7 ms·

Copyright is Broken

73 points by a_magical_me 11y ago

forrestthewoods 11y ago
I fully understand the authors argument and disagree almost across the board. He should just strike a licensing agreement like everyone else. It's not hard.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  It's hard enough to strike a licensing agreement of any kind for a song in a wedding video. Even harder to strike a reasonable one given how copyright works. Hell, Disney used to charge companies up to five digits to sing the Happy Birthday song in a movie. Yet, anyone reading your comment might be mislead to think that companies are very reasonable about this and there might even be something as easy as Amazon.com to get licenses from. Not the case as it wouldn't make enough for the greedy and powerful as author said. If they want these rights, I think some equally-strong responsibilities are in order in exchange.
  - forrestthewoods 11y ago
    Calling a one man indie who just had a stroke of success greedy and powerful is silly. Indies are very easy to work with. Napkin agreements are legally sufficient. A simple email promising 30% of net receipts may have been enough to seal the deal. Getting licenses from large companies isn't that hard either. Are you gonna make a bunch of money? Turns out big corporations love money. So if you're gonna make a bunch of money just contact their licensing department. It's available on their public website.
    - chipsy 11y ago
      The problem is that that is too much business for individual creators to be bothered with. It is not a matter of whether they can literally do it if they behaved as a rational, rent-seeking Homo Economicus, but whether it's actually on their minds to do business first and not just act on their emotions and run away from the problem altogether, leaving money on the table. For artists, the latter is far more likely to be the case. We should not blame human beings for being flawed and fitting into our arrangement of society poorly.
      - forrestthewoods 11y ago
        ...what? Most people fail at most things they try. Most businesses fail. Most ideas suck. Most personal projects never see the light of day. And because some people can't bothered to send a damn e-mail you propose... ?
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        I'd say the real problem is big players buy up or fund the best stuff. So, opposite of that commenter's claim, most people trying to license good content are going to be doing business with medium-to-large firms that are quite greedy and won't give the time of day. In my wedding video example, it was so hard to get them on the phone and get the two licenses that some companies briefly specialized in doing just that part for people. Fee was typically around $10,000. Far cry from my teacher in middle school contacting Cinderella copyright holder and paying a quarter or so royalty to allow us to do a Cinderella play. So, if we're giving them control, I say there should be a requirement to make it easy to get a license from them.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      "Calling a one man indie who just had a stroke of success greedy and powerful is silly." Actually it is greedy for one man doing one thing to legally control that thing and charge whatever he wants for 100+ years. The things many workers create are much more valuable with little to no legal protection and far from guaranteed pay. So, there's should be a strong benefit to the public over no copyright if we're going to give the owner this much special treatment, power, and money. For most content, I'm not seeing much of a difference between the one's that do it for pay vs those that do it for fun. Only seems to factor in when the development or production cost is high enough where one needs to recover it. Complex software, video games, and SFX movies come to mind. Even then, the protections could be weakened after the return on investment came. Instead, we're seeing a lot of great stuff pulled off the market or still charged full price to force you to buy the next thing. That benefits only owners with provable harm to the public, esp with legacy software. The opposite of what system claims to provide. So, it's worth remembering that there's first part of getting authors paid and second part of what happens after. Both are corrupt in current scheme.
  - shalmanese 11y ago
    > Hell, Disney used to charge companies up to five digits to sing the Happy Birthday song in a movie. Which is particularly egregious given that Disney never owned the rights to Happy Birthday at any point in time! (you're thinking of Warner Music)
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      Lol. Thanks for the correction.
- eevee 11y ago
  "Yes, hello, Nintendo? Let's talk business. I'm a starving artist and I want to sell some Pikachu buttons."
  - forrestthewoods 11y ago
    Nintendo licenses the shit out of Pokemon.
    - Ketsuban 11y ago
      Not to random artists on the internet for the purpose of selling a couple hundred homemade pins at ComiCon.
pfisch 11y ago
This is ridiculous. You don't have the right to just take someone else's IP in order to make money. That is basically just taking advantage of someone else's marketing budget and hard work. In this world you would never even know if a sequel to a game or movie is made by the original author or a cloner. Maybe copyright periods are too long, but there is no way I should be able to release a game called Undertale tomorrow with the same characters and plot and slightly different art.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  It is ridiculous. The content companies don't have the right to pay money to people in Congress to change laws to benefit them at others' expense. And should we give I.P. producers preferential treatment in form of guaranteed profit on good works for lifetimes that the rest of us don't get for our work? And which mostly benefit those same companies above? Doesn't seem right.
