Tag Archives: intellectual property

Comparative Media Studies

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Earlier this year, after returning from my semester in Kyoto, I decided to pursue the composition of a book. The idea of writing a book intrigued me, excited me, and inspired me to devote a “page” of this blog to my plans:

Otaku Movement Book

Working title:
• “Otaku Movement: The History and Fans of Anime in America”
• “Fan Tribe: The Cultural Economy of Anime in America”

“Otaku Movement: The History and Fans of Anime in America” is a future publication about the history of the anime fandom in the United States and its implications on media institutions, intellectual property, and cross-cultural reception.

I sent out a dozen emails to a number of academics and even met with Professors Ian Condry (MIT), Susan Napier (Tufts), and Henry Jenkins (MIT/UCS Annenberg) to discuss organizing research and arranging plans for graduate school.

During the spring semester, I decided to begin writing a lot about my personal interests, critiques, and analyses of anime & manga on this blog (which has previously housed the same tripartie then reserved for developments in digital media, Internet studies, etc.).

In May, I contacted the Convergence Culture Consortium, a major think tank in the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT, about potentially working there as a research assistant. Instead, and much to my surprise, I was awarded the opportunity to submit a proposal for a year-long research project of my own to pursue during the next academic year. Of course, I chose a focus on anime, manga, & fan culture.

This past Monday, my proposal was accepted, and I’m happy (and relieved) to announce that beginning in September, I’ll be working with the Convergence Culture Consortium, pursuing research and publications about developments surrounding and the maturation of the American anime & manga fandom. Basically, I was awarded my dream job (especially since after I applied for the graduate MA program in Comparative Media Studies in December ’08, Henry Jenkins announced his move to USC Annenberg, propelling the termination of the CMS program).

The news that I can announce right now is that this project (and any subsequent publications) will replace the book proposal (see above) that I initially hosted on this blog.

While the exact details of my project will be evolving over the coming weeks, I’ve posted my initial proposal below, in case anyone’s interested in reading it. We’ve narrowed the project down a lot from this foundation (Joshua Green, the head researcher at C3, stated that this proposal would form a solid 4-year PhD project, but was too broad for a “case study” in the Consortium).

Proposal

While Japanese popular culture has achieved relative popularity on an international level, critics have targeted fans — the loyal consuming audience of these comics and cartoons — as one potential cause of the currently faltering commercial market for anime and manga. Particularly in America, though, the relationship between audience and media has played an important role in the development of both the fandom and industry. Given the fifty-year history of this media in the United States, the developments related to the growth of the fandom and industry provide a historical context with which to analyze and assess the progress of contemporary convergence culture.

This white paper proposes a narrative of value over time in a specific fan economy. How do fans attach value to media? How does that value compete with the value imposed on fans by the industry? The American anime fandom, originating in the 1960s and coordinated in the 1970s, developed a profit-oriented market from a tradition of fan-to-fan practices. Initially, fans spread copies of taped, untranslated anime through the United States postal service to fellow viewers interested in seeing something new. Eventually, translations entered the network, first as scripts, then followed by fan-composed subtitles (fansubs). While the Japanese industry attempted to intersect this development in the 1980s, the Japanese withdrew, allowing the market to evolve independent of Japanese exportation. Once the commercial sector matured, American companies reapproached Japanese producers to import and spread media to foreign audiences, through print and broadcast. The early, pre-2000 history of this fandom presents a unique yet discordant convergence of business and fan practices, as well as an instance of cultural dissonance, that exhibits a changing landscape of fan interest in foreign entertainment.

In the past decade, the fan demographic has begun to change, and participation by a new generation of fandom, propagated and shaped by developments in broadcast and Internet technologies, has introduced both beneficial and destructive potential to commercial growth in the American market space. The proliferation of fansubbing and scanlations caught the attention of a large portion of Japanese producers, who now decry the fan activities as much as American companies. However, fans across the globe find value in free content as much as in the media they purchase. The question of how much value fans of anime and manga locate in the media they consume may provide a scope for analyzing commercial trends for the near future, particularly as Japan establishes foreign policy around cultural exportation. From NBC in 1963 to Crunchyroll.com in 2007, fan practices continue to inform theories of convergence culture and the ever-evolving nature of audiences.

Unexpectedly, given the recent trends in declining sales of comic books and DVDs, attendance numbers at anime conventions in the United States have increased. Whether this increase depends on changing fan demographics or an evolution in fan-centric values, it provokes a new realm of thought that complements the narrative: What succeeds convergence culture? This white paper aims to construct a narrative of the development of value fans derive from media alongside the value assumed by the industry. While the report primarily attempts to examine a historical period in light of recent convergence culture discourse, the continual advancements in the American anime fandom may shed light on the direction in which this specific converged culture, as well as other converging cultures, will proceed. An account of the forty-year history of the American anime fandom provides critical analysis of a previously-established intersection between producers and consumers, with implications for both Japanese and American economies.

YouTube, Fansubs, and a Conflict of Copyright

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[This article has been cross-posted to YouTomb.]

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:

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Girl Talked: Remix, Reproduction, and a Recipe for Copyright Stew

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Even though I’m off to Japan at the beginning of September, which will prove to be an epic and unforgettable experience, I have to deal with news about events, activities, and orgies that I’m missing out on while across the Pacific. Brings a tear to my eye, really (especially those orgies). To be frank, though, I really am bummed about having to skip out on a specific concert to be performed on BU campus in late September: Girl Talk.

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.