My Loss Is Your Information, MeGUI Says Yes We Can
A slightly different approach with this post. Because I don’t want to write five pages worth of nonsense. You hear that, you train freak?
Today’s Recipe:
How to encode hardsubs for your PS3/Xbox/PSP/iCrap/etc.
(Nearly) All I Know about Doujinshi and (Some) Related Nonsense, or Just Read Canned Dogs
Just a random list. Maybe you can help me by adding or correcting it. And maybe I can help you by telling you otherwise or something you didn’t know. The list is unordered, just numbered for ease of reference.
- Generally understood, doujinshi is comic, based on some previously existing work (for short, I’ll call such things IP), done not by the creator. Basically, fan fiction but in comic form. The term doujin also applies to non-comic fan creations. These terms have over time included amateur work that are original as well, as well certain professionally produced products that market to the same crowd.
- It’s not all porn. In fact I think there are still more non-porn doujinshi out there than adult-content ones, but that’s just what I think. What is a fact is that at Comiket, there are more non-porn doujinshi titles than porn ones. And the fact that I say this does imply there is some kind of (mis)conception about doujinshi and porn.
- It’s done by concerned fans. It’s also done by wannabes. And pros. Technically anyone can make it, even the original creators(!). Anyone. Period.
- It’s printed on paper, but sometimes also pressed on a CD or DVD or otherwise digitally stored. Other times it could be in the form of a merchandise. It could be a web comic. It could be many things.
- It could be so many things, that it could be fan fiction, strategy guides, essays about the IP, remixed music, original music inspired by the IP, cross-over games, episode guides, scripts for anime based on IP, anime based on IP, even mostly original things, and much more!
- It’s been used as a form of promotion. Like viral marketing. Both for IP and for brand recognition (e.g. identity of illustrators). It could be a part of a larger business strategy. Sometimes it can also be used to make money directly when sold through certain stores (in this case, it’s more like direct publishing).
- Sometimes “doujinshi” are sold as licensed goods, in the form of fan comic or anthology. Technically this is where it stops being doujinshi. For example, these. And even maybe this. But you know this is really just the same stuff for these artists anyways no matter how they sell the final product.
- There are events organized around the promotion, trading, distribution and acquisition of doujinshi. Comiket is just the one everyone knows, and there’s a lot more to comiket than I care to learn. It is complex. But that’s not all. Doujinshi are sold, given away, pirated, and otherwise distributed in pretty much any way any good of this kind is sold, given away, pirated and otherwise distributed. So while I might not list everything, there are a lot of cross-over knowledge that applies to doujinshi that could apply to, say, event-license figures or even non-event-license figures (the former can even fall under the doujin category…and maybe the latter). Which is to say, a lot of it revolves around these conventions.
- Production and distribution of doujinshi is often an organized effort by more than one person, but it’s much easier to self-publish in this way than it is … many other ways. Partly because in Japan there are things setup to do this, with services tailored for doujinshi publication. Go watch Comic Party or something. Or Genshiken. Or Doujin Work.
- Or read Wikipedia.
- There is a scene. Like many other aspects of Japan, Japanese doujin things and creators of said things tend to follow various unspoken rules. ZUN’s comments about the Touhou anime actually comes close to nailing down some of the basics. It’s a more liberal interpretation than some, but I think that’s why it nails down some of the basics. It also smells like Creative Commons 3.0, with some major exceptions.
- Doujinshi economics. It’s all Zepy. All the way. To sum up, generally people who make doujinshi don’t make much money, if at all. However the gross volume is large (many circles selling many doujinshi at small quantities), so looking at annual sales volume can be shocking.
- Doujinshi sales is also a very good indicator of IP popularity, however skewed, for high popularity titles. It’s probably good market research data for an area that doesn’t have much data to begin with. Of course, one could also easily say that doujinshi sales is also a poor indicator of popularity to a degree, because you could pull a Type-Moon or a ZUN. 1000 true fans and all.
- For most doujinshi producers, in corollary, the production cycles sync with these doujinshi trade shows as the bulk of titles sell via these venues. But that’s just an observation anyone could make.
- Doujinshi do get copied, reprinted and sold without creator’s consent. By this I mean the original circle that created the doujinshi. Obviously, this is shady. And limited to certain places in the world. Ahem.
- I’ve been mostly talking about how Japan and Japanese people view, consume, make, and otherwise deal with it. Truth is a lot of it also apply to fan works across the globe, at least in essence. The culture, legal limitations, practical limitations and history all vary however. And for that reason I’m going to just limit this post to “doujinshi” as we know it–fan works marketed to Japanese fans.
- The exchange and circulation of doujinshi is also one way where some artists made a break, got the hookups and started their pro career. I wish I have more specifics on this, but it would seem that doujinshi is one active outlet that encourages the mutual contribution of works, varying in commercial viability.