  - pfisch 11y ago
    Well now you are talking about lobbying which is a different subject that also isn't as black and white as you are painting it. I don't know what guaranteed profit you are talking about. Most IPs do not produce any profit even 2-5 years after they are created. Mario for example has required millions if not billions of dollars of follow on investments from Nintendo so that the ip is still valuable. Most other NES games do not continue to generate profit. "....the rest of us don't get for our work" - I don't even understand what you mean by this. Are you talking about the employment contract you strike with an employer? Because that contract varies and some employees do see profits for decades on previous works. I think you need to provide an example here.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      No, we're talking about copyright and the money it brings. That's the primary reason for its existence that I can tell. Copyrighted works are a multi-billion dollar industry. They're also extremely, one-sided laws thanks to lobbying by big companies that own most of the I.P. (esp profitable). So, when conversation comes up, it makes no sense to act like it's Joe Public vs The Little Guy given that the laws are mainly designed to benefit The Big Companies. So, the question is, should my work and company have to keep innovating to earn at or above the market rate while a select few get 100+ year monopolies on their work? I think not. Further, your employment contract reply is a strawman that doesn't reflect America's situation. People are typically hired by a company with either no contract or a contract written by the company for the company's benefit. Laws, passed again with corruption, often grant the company the I.P. if the slightest bit was done on their time. Other laws let the companies throw away employees without consequence. The result is that the labor market is rigged highly in favor of big companies and their lawyers with supply-and-demand lowering the wages of workers each year. Except big companies with a nice selection of copyrights, patents, and other legal monopolies. ;) So, it's worthwhile to ask whether we should continue giving monopolies that mainly benefit richest few and were largely created via corruption. I'm opposed to it as I think artists will create regardless. I'm for models more like Patreon or non-profits behind software.
mediumdeviation 11y ago
I understand his argument about gatekeepers, but Steam is a poor example. Steam itself provides so much more than a simple storefront as he describes it. By selling on Steam you also get Steam API, which gives you - Achievements - Leaderboards - Cloud save - Steam Workshop - user generated mods and content - Multiplayer infrastructure Steam community, which gives you - Forum - Social network - user generated content such as screenshots, game guides and fanart - Reviews - endorsements from several thousand actual players sells games far better than a flashy trailer Whether these features are worth the 30% cut is arguable, but these services are far more valuable to independent developers, who don't have the time or ability to implement these, than to developers under large publishers, who may share these infrastructure within the games they publish.
- c3534l 11y ago
  "Market makers" are a very important economic function. Just because it's hard to put your finger on a tangible product, the fact that they were able to create a unified framework for selling games to customers is worth quite a lot of money. A lot of people had tried (and failed) to do similar things in the past. Those things you mentioned are almost irrelevant. The actual value they're delivering is being able to easily and economically distribute your game to a wide audience and, as a consumer, connect me with a large number of games. It's like trying to say the value of a road is the stopsigns and traffic lights on them, not the fact that it's connecting two cities.
  - mediumdeviation 11y ago
    Disagree. The 'market' is far less important when the good you're selling takes up no tangible shelf space - people have been buying games just fine without Steam for decades before Steam, and still are. Steam itself, by dint of being another layer between gamers and their games, have to justify its existence and value to them, and generally does through a variety of features as well as its legendary sales. But being a marketplace and distribution network alone does not get you anywhere, not when the cost of setting up shop on the Internet is so low these days.
Animats 11y ago
He's complaining about the problem with dōjinshi outside Japan.[1] Although Japan's copyright laws don't allow fan works, the tradition in Japan is not to enforce this. If you really wanted to work on this problem, an interesting option would be to approach the Cool Japan Fund.[2] This is a venture capital fund, funded by the government of Japan and some big banks at about the $1Bn level, to promote Japanese culture outside Japan. (The government of Korea has been pushing K-Pop, and Japan is working on catching up.) They own an anime translation operation, a free anime site (daisuki.net), a TV channel, and, most relevant to this, a content creator training academy.[3] Kadokawa Contents Academy[4] is a training school for anime and manga creators outside Japan. There are currently branches in Taiwan and Singapore, with more to come. They might be able to give some advice on the subject. [1] http://www.animenation.net/blog/2014/08/12/34666/ http://www.animenation.net/blog/2014/08/12/34666/ [2] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ [3] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/files/press_150330-1.pdf https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/files/press_150330-1.pdf [4] http://www.kadokawa-ca.co.jp/ http://www.kadokawa-ca.co.jp/
