, working together toward a final result, coordinated by a central figurehead.

Social translation solves these two impediments on some level. First, there’s a better chance that more languages will be translated. A problem, of course, is that the translator needs to be bilingual (Japanese and X for anime, or English and Y for the TED talks). Second, tools are provided to take down the infrastructure of translation teams, instead putting the power into the hands of an individual.

I spoke with Vu after the Crunchyroll panel to go over a few details of the project. He first explained that the tools were easy to use. A user relied on the time codes of the English fansub to translate from Japanese to his (probably native) language. One issue that arises here is that the translator could be using the English fansubs to translate, instead of the original Japanese voice overs, but ultimately this is probably unavoidable. Still, it provides a somewhat accurate translation in a language that would otherwise probably not ever be translated. Vu also noted that the translations would be checked by some staff (he didn’t have many details, as the project was still in development) to ensure a certain level of accuracy (mainly to avoid the Nico Nico Douga effect of random text in place of actual subtitles).

I had meant to follow up with Vu in an interview for Youtomb, but then I shipped off to Japan last fall. I sent him an email to inquire further about the project, about which I could find no information this spring. He replied back in April:

As for the community subtitling project, we did launch it at some point for user uploaded content. I agree that it is one of the more ambitious projects. But Crunchyroll made a transition to fully licensed, so all of the content online has a licensing agreement in place and our challenge has been in getting the content holders to agree to allow fans to contribute subtitles. There’s IP issues (to which I think we have a good solution), quality issues (which I think content holders need to overcome), and security concerns (for new, yet to be aired content, there’s almost no way we can provide fans any work to translate prior to the air date, so we can’t use fans for simulcasts). We’re still chipping away at this, but I’m not sure how close we are to accomplishing it, and I’m hesitant to discuss too many details… until we make more progression on our side.

So, it seems that Crunchyroll is still in the process of creating some sort of social translation community around their already thriving membership. I wonder if TED’s project will further propel the CR ambitions further.

And I really hope it develops into something similar. If you didn’t read through the TED blog’s announcement, it details that each video translation will have an accompanying text transcript, in which a viewer can click on a sentence and immediately be brought to that spot in the video. If the fansub community or a CR social translation project were to pursue a similar initiative, this would have epic benefits for the anime research community. The availability of transcripts would be akin to throwing it back old school to the early days of American anime clubs, where a member would stand up at the front of the room and read a translation of the script as the Japanese-language animation played in the background. However, such a project takes that extinct practice and revamps it, providing researchers not only with a transcript but also the accompanying video, with which they can easily do a text search on the page and be transported to X point in the video clip, to examine the art relative to the speech. Of course, such a project begs all sorts of questions, particularly video hosting: is it possible to keep a database of videos that could be accessed while bypassing numerous legal and financial barriers?

The question, though, is certainly not one of fansubbing as a practice. At the recent Media in Transition conference at MIT, a Thursday night panel was hosted by the Comparative Media Studies program’s colloquium series called Global Media (the podcast can be listened to here). Most of the panelists agreed that, all over the world, fansubbing is thriving in genres from Bollywood to American bootlegs to tella novellas (to such an extent that it probably can’t be stopped). It seemed that the panelists were more concerned protecting local works and saw more benefits in the circulation of their works than in the loss of monetary content. For Japanese animation, this might mean that Japan should be focusing on their home turf. But we can’t ignore that companies in the US have been set up to distribute anime, which is the main factor that complicates the Japanese market and its profits.

Ultimately, there are only benefits for TED, who own their own videos because it is their personal content. They do not have to deal with complications with copyright or monetization. As far as the anime industry, it’s a completely different set of matters. As Vu stated, simulcasts are out of the question for fan-curated translations, and getting around questions of intellectual property is going to require some deep thought.

We’ll have to wait and see where this ends up. But if you’re interested in continuing the conversation, I’ll be at the Open Video Conference in New York on June 19 and 20 to give a talk about the the history and culture of Japanese animation in the US and its past/future implications. Come check it out, especially for the other talks (which are obviously going to be way more interesting than mine).

On top of the initial reactions in pure text (such as the video’s 2000+ comments as of the publication of this article), even Anime News Network’s Chicks on Anime picked up on the fandom’s backlash.

As much as anyone would like it, I’m not here to discuss the fandom or whatnot. Instead, my interest lies in a connection to a project that I’m helping out on and blogged about before: YouTomb, a project through the Students for Free Culture group at MIT where we look at the takedowns on YouTube.

