Your Favorite Anime Sucks
No, not really.
I am a bit fustered. Partly because of this, but also I’ve hit some kind of a dry spell. Just haven’t been thinking about much other than work lately, so not much to write about.
When all else fail, let’s try insulting random things. Maybe it’ll get the juices flowing.
The Rise of a Networked-Economic Giant; or Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, But Nobody Wants to Die
In Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth of Networks, he explored the internet’s potential in transforming human society by comparing behavior of people living in advance economies between a industrial mode of information production and network mode of information production. In some ways it is a repackaging of the common, copyleftist argument about freedom–”free as in free speech, not free beer.” However, Benkler raises a contention that a networked, non-proprietary approach to creating valuable, marketable information can be just as good, if not superior to a classical, industrial mode of production of information. Benkler does this through both economic ally and in social and political terms. While his example of the open-source movement in the software industry is a common banner that copyleftists rally under, the generalized approach Benkler used to explain the situation can be applied across-the-board, to most, if not all, useful information that is produced today under an industrial mode of information production.
Taking a bottom-line, cynical approach, I ask: Is Google’s long-term strategy as a business entity to create a niche in the market and in the landscape of copyright law, a sustainable goal? While the public cannot be certain what goes on in Google’s board meetings, one can reasonably construe their recent actions, marketing strategies, and overall philosophy to suggest several things:
1. If one can fairly presume that Google is full of smart, intelligent managers, lawyers, and businesspeople, then their success thus far these past few years means a switching of gears that they are going to be in this business for the long haul. Google has not existed even for 10 years, and many years less in the eyes of the public (and investors). Given their position as a leader in the internet-related industries, they now have the wherewithal to take new kinds of risks and pioneer the future in this mostly uncharted area of business and law.
2. Jessica Litman’s Digital Copyright lays out a solid foundation and a rather cynical view of US copyright law. In part, she argues the current statutory regime is the direct result of many elaborate and complex negotiated-for bargains between the traditional players in the copyright industry. While Litman, Benkler, and many others warn the senselessness and unfairness of applying laws meant to enforce economic competition between businesses to everyday Joe and Jane, the fact that Google (and the majority of players in the higher level of abstraction of the internet market–to exclude telecom interests and ISPs from the picture) had no say during the late 1990s round of legislative negotiation, it leaves new players in new media little choice in dealing with laws that are designed keeps the old players in power. Indeed, this entire school of thought did not start to mature until years after the passage of the DMCA. (Perhaps talk about Yahoo here?)
3. Are Google’s lawsuits a form of impact litigation? No doubt, by bringing novel and new issues before courts, Google is trying to set laws in favor to itself. In fact, if Litman is right, the court may be the only real legal venue where Google can seek relief; and especially if the legislative process is as slow as Litman (and in the history of US copyright law) claims. But as a rule, outside the court room, lawsuits have deep and complex implications for businesses. One of the key implication is in the battle of mindshare. (Bruce Keller’s presentation about the ad-based model of Google and the comparison to TV and radio elicited in me a feel of irony in light of the big picture.) Google is viewed in the eyes of the public directly, and its good will with the public affects its earnings in a very direct way (as opposed to book publishers or the Author’s Guild, as examples of Google’s opponents). Thus, Google has a stake in swaying the law to embody a wider fair use, or more free use, in alignment of public interest. Google can paint its opponents in a light of how established players, lacking that judicial agility, fight to retain the way they do business against innovative technology. It is both a marketing ploy and a legal strategy.
4. This ties in with the perceived, Lessig-like argument about fair use. It is generally accepted that a business method relying on a legal interpretation of fair use is an extremely risky one. While that never stopped VHS and Betamax manufacturers, the full force of the copyleftist argument is that some of the new things we can do through new media seems to violate the section 106 bundle of rights, they shouldn’t. These uses should not even be “fair use,” but free, un-infringing use. However short of legislative changes, Google’s only alternative is to have a court declare that it is “fair use.” Once realized that these reforms are very pro-public and against the interests of the established, entrenched corporate interests in old media, the public will tend to rally towards Google, its free services, and its vision of a freer informational future.