- ue_ 11y ago
  I'm going to post a bit of an unrelated (in that it is not related to Doujinshi) comment, but still drawn from a link you posted. Please forgive this, as I didn't have anywhere else to post it. In the first link, it says, >According to the 2012 CIA World Factbook, 98.5% of the residents of Japan are ethnically Japanese. Doujinshi arose largely due to the uniformity of intention, good will, perception, and morality of Japanese people. This seems a rather poor reason to me. There doesn't seem to be any grounds to say that what's going on with doujinshi has anything to do with morality, and further the link between this sense of morality and being ethnically Japanese - as though this won't be found if other ethnicities were to co-exist on a larger scale. Most countries are pretty homogeneous with regard to ethnicity (albeit not as high as Japan), so I'm wondering as to why the author has decided to pick up on this fact about people rather than the elements of culture that have nothing to do with how ethnically homogeneous a society is. The author implies that the first sentence automatically will lead to the next - I think that's a false link to make. As someone who isn't ethnically Japanese in Japan, it makes me feel uneasy as it just seems to be widening this gap that people make between ethnicities and countries of origin, especially with regard to Japan. It's a borderline 日本人論 statement that I've seen is popular in Japan. Countless books about "Japanese style" and how it's accomplished through the "harmony" achieved by something innate in Japanese people or culture (that God forbid cannot be learned, silly foreigner! /s) that's brought about through the fact that Japan is an ethnically homogeneous country. tl;dr rant about how I think the author makes a link between two unrelated things, and furthers the divide between two groups of people while still managing to be offensive during the course of it.
c3534l 11y ago
This is some very strange logic here. It's so odd that I feel like doing some point-by-point rebuttals. > Commissions are all well and good, but they don’t pay very well and there’s a physical limit on how many a single person can do. Which is why the creator of a creative work might be okay with something like that. > The merchandise I had in mind was buttons and stickers and prints and other physical incarnations of art. You see this kind of stuff sold rather a lot at anime conventions Which is precisely why it's not okay. You're not adding anything of your own, you're just profiting off of someone else's stuff. Here's the question you should be asking: are you making a profit from something you did not create? If so, that money is not yours, you did not earn that money. You didn't make the video game, the story, the art. > Copyright was originally invented for books. While true, that's only because books were the first mass-produced creative works. By the time the US constitution came around (and the copyright clause in it), the concept had been well extended beyond that, even to the point where the idea had been generalized to technology andn scientific discoveries (in the form of patents). > Fan work is created from scratch. It’s new. No, it is a "derivative work." Putting someone else's pictures given meaning by a game they created onto a button and selling it is not a "new" work. If it weren't, why not just leave out the stuff you didn't create and sell it on your own? You can't, that's why. > Gatekeeping This is a really idiotic excuse. Steam isn't the one telling you that you can't sell other people's art and taking all the money for yourself, the people who made the art are telling you that. > When copyright was introduced, “creators” were a sort of elite. You had to have a lot of equipment and resources, or more likely, you had to attract the attention of someone who had a lot of equipment and resources. More self-serving rationalizations. Writing only takes talent and some time. Whether or not it was good enough to make copies of and sell is another thing. Copyright was set up so that anyone could afford it if they were even a little bit serious. Copyright protects the little guy against a bigger person with more resources at their disposal to copy your idea and make a profit off it. It gives them the right to their work because they're the ones that created it. > Abuse This section is completely irrelevant. The problems we have with our copyright and patent laws has nothing to do with protecting a small, indie developer, who made a legitimately good game, from being outcompeted by enterprising salesman who are trying to sell merchandising of someone else's work. When did people like Undertale become "multinational corporations"? You can't make someone seem like a faceless and souless being that it's okay to ripoff when you linked to their Twitter account earlier in the article. It's people like the author of this article that copyright laws are rightfully meant to protect content-creators from - people who can argue themselves in circles to not feel bad about ripping people off because they think putting someone else's game logo on a button is an "entirely new" work.