The tale I will relate has already been told numerous times across the blogosphere. Little Kuriboh, a video producer on Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series. He, as well as many other creators on YouTube, made spin-off productions of the Sakura-con commercial. The commercial seems to have caused quite a ruckus over at 4chan and even made it into the Encyclopedia Dramatica, which catalogues most of the memes and miscellaneous “creativity” that occurs on the 4chan boards. On top of the multiple mashups available on YouTube, LK decided to post his own version of the commercial, entitled GUHROOGAMESH!!!1, onto the video site, which parodied the commercial’s audio using clips from the Yu-Gi-Oh animated series. Eventually, the video was removed by YouTube.

Recently, a new version has popped up on YouTube:

However, if this is also eventually removed, Omonomono has indexed links to the video, one available on Nico Nico Douga (ニコニコ動画, known as the Japanese equivalent of YouTube) and another on MegaUpload (if you don’t have an account for the former).

Questioning why the video was taken down, YouTomb has named the cause (which of course can also be discovered when visiting LK’s video’s original page on YouTube, above): a copyright claim by Asia Northwest Cultural Education Association. On 25 March 2009, the video was taken down, a mere week after it was uploaded (18 March 2009).

The association’s website states: “The Asia Northwest Cultural Education Association (ANCEA) is a registered non-profit corporation. Every year, ANCEA participates in various cultural and educational events. Sakura-Con is ANCEA’s main event and realization of the ANCEA mission to educate about Asian Culture, with a focus on Japanese Animation.” Clearly the Sakura-con commercial, produced by voice actor Vic Mignogna (most famous for his American dubbing of Edward Elric from Full Metal Alchemist), is an attempt to gather people to the convention; however, it seems that LK saw it as a “miseducation” about Asian Culture, hence an inspiration for the parody.

As previously stated, the video was removed from YouTube via a DMCA claim. LK created an alternative video in reaction to the takedown, which he titled “1!!!HSEMAGOORHUG,” and uploaded it to YouTube. However, he later removed it, according to the video’s YouTube data, on his own terms. Ravegrl, over at WordPress, neatly records a set of screenshots of the second video, complete with the edits that LK made to the video to avoid re-censorship by the ANCEA. This second video clearly parodies even the first, such as one instance of subtitling: “This joke is no longer available due to copyright claim by Asia Northwest Cultural Education Association.” Some of the audio was muted to avoid a potential Content-ID check, replaced with different lines to continue the parody-of-a-parody, referencing the YouTube Poop genre of comedic (or random, given your taste) video mashups.

There are two critical points at which we must approach copyright for Little Kuriboh’s video parody.

Point 1: Parody versus Satire

Not well known is the distinction between parody and satire.

Merriam-Webster Online defines parody as “a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule” and satire as “a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn.” Basically, the difference comes down to satire as criticism of something outside the original work (generally the human condition), while parody merely criticizes the original work (criticism, here, may be positive or negative, though in the case of satire it is usually the latter).

The problem with parody and satire is that the law distinctly distinguishes between the two. In their paper entitled The Satire/Parody Distinction in Copyright and Trademark Law — Can Satire Ever Be a Fair Use?, Juli Wilson Marshall and Nicholas J. Siciliano state, “The Court creates a fair use dichotomy between parody and satire. After concluding that parody could be considered fair use, the Court quickly qualified its holding: if the new work “has no critical bearing on the substance or style of the original composition, which the alleged infringer merely uses to get attention or to avoid the drudgery in working up something fresh,” the work is less transformative, and other fair use factors, such as whether the new work was sold commercially, loom larger. Id. at 580.”

Clearly LK’s “GUHROOGAMESH!!!1″ is a parody. It mimics the original audio while adding new audio clips and utilizes a new video style. The issue with the Sakura-con commercial, however, is that the video can be taken as a satire of the anime fandom in America. Therefore, LK’s parody video may be construed as a continuation of the assumed satire. Thus, a judge in the court could twist the DMCA claim to support the ANCEA, justifying the YouTube removal.

Point 2: Copyright versus Protection

In an email exchange between me and LK, he writes, “The truth is, they WERE out of line taking my video down in the first place for bogus reasons, but they later contacted me and explained the situation – that their site was being flooded with pornographic spam as an inadvertant result of my video’s content. They have told me that they liked the video, and if I made certain alterations, they would have no problem letting me put it back up. Being a reasonable person, I agreed to those conditions.”