5. The nature of a internet search engine cannot be reduced to the like of a yellow pages or any analogous argument someone may make in court as a biased counsel. The web itself has been transformed entirely by search engines; Google’s success alone is more than enough to testify to its significance. It can be fairly said that ultimately Google is a middleman in the balance of consumers, creators, and middlemen, but how will the courts appreciate the value Google adds to our economy today? How will the courts appreciate the value of YouTube? MySpace? Will it go the way of Grockster; or the VHS?
Conclusion: What does Google stand to lose if they do not press on at this time? This is the $64,000 question, but does sound business sense means anything in an industry that is fast-changing, dynamic, and highly developing? With high risk comes high rewards. The fact that Google is such a threat to traditional players in consumer media (and an ever-growing list of other traditional players), there are reasons to believe this is going to be the case only if Google breaks the ties of the legislative binds that hinders it as a corporation in competition with other economic entities interested in the same slice of the consumer pie. Why say yes to licensing when you can always say yes to licensing later? The cost of litigation plus even a poor settlement seems little when the entire future of the world’s information industry is in the balance. To call Google’s attorneys as “believers” is probably more fitting rather than calling them prophets, but that is exactly what is in the balance for them.
===
Yeah.
The above is a rough outline of what I plan to write in a week’s time into a short paper. (And forgive the random references that I make with no clear meaning as to what it refers to, just for my own sake.) The relevance to all things anime is small but it’s an answer to a question plaguing the content industry. The internet has long since been the worst kept secret to wealth in this information revolution. How do you make a buck? How do we work with fansubbing to make a buck?
Indeed, if what keeps fansubbing alive is the monetary barrier to bring a suit to a wide range of people all over the world, to sue potential customers of Kadokawa Shoten, Bandai, MediaFactory, King Record, and what have you…
1. Why hasn’t there been more concerted effort to bring “fansub groups” down?
2. Fansubbing has evolved. But where will this go next? To elaborate, since the days where we pipe text through a genlock to mail SVHS tapes in a SASE envelope to today where we can produce MTV-style parodies with Aegisub and put it on YouTube, things has changed. The legal liability and economic incentives changed. The use changed. The users changed. And it will continue to change. I find it disturbing that I have to make a distinction between fansubbing in various contexts.
3. What other relevant questions can we ask? What are all the stakes? Whose stakes are important? To whom?
What I would really apperciate are references and critiques if you can throw them my way. I’m still in mid-research, so to speak, so that sort of stuff can be very valuable for me. Pretty please?
Blogging 102 - The Community of Peers
The Web 2.0 generation is the iPod generation. It is the MySpace and YouTube generation. It is the self-centered model of information production. These days are the days where one of my crazy rants can be read by dozens of people unrelated to me.
As bloggers, we are the grunts of a new faction. We are producers of information, may it be entertainment, news, public action, or just as an artform for self-expression. The table has turned from the large, centralized corporate information producers–the mainstream press and the media cartels–to you. And you can do basically whatever the hell you want.
Don’t be fooled for a second that we can exist without these big media guys. Still, life with people who blog, people who comment, people who aggregate blogs, links across them, and most of all–everyone who reads these things, contributing things, building up more things from the bare bones of everyday life (or even from the mass media) to form this new information ecology–makes a better world. Instead of caring for Tom Cruise, you get to care for your fellow bloggers, commenters, or just care about Tom Cruise all together (for example). It’s no longer about random things as much as it is about a group of people caring about random things. A community. An ongoing dialogue.
It may just be that I’ve been stuck in school for way too long, but this entire process reeks of academic peer-review publications, and how professors and researchers use these publications to build your next idea…it just seems natural. People critique each other in publications this way just as well as they collaborate to work on the same idea. This is a different community than, say, BBC and CNN; or TNT and Oxygen; definitely not FOX or NHK. It’s closer to 2ch or Slashdot, but not quite. What’s the difference? The long tail.
The ability of the internet to bring geographically isolated people who share similar interest together is the crux. I think in a macrocosm of American anime fans (for example), topically you’ll see a lot of people into Yugioh, Digimon, Final Fantasy, or what have you. Zooming in to any random segment and you’ll see the Naruto, FMA, or old fashion Ninja Scroll and Akira folks. Zooming in even more and you’ll see the digisubbing viewer mixed in all of that, the diversification of fandom expressed in cosplayers, fanartists, web comic people, and online personalities.