dwg 11y ago
I agree with @mediumdeviation about the Gatekeepers section remarks. Steam cost real money to develop and operate. Valve also has additional operating expenses as a business. It's a free market and others are free to compete with Steam with a lower priced product. Additionally, the creator had a choice whether or not to distribute via Steam, and obviously the decided that the benefit outweighs the cost. I don't mean to be rude, but I lost interest in finishing what at first appeared to be a potentially interesting article based on the naivety of these remarks. I would suggest to the author to give it more thought.
- TheDong 11y ago
  If you want to respond to mediumdeviation's remarks, please reply to him, not add a new top-level comment. It's more readable to do so.
chmike 11y ago
One may ask for a license to sell own crafted things about something we like. It is legitimate that the initial creator has a control over use of his product image and a cut on the profits. Copyright is not broken. It would not be smart for the initial creator to strictly forbid any third party to contribute in the promotion and potential return of its product. But in any case it is up to him to decide and that is legitimate.
- TheDong 11y ago
  You're parroting the law, not giving any real reason. "It's legitimate" .. but why? Eevee has actual arguments here, namely that it doesn't promote the advancement of the arts at all which is the sole purpose of copyright. Why shouldn't I be able to draw artistic representations of a game character? I can draw a representation of Donald Trump with no problem (as many political cartoonists do) and I own that because I made it. Why the hell does some random digital character have more rights than a human? I know this is a bit of a silly analogy, but your comment is silly to begin with. It's obvious that if I'm taking someone's art or work and re-selling it with some minor transformations, that's wrong. But if I put work into making something that has my flair, my touch, my innovation, why should the original artist profit from it?
  - chmike 11y ago
    I gave the reason, you are ignoring it. Because a creator has the right to decide how it's character is drawn, in what context it's put, for what it is used, etc. it is also a protection against parasites and stealers. If you don't understand that you are not a creator. Create your own characters and the problem is solved. Or ask for a license. The creator may give you a free license if your drawings and use of it match his liking. A copyright is a protection, not an interdiction. Ask the permission to the creator. The decision belongs to him and that is, in my opinion, right. Don't down vote me if you simply disagree with me.
    - Flimm 11y ago
      You seem to think that the right of a creator to control how people use their creation is self-evident, along with other self-evident rights, like the right to a fair trial. Other people like me don't feel that it is self-evident, rather, we feel that it is only justified if it effectively encourages the sciences and the arts. Our axiom, the self-evident truth that we're working for, is the flourishing of arts and science, and if we can find a way to do that which doesn't allow creators to dictate what people do with their copy of Mario, all the better. Once we realise that we're assuming different axioms, we can stop talking past each other.
leni536 11y ago
OK, there are like three things about copyright that I don't fully get: 1. What counts as copying? 2. What counts as creative work? 3. What counts as fair use? For me all this three are huge gray areas. I honestly can't decide if derivative works from this game's characters could be sold freely despite what the original author says under the current US law. Please don't mix trademark into the question, I don't know if Undertale or its characters are trademarked or not. For the sake of clear discussion about copyright let's assume that they are not.
KaiserPro 11y ago
The problem is this. In order to make money you need to be reasonably sure that someone can't take your stuff and sell it as their own. This is a separate issue to stuff costing too much, or DRM. Everything you create that is original is copyright to you. This is known as your moral rights. This means that if you come up with a novel character, design or mechanical item, you have the ability to exclusively produce, market, license or sell that thing. This is good, because thats how the economy works. If you make an item, and a large corporation comes along takes them all and sells them as their own, that would be theft. This however is a problem for giants like google, youtube and facebook. When you publish something to the giants, you sign away your moral rights. This is mainly to allow things like recompression and excerpts. (Because your emails/videos/photos are your own copyright, google must seek permission to display, alter or create derivative works.) Its very much in their interest to dilute and dissolve copyright laws. They have managed to capture the general dissatisfaction at the high price of music and movies to push their agenda, which is to sell adverts on the back of someone else's work. If we take a specific thing like dōjinshi, The people creating the subtitles are not breaking the law. The act of transcription is their own copyright. What is illegal is selling/distributing the video as well without paying the original owners. In the digital economy, we need strong copyright, or us small people will never be able to make a living.