As LK recounts, the issue of the takedown does not revolve around copyright, but instead a problem with “pornographic spam.” Although the audio content of the parody video and the associations with 4chan may have caused the spam, the fundamental matter in question of the YouTube removal revolves around the ANCEA’s use of a DMCA-related takedown when it clearly does not ultimately apply. I might argue that ANCEA had the right to file the claim, since LK did use Vic Mignogna’s voice-over at the end of his video, but eventually the work would be held up as a parody in a DMCA counter claim. Even LK shared my take on the issue: “I think if there’s a lesson here, it’s that a simple message explaining why the video was a problem was a LOT more effective than having the video deleted for silly reasons that don’t really apply.”

The concern for me, and probably the rest of the YouTomb team, is that a copyright claim can be used to remove a video from YouTube without an actual copyright violation. Currently YouTube allows for three methods of removal:
1) Terms of Service Violation
2) Content-ID Removal
3) DMCA Takedown Notice
(via the Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Avoiding of course the possibility that anime music videos and related media may violate copyright (Lawrence Lessig would argue no, given certain stipulations)… While we have ruled out #3 and stated the possbility of #2, why did YouTube not remove the video by quoting method #1? Taking a look at the transcript of LK’s first parody video (via Yu-Gi-Oh! Wikia), it might be argued that his material is not suitable for YouTube’s general user base. YouTube’s Community Guidelines reads, “YouTube is not for pornography or sexually explicit content. If this describes your video, even if it’s a video of yourself, don’t post it on YouTube. Also, be advised that we work closely with law enforcement and we report child exploitation. Please read our Safety Tips and stay safe on YouTube.” These guidelines reflect the law written in the Children’s Internet Protection Act (following the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act), which was signed into law in 2000 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003. Clearly the statement is aimed at video and audio of pornographic situations to protect minors (in the sense of minors viewing and/or being recorded in the material), but it may be applied to the GUHROOGAMESH!!!1 video all the same. The real question remains: Why, or really how, does YouTube allow someone to claim copyright with a purpose not related to copyright? And how many other instances have there been?

It seems that for now the whole affair has died down, even over at 4chan (which Encyclopedia Dramatica describes as a joke thoroughly killed and buried). But this is one instance of a strange use of “the law” as YouTube sees it and, really, dictates it.

Fansubs: fan-produced subtitles added to original footage of foreign television programs or films.

Most commonly a practice by fans of Japanese animation, fansubs have, since the 1980s in America, allowed fans of anime to view the Japanese-language media and share it amongst friends. While technically illegal [1] in terms of copyright law, fansubbing in the Internet age has proliferated to a point that 1) fans rely on fansubbing groups to keep up with the latest series, and 2) the animation industry has felt the need to form a conversation around protecting their intellectual property [2]. By the end of 2008, the demand for English-language fansubs reached such a critical point that major Japanese animation companies teamed up with the (previously illegal) Crunchyroll.com to distribute fansubs streaming online in a timely manner (read: one hour after television broadcast in Japan) for a fee or after a longer period (one week) for free [3].

In the summer of 2008, I traveled down to Baltimore, MD for Otakon, the largest East-coast anime convention, and attended the Fansubber & Industry Discussion panel (viewable online [4]). After the panel ended, I snagged Interactii, one of the members of the popular fansubbing group Dattebayo Fansubs, LLC [5], for a quarter-hour to ask a few questions, reprinted below:

Q: Can you comment on the fact that Dattebayo, while fansubbing is technically illegal, [is] asking YouTube to follow through with legal actions…

Interactii: Yeah, the reason that we do that is because we believe that having some level of control over the material is very important. So if it is asked of us to stop, we can try to stop as best as possible. And YouTube is so uncontrolled in its methods of distribution and it’s so accessible — it’s accessibly accessible — by my viewpoint. And so our goal is just to reduce that. And it’s also kind of to protect the interest of the show, because it’s not good for that to be on YouTube. Anime companies don’t want it, fansubbers and fansubbing groups don’t want it… we’re all working towards that same kind of goal.

Q: Where do you think the intellectual property lies? Is it just in the fansubs themselves? Or is it in the link between the fansub and the video…

Interactii: From our standpoint?

Q: From the company’s standpoint, because technically the entire use of the episode is not under free use.

Interactii: It’s murky for sure, but we went through the process with YouTube, and we got the approval to do it. We do it on the basis of the translations and the styling of the translations as a thing that’s copyrightable, which is technically under the DMCA, which is something that we can take down. That’s kind of our approach to it, and it hasn’t been challenged by anyone so far. So we’re continuing to operate under it.