But is the anime blog community a reflection of that? Not quite so. I think within these sites there’s a conflict of sites who tend to “centralize” and sites that “diversify.” It’s a reflection of an instinct of people who wants to “syndicate” and people who relinquish that kind of editorial power to their readers. We have sites like Something Awful or Blogsuki which acts like filters, yet at the same time as censors. The Slashdots and Diggs today get around that by aggregating some kind of democratic response, but invariably they compromise on the same as well.
I suppose the criticism I have is that the lone dissenters today, just as they would decades ago, are still unheard. It is vastly improved in that they could be heard today, but the democratic process of filtering will still wash them out, and there’s no guarantee that a tightly-controlled, power-to-a-few-editors kind of process will improve exchanges of thought.
Then again, I think that’s also the case in academia. But somehow, merit speaks volumes more than appeal when the purpose is to discover truths rather than to entertain? Are there truths to be harvested in this medium, or are we just drones spewing meritless trash so we can claim we update regularly? Just because anime bloggers, invariably, flock to new stuff, is that why we don’t have much in terms of blogging older series? Is this the fingerprint of the god of Relevance? What is the state of the anime blog nation today?
Perhaps, the answer is a simple, “it doesn’t matter.” Perhaps it does; I don’t know. Maybe we’re at the right stage of the game given the size, but you can see it happening in various online communities even today. Still, a pinch of selfish interest is the way to go.
This is a continuing series of random stuff about blogging. Hit the “blogging” tag to see some of the previous entries!
Your Life as a Sports Manga
This is sort of off-topic, but as with all things building up to a climax, it gets exciting.
A bunch of guys I know and regularly run into are playing in a softball tournament. They made into the playoffs (out of 20 some odd teams?) and they have a big game today, which may or may not be rained out (it is suppose to start in half an hour).
Honestly, I don’t really care that much about it. I am interested at all only because I know these guys. But hearing their story it’s exactly the sort of thing that lines up a good, classic shounen (or shoujo, even) baseball manga story. Complete with a prayer-miracle last-half-inning home runs, dramatic relationships between families and lovers (many of them are married), parents and children, friends and rivals, what have you.
The only thing we’re missing is spring training in rural China, swinging under a waterfall in Spain, or seeking legendary pitching techniques in the savanna plains of Mozambique. And even I say this jokingly, some of them might end up at those places doing something softball-related.
And even the rain-out big game.
If I had a pickup truck, I’d be tailgating.
Sometime, when I see some funny Phoneix Wright parody of trial lawyering, I get the same feeling. When drama is bigger than real life, it’s fun to read about it or watch it on TV or even play a game. Learning how to bring that passion into the actual practice, however, is nigh difficult if even possible.
Ah well, I suppose it’s not a matter of being able to enjoy two very different things the same way, but rather as they are? It certainly makes a real-life miracle at-bat all that more miraculous.
Speaking of manga, though–Brocoli Books is looking for bloggers to review their crap. Let them know if you’re interested.
Blogging 311 - Collective and Transformed, Copyrightable Expressions as Memes
It’s actually a very complex topic and I’m not sure I can give it the right treatment right now, without having done all the research I want to. Treat this as an outline I suppose.
But somewhere between the shuffle of the internet, from one viral marketing tool to another, the evolution of Web 2.0, and attention whoring on YouTube or MySpace, there is something going on. Lessig calls it a war, but I think it’s a lot more subtle than that–although it is pretty serious. However, while the war (or whatever you call it) may wage on, there are some players who are the key to understand why it’s an important conflit. Memes are one of them.
For the sake of simplicity, we’ll define and call this construct a “meme” in that it is a icon, like words in a language, that symbolizes and trigger a set of experiences, ideas, and/or emotions. These are powerful currencies that brings us to laughter, to sadness, to help us remember.
1. Memes are powerful, compact, concise devices to invoke elaborate and complex ideas and shared experiences.
As time become increasingly valuable in certain societies and cultures, and as well as the size of our communication devices for mass media shrink over time (not to mention our attention span), it is increasing important to be able to deliver large amount of content over a small area. A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say–that’s why motion pictures and television are powerful? Memes, audio, audiovisual, visual, slogans, simple words, emoticons, or even body language become common methods to express large amount of data over a short time. It’s got the phat pipes, so to speak. And unlike latin or calculus, it is widely disseminated and fast to learn.