73 points by a_magical_me 11y ago

I fully understand the authors argument and disagree almost across the board. He should just strike a licensing agreement like everyone else. It's not hard.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
It's hard enough to strike a licensing agreement of any kind for a song in a wedding video. Even harder to strike a reasonable one given how copyright works. Hell, Disney used to charge companies up to five digits to sing the Happy Birthday song in a movie. Yet, anyone reading your comment might be mislead to think that companies are very reasonable about this and there might even be something as easy as Amazon.com to get licenses from. Not the case as it wouldn't make enough for the greedy and powerful as author said. If they want these rights, I think some equally-strong responsibilities are in order in exchange.
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  Calling a one man indie who just had a stroke of success greedy and powerful is silly. Indies are very easy to work with. Napkin agreements are legally sufficient. A simple email promising 30% of net receipts may have been enough to seal the deal. Getting licenses from large companies isn't that hard either. Are you gonna make a bunch of money? Turns out big corporations love money. So if you're gonna make a bunch of money just contact their licensing department. It's available on their public website.
  - chipsy 11y ago
    The problem is that that is too much business for individual creators to be bothered with. It is not a matter of whether they can literally do it if they behaved as a rational, rent-seeking Homo Economicus, but whether it's actually on their minds to do business first and not just act on their emotions and run away from the problem altogether, leaving money on the table. For artists, the latter is far more likely to be the case. We should not blame human beings for being flawed and fitting into our arrangement of society poorly.
    - forrestthewoods 11y ago
      ...what? Most people fail at most things they try. Most businesses fail. Most ideas suck. Most personal projects never see the light of day. And because some people can't bothered to send a damn e-mail you propose... ?
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      I'd say the real problem is big players buy up or fund the best stuff. So, opposite of that commenter's claim, most people trying to license good content are going to be doing business with medium-to-large firms that are quite greedy and won't give the time of day. In my wedding video example, it was so hard to get them on the phone and get the two licenses that some companies briefly specialized in doing just that part for people. Fee was typically around $10,000. Far cry from my teacher in middle school contacting Cinderella copyright holder and paying a quarter or so royalty to allow us to do a Cinderella play. So, if we're giving them control, I say there should be a requirement to make it easy to get a license from them.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    "Calling a one man indie who just had a stroke of success greedy and powerful is silly." Actually it is greedy for one man doing one thing to legally control that thing and charge whatever he wants for 100+ years. The things many workers create are much more valuable with little to no legal protection and far from guaranteed pay. So, there's should be a strong benefit to the public over no copyright if we're going to give the owner this much special treatment, power, and money. For most content, I'm not seeing much of a difference between the one's that do it for pay vs those that do it for fun. Only seems to factor in when the development or production cost is high enough where one needs to recover it. Complex software, video games, and SFX movies come to mind. Even then, the protections could be weakened after the return on investment came. Instead, we're seeing a lot of great stuff pulled off the market or still charged full price to force you to buy the next thing. That benefits only owners with provable harm to the public, esp with legacy software. The opposite of what system claims to provide. So, it's worth remembering that there's first part of getting authors paid and second part of what happens after. Both are corrupt in current scheme.
- shalmanese 11y ago
  > Hell, Disney used to charge companies up to five digits to sing the Happy Birthday song in a movie. Which is particularly egregious given that Disney never owned the rights to Happy Birthday at any point in time! (you're thinking of Warner Music)
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Lol. Thanks for the correction.
eevee 11y ago
"Yes, hello, Nintendo? Let's talk business. I'm a starving artist and I want to sell some Pikachu buttons."
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  Nintendo licenses the shit out of Pokemon.
  - Ketsuban 11y ago
    Not to random artists on the internet for the purpose of selling a couple hundred homemade pins at ComiCon.