Q: What material do you submit to them so that they can track the takedowns?

Interactii: Actually, it’s not tracked by them. We have someone on our staff who has the authorization to take down the videos.

Q: If the Japanese company were to go to YouTube and try to find some parallel between your takedowns and their takedowns, do you think there would be some kind of conflict there?

Interactii: Probably, yes. But I don’t see how our take-downs would possibly be non-beneficial to them. We only remove our content. We don’t remove all Naruto. We remove Naruto with our subs on them; we remove Bleach with our subs on them. It’s only those things that we’re removing, so we’re not removing anything that they might be contributing. So there’s really no negative effect in my mind.

Q: Have you guys taken any legal action against people who try to distribute these videos?

Interactii: We really have no grounds to. We’ve asked places who do that to stop, and we’ve sent people other requests — Please stop doing this. And that’s basically the same course we did with YouTube, and by being persistent about it they gave us the access to do that.

Dattebayo Fansubs, who subtitle the trendy anime Naruto Shippuuden and Bleach, currently rests at the sixth position for most copyright-related take-downs of the videos tracked by the Youtomb project (excluding those removed by “a third party”). TV Tokyo Corporation, the Japanese distributors of Naruto and Bleach, occupies the third position [6].

The conflict between the fansubber and the owner of the animation certainly evokes new questions regarding copyright, particularly because the subtitles remain a translucent layer of intellectual property draped over the original media. Is it legal, therefore, for Dattebayo to claim partial property or legality to a complete (“whole,” “unified”; not “entire”) cultural production? Free use, unfortunately, does not apply in this case. Or, in a more general sense, is it legal to make a claim of copyright where a more legitimate layer of copyright exists? Either way, it is illegal to upload the original animation, with or without fansubs, according to the YouTube Terms of Service, Section 6D and 6E [7]:

D. In connection with User Submissions, you further agree that you will not submit material that is copyrighted, protected by trade secret or otherwise subject to third party proprietary rights, including privacy and publicity rights, unless you are the owner of such rights or have permission from their rightful owner to post the material and to grant YouTube all of the license rights granted herein.

E. You further agree that you will not, in connection with User Submissions, submit material that is contrary to the YouTube Community Guidelines, found at http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines, which may be updated from time to time, or contrary to applicable local, national, and international laws and regulations.

In the contemporary agenda of YouTube copyright, my personal interest lies in a parallel between fansubbed material and Youtube’s trend of music-related takedowns. It may not (but should) be common knowledge that Youtube utilizes its Content Identification system [8] to target videos that contain copyrighted music. My curiosity (and concern) is whether animation studios will submit the original audio of anime episodes (audio that comprises music, actors’ voices, sound effects, etc.) to track more quickly any uploaded content. I wonder too whether groups like Dattebayo could do the same and do it legally. Although they do not own rights to the original footage and audio, could fansubbing groups also use the original audio to track when fansubs are uploaded?

[1] http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/SCRIPT-ed/vol2-4/hatcher.asp#legal
[2] http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2008-03-29/tokyo-anime-center-posts-stop-fan-subtitle-notice
[3] http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2008-11-17/tv-tokyo-to-also-stream-naruto-through-crunchyroll
[4] http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/convention/2008/fansubs-and-industry-panel
[5] http://dattebayo.com/
[6] http://youtomb.mit.edu/statistics
[7] http://www.youtube.com/t/terms
[8] http://www.youtube.com/t/contentid

Girl Talk, or Gregg Gillis, the engineer-turned-DJ (though he’d rather call himself an artist), remixes clips from a variety of popular songs to create new songs clips of songs glued together by a common BPM. Honestly, it’s nothing special, but there’s something appealingly freakish about it that I’ll keep his MySpace page on loop for a good hour at work. It’s like the nineties joined up with the 00s and drove a car through the panoramic window of my storefront. It’s music improbable to dance to yet so possible that I find myself dancing anyway. You can actually buy Girl Talk’s latest album, “Feed the Animals”, for any price.

Well, Girl Talk’s been all the… talk… on the Students for Free Culture national mailing list for the past week or so. The issue: Girl Talk’s defense of fair use to create his music without having to deal with musical industry copyrights. Tech Dirt explains Girl Talk’s theory: Girl Talk uses a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license for Feed the Animals, even though the songs on the album were made by using hundreds samples from other artists. Gillis claims his songs are fair use on the basis of being transformative and because the clips used are very short. TechDirt mumbles about the definition of transformative, but Girl Talk is furthering the production of a newly popular, cultural, musical genre and form: remix, also known as the mash-up. The New York Times uses the term collage, which I find fitting.