- Uniform, productive contribution by the fan base, centralized for pursual via the ‘net, centralized events (ie. comiket), and major hubs of fan activity (e.g., Akiba)…it’s only possible in a small, wired-up (or wireless), densely populated country like Japan?
- And of course, people outside of Japan buy Japanese doujinshi as well. For the most part this barely registers in the market and can be safely ignored, although it makes you wonder if it has real impact or not on individual doujinshi creators. Small changes in sale can have large impact for small-time creators.
- To make it an even 20, there are non-Japanese people making doujinshi as well, selling it just like everyone else (in Japan). I’m not sure what to say about that besides that’s pretty neat. For now.
I guess this is a good start. Not sure if this is even “nearly” all I know D:
DTO DRM Versus Rental DRM
I was just thinking, but wouldn’t some of the practical arguments against DRM be invalid against rentals?
For one, when you say “rent” the implication is that of mere possession and not ownership. You “have” it but it’s not yours. Unless you are one of those people who think it’s within their right to Netflix and copy the DVDs and send it back. Which may be something that is legal somewhere, who knows. But it’s a very slippery ethical position.
Now we know (at least, you ought to) because of copyright, when you buy some movie you may “have” it, except you sort of don’t own it. You only own the physical copy. To really own the movie you have to own the copyright as well as the copy.
So in a sense, the way copyright items are monetized is just an elaborate rental scheme with variable rental periods? Which is why I think in some bizarro-alternate universe where laws made sense, it may be legal to Netflix all you want and copy every DVD you got in the mail. But let’s return to reality for now.
If we only rent and don’t “buy to own,” a lot of the fair use arguments people make suddenly have less traction. LOL @ time shifting? Do we have the right to make AMVs from rented source material, for example? It’s like, even if you created something original, you are keeping things beyond the time limitation you first agreed to. I’m not sure if those fair use arguments are any less valid overall (probably not), honestly, but it’s harder to swallow.
When it comes to download-to-own content, the analogy extends similarly with a DVD sold in a brick-and-mortar store. The media companies fear that people will copy it and distribute it (they will fear the man who copies every Netflix DVD he gets), so they slap DRMs on the stuff. It’s just like the Venetian manuscript sellers during the Renaissance that prompted the birth of copyright law in recorded history. [Or whatever the history buff that will correct me in the comments says.] But I bet most of them are comfortable if their readers were buying leases or rentals instead of permanent copies. They can probably forgo the DRM, at least with less resistance than without the time limit.
Cutting to the chase, there’s a disconnect between what we feel what we are entitled to do versus what we are programmed as right or wrong. It’s wrong to keep your movie rentals beyond the rental period, which is why Blockbuster got away with a business model for decades making $ off late fees. That’s money libraries use to supplement their income.
At the same time, rental is a concept that is foreign and disgusting to some. And these are the people who think rental is crappy value because you don’t own it when you part with your money and your rented video at the end of the day. I think that’s only because home videos is so cheap now? Do they always buy their own bowling shoes? Rollerblades? Skis? I can’t say. But it always puzzles me when people argue against a rental-based DRM video delivery platform because I convert that “it’s a rental” into a monetary equivalence. There’s nothing inherently bad or good about limited-time use with a fee. If you had to pay more to own something, that something being owned needs to convey value behind the price difference. That’s how you calculate if you want to retain your leased car, right? And if you only plan on watching something once, a rental is all you need. Watch and just be done with it.
But it makes sense why a subscription-based DRM delivery platform is the more palatable but equal alternative. Some people are less irked by it. But with the iTunes Music Store rising to its leadership position, it shows that people like quantized DTO rather than an all-you-can-eat buffet that probably cost just as much to the end user even if you have to give it up later? I don’t know.
Social engineering is a mysterious thing.
Digital Delivery Drilldown
I’m going to do my best to hold back my TD;DR instincts as much as I can. My hope is it can serve as a quick reference to the set of assumptions I (and many) make when discussing digital delivery. They may be bad assumptions. They may be improvable assumptions. But it should make life easier when talking about them.
- It is cheap to set up digital delivery system, DRM free, in terms of the technical end of it. It’s about shedding the mortal shell of brick and mortar.
- Corollary: it is cheap to do so with DRM, but DRM adds cost. Cost is calculated not only in $, but in customer dissatisfaction, uptake, and whatever. It’s well-assumed people like not having DRM over having DRM given exactly the same service otherwise. The question remains what the difference is. Not going into detail with that here.
- Retailers don’t make a lot of margin dollar for media per item sold, as a rule of thumb. It’s often used as a loss leader to bring customers into the store/website/whatever, and retailers rack up otherwise with other kinds of deals and incentives along with the conventional loss leader strategy. B&M retailers absorb the cost of B&M retailing by getting back from distributors and publishers via other means (eg., advertising, negotiated deals). Some items may have large margins, but these items tend to have reciprocally appropriate lower volume of transactions.