pfisch 11y ago

This is ridiculous. You don't have the right to just take someone else's IP in order to make money. That is basically just taking advantage of someone else's marketing budget and hard work. In this world you would never even know if a sequel to a game or movie is made by the original author or a cloner. Maybe copyright periods are too long, but there is no way I should be able to release a game called Undertale tomorrow with the same characters and plot and slightly different art.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
It is ridiculous. The content companies don't have the right to pay money to people in Congress to change laws to benefit them at others' expense. And should we give I.P. producers preferential treatment in form of guaranteed profit on good works for lifetimes that the rest of us don't get for our work? And which mostly benefit those same companies above? Doesn't seem right.
- pfisch 11y ago
  Well now you are talking about lobbying which is a different subject that also isn't as black and white as you are painting it. I don't know what guaranteed profit you are talking about. Most IPs do not produce any profit even 2-5 years after they are created. Mario for example has required millions if not billions of dollars of follow on investments from Nintendo so that the ip is still valuable. Most other NES games do not continue to generate profit. "....the rest of us don't get for our work" - I don't even understand what you mean by this. Are you talking about the employment contract you strike with an employer? Because that contract varies and some employees do see profits for decades on previous works. I think you need to provide an example here.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    No, we're talking about copyright and the money it brings. That's the primary reason for its existence that I can tell. Copyrighted works are a multi-billion dollar industry. They're also extremely, one-sided laws thanks to lobbying by big companies that own most of the I.P. (esp profitable). So, when conversation comes up, it makes no sense to act like it's Joe Public vs The Little Guy given that the laws are mainly designed to benefit The Big Companies. So, the question is, should my work and company have to keep innovating to earn at or above the market rate while a select few get 100+ year monopolies on their work? I think not. Further, your employment contract reply is a strawman that doesn't reflect America's situation. People are typically hired by a company with either no contract or a contract written by the company for the company's benefit. Laws, passed again with corruption, often grant the company the I.P. if the slightest bit was done on their time. Other laws let the companies throw away employees without consequence. The result is that the labor market is rigged highly in favor of big companies and their lawyers with supply-and-demand lowering the wages of workers each year. Except big companies with a nice selection of copyrights, patents, and other legal monopolies. ;) So, it's worthwhile to ask whether we should continue giving monopolies that mainly benefit richest few and were largely created via corruption. I'm opposed to it as I think artists will create regardless. I'm for models more like Patreon or non-profits behind software.