The problem I have with Girl Talk with regards to copyright license: the copy.

In one interview, Gillis explains the effort required to put together one of his CDs, Night Ripper.

Pitchfork: The samples are very specific– when you listen to a song for the first time do you know which lines you want to pick out immediately?
GG: Sometimes. Anyone can make a mashup in 30 seconds but that record took me– outside of collecting the samples– at least a year of putting everything together. It’s always just trial-and-error, I get all the loops and mix-and-match them on my computer.”

Girl Talk mixes hundreds of fragments of songs together — a process which has been thoroughly documented on Wikipedia, such as on Feed the Animal‘s page. The wonderful power of the Internet has even provided the initial play times of every sample included in each track. This last point is the key to unlocking the copy. Well, no, I would consider it to be more the tumblers of the lock.

The ultimate key that moves those tumblers is the creative environment, specifically software. Special thanks to Tim Hwang for helping me realize this (look out for future related awesomeness on his part). The improved availability of software and ever-lowered ability requisite of the user to operate said software will complicate copyright beyond anything we’ve seen yet.

To explain my idea, I’ll ask a simple question: What if you produced an exact copy of a song, but without actually copying and pasting the original music?

By this I mean creating a cover of a song, entirely self-produced, but one that exactly (read: PERFECTLY) matches the source material. Of course, such a dream is impossible: no garage band will ever replicate the exact twang of a Hendrix guitar or a flawless warble akin to that of Johnny Cash. When we use our own instruments, musical covers will remain covers, ever removed from the classic prototype that retains the value. And according to copyright law, royalties are due to the original musician if you decide to market a cover song.

However, what if you’re provided with the materials, so that you avoid having to reproduce anything? Here’s where the trouble lies.

Girl Talk licenses his latest work with a Creative Commons license that prohibits others from garnering money from the retail of his music. I cannot download his CD and sell it to another person. However, assuming that Girl Talk’s claim to fair use upholds, then I also may use fair use to put any clips of music together to create another song. If I decide to choose the same original songs as Girl Talk to create the same tracks on his CD, then I have not copied or reproduced his work as long as I have personally toiled to put together each song.

Props to the new genre of remix, because musical recognition is simpler than ever before. The recirculation of cultural works (read here: music) into the mainstream (or even tributaries of popoular culture) certainly seems beneficial to a generation branded as “unable to create any new meaning.” Girl Talk mirrors the Internet: he’s making ideas available. If a young kid of this decade listens to Feed the Animals, he’s likely to miss most of the references to the popular songs of an older generation. However, Girl Talk refreshes the material, while at the same time refreshing the genre. Yet even if Gillis were not indirectly advertising music from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, technology has kept up with the pace. A program called Listen on the iPhone will analyze a piece of music and identify the name of the song, its composer, and the track’s album.

With new technologies, composition is also easier than it ever once was. Given the availability of open source software (eg. audio programs like Audacity) and the ease-of-use provided by these new software, it does not take much effort to (re)create Girl Talk’s music while avoiding literally copying and pasting it. In fact, I could probably spend much less time producing my own songs compared to Girl Talk’s “at least a year,” since I have a storyboard for each song on Wikipedia, samples available on Pandora, free editing software available online, and the optimum cheat sheet, Girl Talk’s compilation. If Gillis had decided to sell his CD for the ’90s average price of $12, an unemployed, middle-school-based teenager could spend an afternoon recreating the music, possibly even extending the production to suit his own needs.

This post has been about copyright, but instantly the issue has evolved into a debate over intellectual property. Does Girl Talk have legal rights to protect his idea to mash together a bunch of previously-released songs (down to each second that he switches to a new sample on each individual track)? Or do we have to start from the beginning by ruling Girl Talk’s appropriation of songs as illegal?

Compared to composing an academic essay, obviously we cannot copy the words of another person and claim it as our own. The MLA would kick our ass (I mean, that’s why we’ve been writing citations pages, right? because we’re afraid?). However, I can write a book while quoting other people and still sell my book without paying royalties. If we read music like words, Girl Talk has already plagiarized, although he has created a new idea out of it. So, by creating my own (identical, but personal) version of Girl Talk’s music, I am plagiarizing from the artists’ original songs from which I take the samples, but am I also plagiarizing Gregg Gillis?

Or, to spin these questions another way: what if an eight-year old kid did all of this? Well, not entirely similar, but we’ve already seen some teeth bared.