- Overall, digital delivery doesn’t make creators much money. If we think of the sales price of a good as the total size of the pie, or the total revenue (the amount advertisers pay into viewers of an episode on Hulu, for example; or simply the amount of money paid for a DTO item), then the amount any one person getting a cut of that revenue (or slice of the pie) depends on
- the size of the pie;
- the number of other persons getting a cut of the same pie, and
- how big % of a piece every such person gets.
- In a digital delivery reality today, the size of the pie is usually much smaller. As mentioned before, retailers never made much money to begin with, so shrinking their grab by ditching more expensive B&M retailers for internet distros is unlikely to increase the actual size of the pie, even if %-wise it is a larger piece for almost every party involved. In other words, #1 is much smaller, #2 is slightly fewer and #3 is larger.
- The consequences of these assumptions can be several:
- Digital delivery at the present is not particularly profitable compared to traditional channels. Where’s the incentive for pro-consumer behavior for publishers?
- Lower cost of entry:
- Enticing for certain publishers and creators, eg., Studio Rikka?
- Digital delivery is still relatively cheap, so it lends itself as a part of more elaborate marketing campaigns (ie., advertisement). Possible examples include Funimation’s streaming initiative with select titles; Xam’d.
- Concerns for cannibalization:
- Fansubs versus traditional retail venues? Capitalizing on lost revenue may be scrapping the bottom of the barrel at the expense of weakening traditional sales models. If the assumption is that people are downloading anime and not buying, what makes legit downloads any more desirable for companies than non-legit downloads, especially if legit downloads/streaming may be easier to access and guilt-free?
- Asking the same question from the reverse: Jumping the technological sophistication barrier? Perhaps what bittorrent is doing for video is what Napster was for music in the late 90s. What and how did all interested parties learn from their last bout? How is ease of access leads to organic market growth, and how does that translate to revenue growth?
Without trying, this has turned into a presentation of sorts. I guess if I turn some of the bullets into slides, that’s what this would be.
I’m going to spin out a little on the last question–how has all interested parties learned from the late 90s?
I think here is where I’m going to give Crunchyroll a lot of credit. It’s exploiting what people commonly would call a “legal loophole” by playing up the worst-nightmare scenario that Hollywood didn’t quite fear as much as they would have if we rewind back to 1996. The DMCA safe harbor provision has shifted the liability off the ISP. It is rather dangerous to make your business ideas on top of a legal loophole, needless to say. But I think these notions are better taken by Google’s legal team as Youtube is a much bigger time bomb than CR is. After all, the only difference between the two is that CR offers an additional DTO option, and it doesn’t really make their case any worse in front of a judge than pure advertising-only money. Will Viacom win? I think that’s the question everyone who cares with digital distribution has to ask themselves.
And no quantity of moral posturing and ego wanking amounts to anything tangible when it comes to CR. I don’t really care if the guys running the outfit uploads fansubs to their own site while getting a footjob from a mysterious swordgirl, humming to Rick Astley, chewing on cats, and flaming people on the internet–all at the same time. If they can continue to hook up Japanese distributors with the American market in ways to adopt to the digital revolution, they are doing a good thing. Probably way better of a thing most of us fans can do. I recognize and I believe that there is some kind of legitimate, hurt feeling, somewhere, by what CR has done in their earlier days, but a lot of it is magnified by the common sort of ignorance you see everywhere on the web and not a rational view of the situation. It’s too bad.
Download to Own, Rental, or Streaming? It’s All DRM And We Deal? Pragmatic Outlooks.
I’m just thinking the distinction is kind of weird.
Some people tend to really champion one thing or another, like against digital rights management (DRM). I think regardless how you feel about the issue on digital delivery of anime, it’s important to look at it from the big picture.
The really basic concept here is that it cost money to create and deliver anime to us, so it makes some sense for us exchange money for it (or rather, for them to charge us money to watch it, or use it to deliver ads and have advertisers pay or some form of that).
Naturally, the purer form of the delivery, the better value. Things like DRM are, in a nutshell, giving the user less value. To an extent, “streaming” media is also a form of DRM in the inability (and lack of common knowhow) to record a stream, giving us less value. Think of it like radio. But at the same time, that kind of distinction is not all bad compared to a less-restricted format, much like how radio and streaming media can deliver to users who just have access to a wirelessly-wired portable device (eg. a radio, iPhone), versus having to carry around a personal media player (PMP; eg. Zune) and worry about storage. Of course, the better way to look at it is that streaming media is really just a DRM-laden, on-demand broadcast.
A rational consumer’s perspective is that if we are to receive a more restricted product or service for our money, in exchange, we ought to pay less. And vice versa–less restrictions mean it should cost more money.