mediumdeviation 11y ago

I understand his argument about gatekeepers, but Steam is a poor example. Steam itself provides so much more than a simple storefront as he describes it. By selling on Steam you also get Steam API, which gives you - Achievements - Leaderboards - Cloud save - Steam Workshop - user generated mods and content - Multiplayer infrastructure Steam community, which gives you - Forum - Social network - user generated content such as screenshots, game guides and fanart - Reviews - endorsements from several thousand actual players sells games far better than a flashy trailer Whether these features are worth the 30% cut is arguable, but these services are far more valuable to independent developers, who don't have the time or ability to implement these, than to developers under large publishers, who may share these infrastructure within the games they publish.

c3534l 11y ago
"Market makers" are a very important economic function. Just because it's hard to put your finger on a tangible product, the fact that they were able to create a unified framework for selling games to customers is worth quite a lot of money. A lot of people had tried (and failed) to do similar things in the past. Those things you mentioned are almost irrelevant. The actual value they're delivering is being able to easily and economically distribute your game to a wide audience and, as a consumer, connect me with a large number of games. It's like trying to say the value of a road is the stopsigns and traffic lights on them, not the fact that it's connecting two cities.
- mediumdeviation 11y ago
  Disagree. The 'market' is far less important when the good you're selling takes up no tangible shelf space - people have been buying games just fine without Steam for decades before Steam, and still are. Steam itself, by dint of being another layer between gamers and their games, have to justify its existence and value to them, and generally does through a variety of features as well as its legendary sales. But being a marketplace and distribution network alone does not get you anywhere, not when the cost of setting up shop on the Internet is so low these days.

Animats 11y ago

He's complaining about the problem with dōjinshi outside Japan.[1] Although Japan's copyright laws don't allow fan works, the tradition in Japan is not to enforce this. If you really wanted to work on this problem, an interesting option would be to approach the Cool Japan Fund.[2] This is a venture capital fund, funded by the government of Japan and some big banks at about the $1Bn level, to promote Japanese culture outside Japan. (The government of Korea has been pushing K-Pop, and Japan is working on catching up.) They own an anime translation operation, a free anime site (daisuki.net), a TV channel, and, most relevant to this, a content creator training academy.[3] Kadokawa Contents Academy[4] is a training school for anime and manga creators outside Japan. There are currently branches in Taiwan and Singapore, with more to come. They might be able to give some advice on the subject. [1] http://www.animenation.net/blog/2014/08/12/34666/ http://www.animenation.net/blog/2014/08/12/34666/ [2] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ [3] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/files/press_150330-1.pdf https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/files/press_150330-1.pdf [4] http://www.kadokawa-ca.co.jp/ http://www.kadokawa-ca.co.jp/

ue_ 11y ago
I'm going to post a bit of an unrelated (in that it is not related to Doujinshi) comment, but still drawn from a link you posted. Please forgive this, as I didn't have anywhere else to post it. In the first link, it says, >According to the 2012 CIA World Factbook, 98.5% of the residents of Japan are ethnically Japanese. Doujinshi arose largely due to the uniformity of intention, good will, perception, and morality of Japanese people. This seems a rather poor reason to me. There doesn't seem to be any grounds to say that what's going on with doujinshi has anything to do with morality, and further the link between this sense of morality and being ethnically Japanese - as though this won't be found if other ethnicities were to co-exist on a larger scale. Most countries are pretty homogeneous with regard to ethnicity (albeit not as high as Japan), so I'm wondering as to why the author has decided to pick up on this fact about people rather than the elements of culture that have nothing to do with how ethnically homogeneous a society is. The author implies that the first sentence automatically will lead to the next - I think that's a false link to make. As someone who isn't ethnically Japanese in Japan, it makes me feel uneasy as it just seems to be widening this gap that people make between ethnicities and countries of origin, especially with regard to Japan. It's a borderline 日本人論 statement that I've seen is popular in Japan. Countless books about "Japanese style" and how it's accomplished through the "harmony" achieved by something innate in Japanese people or culture (that God forbid cannot be learned, silly foreigner! /s) that's brought about through the fact that Japan is an ethnically homogeneous country. tl;dr rant about how I think the author makes a link between two unrelated things, and furthers the divide between two groups of people while still managing to be offensive during the course of it.