2. Increased mobility and intake demands concise and short informational exchanges
In terms of blogging, memes are both the bait and the hook. In some ways it is just another channel to communication and disseminate. Soap box where people can talk back at you. Slashdot is probably the best example. For me, 2ch, 4ch, SA, Wikipedia, Xanga, MySpace, what have you. However the juicy morsels of entertainment and education that draw us to those sites are what memes are made of. Snakes on a Plane? The online craze is unbelievable. Yet that’s what some of us are looking for–good campy movies–to begin with. It just spread like how a meme does.
3. Memes are useful for blogging, blogs create memes.
But speaking of Snakes on a Plane, the obviously stock concept of dangerous creepers in a confined area with a lot of people who can’t leave is hardly copyrightable. In some ways Samuel L. Jackson’s performance involving the various uses of “motherfucking” has more copyrightability (even if it is also not really copyrightable), which is odd. Of course I say this with the disclaimer that don’t take my word for it–the law on the book is fairly settled when it comes to Scene a Faire. Still, it might take a litigation anyways to find out. Can New Line Cinema take on the countless of parodies and references to this cult hit-in-the-making for ages to come? Probably to some success if the money is there. What’s up with the rather high 8.1 IMDB ratings anyways?
4. Memes may use copyrightable or trademarked expressions to get the job done.
5. Derivative claims on memes–not derivative enough too frequently.
If you recall the original flash video for All Your Base Are Belong To Us, you’ll remember a large amount of use of photochopped image ala Photoshop Friday @ SomethingAwful. Parody? Maybe–they’re definitely not making fun of the cultural icons they were using. And you may also recall that’s the reasoning why PA humbled themselves from the Strawberry Shortcake joke they pulled. All these things makes weak, in the context of a fair use defense against copyright infringement, the fair use defense.
And on the topic of Penny Arcade, they’re not a non-profit use per se. I’m not sure if they’ve gone farther with what they’ve had, including PAX and all, but in many ways they’re a profitable entity–enough to subsist Tycho and Gabe’s gaming habits at least. In as much most relevant memes do carry some kind of social value either as criticism, and are often freely traded, they tend to use commercial, copyrighted content that are not news-worthy. There are some that are, such as ones involving 9/11 or the war in Iraq, depending on subject matter.
6. The context in use of memes: commercial, private/public, social criticism, fact/news/fiction. It can affect the fair use defense.
And even though you can’t call AYBABTU a Budweiser ad, or even an ad for an old NES game, it evokes enough of both. What has been transformed? Certainly the images themselves and their contexts, but each of those individual elements were preserved to a sufficient extent that reminds the viewer what they are, to create the juxtaposition necessary for the meme to stick. It’s like noise music in that sometimes you want to preserve the original identity, but it in itself is not the attraction.
7. Transformative nature of memes
There is one big hurdle I think we need to decide, each for yourself. Do you think in today’s mass media society, the pieces of popular culture created and conformed to feed into our feeble minds, belongs to you? Or does it belong to those who created it? Remember, it’s inside your mind.
8. The Lockean balance
9. Redefining the public domain - who owns culture?
I suppose the last question is one that needs to be answered early on. If a movie like Snake on a Plane can be copyrightable, memes would be generally. However what’s the “meme” in SoaP isn’t the film itself, but the shtick and the hype surrounding it.
This is one of the other emerging area of law that is, for the most part, poorly chartered and thought-out. I trace it from the perspective of copyrightable fictional characters (who are some of the best memes themselves, to me). MGM v. Honda is probably the big turning point for it legally, but where does it end?
10. Are memes copyrightable?
I hope this helps you (and me) to focus a bit where the issues are today, and why it is relevant.
Well, why is it relevant? Fanfiction? Doujinshi? AMVs? Even cute little blog posts like Yuribou’s interviews? Why, what about the vibrant fan art or non-fan art that we use, for granted, as avatars, wallpapers, photochopped jokes and e-cards? It all can matter.
And lastly, this is a part of series of entries:
- 101 - Creation-Traction and Introduction
- 203 - Informational Virology and Memetics