c3534l 11y ago

This is some very strange logic here. It's so odd that I feel like doing some point-by-point rebuttals. > Commissions are all well and good, but they don’t pay very well and there’s a physical limit on how many a single person can do. Which is why the creator of a creative work might be okay with something like that. > The merchandise I had in mind was buttons and stickers and prints and other physical incarnations of art. You see this kind of stuff sold rather a lot at anime conventions Which is precisely why it's not okay. You're not adding anything of your own, you're just profiting off of someone else's stuff. Here's the question you should be asking: are you making a profit from something you did not create? If so, that money is not yours, you did not earn that money. You didn't make the video game, the story, the art. > Copyright was originally invented for books. While true, that's only because books were the first mass-produced creative works. By the time the US constitution came around (and the copyright clause in it), the concept had been well extended beyond that, even to the point where the idea had been generalized to technology andn scientific discoveries (in the form of patents). > Fan work is created from scratch. It’s new. No, it is a "derivative work." Putting someone else's pictures given meaning by a game they created onto a button and selling it is not a "new" work. If it weren't, why not just leave out the stuff you didn't create and sell it on your own? You can't, that's why. > Gatekeeping This is a really idiotic excuse. Steam isn't the one telling you that you can't sell other people's art and taking all the money for yourself, the people who made the art are telling you that. > When copyright was introduced, “creators” were a sort of elite. You had to have a lot of equipment and resources, or more likely, you had to attract the attention of someone who had a lot of equipment and resources. More self-serving rationalizations. Writing only takes talent and some time. Whether or not it was good enough to make copies of and sell is another thing. Copyright was set up so that anyone could afford it if they were even a little bit serious. Copyright protects the little guy against a bigger person with more resources at their disposal to copy your idea and make a profit off it. It gives them the right to their work because they're the ones that created it. > Abuse This section is completely irrelevant. The problems we have with our copyright and patent laws has nothing to do with protecting a small, indie developer, who made a legitimately good game, from being outcompeted by enterprising salesman who are trying to sell merchandising of someone else's work. When did people like Undertale become "multinational corporations"? You can't make someone seem like a faceless and souless being that it's okay to ripoff when you linked to their Twitter account earlier in the article. It's people like the author of this article that copyright laws are rightfully meant to protect content-creators from - people who can argue themselves in circles to not feel bad about ripping people off because they think putting someone else's game logo on a button is an "entirely new" work.

dwg 11y ago

I agree with @mediumdeviation about the Gatekeepers section remarks. Steam cost real money to develop and operate. Valve also has additional operating expenses as a business. It's a free market and others are free to compete with Steam with a lower priced product. Additionally, the creator had a choice whether or not to distribute via Steam, and obviously the decided that the benefit outweighs the cost. I don't mean to be rude, but I lost interest in finishing what at first appeared to be a potentially interesting article based on the naivety of these remarks. I would suggest to the author to give it more thought.

TheDong 11y ago
If you want to respond to mediumdeviation's remarks, please reply to him, not add a new top-level comment. It's more readable to do so.

chmike 11y ago

One may ask for a license to sell own crafted things about something we like. It is legitimate that the initial creator has a control over use of his product image and a cut on the profits. Copyright is not broken. It would not be smart for the initial creator to strictly forbid any third party to contribute in the promotion and potential return of its product. But in any case it is up to him to decide and that is legitimate.

TheDong 11y ago
You're parroting the law, not giving any real reason. "It's legitimate" .. but why? Eevee has actual arguments here, namely that it doesn't promote the advancement of the arts at all which is the sole purpose of copyright. Why shouldn't I be able to draw artistic representations of a game character? I can draw a representation of Donald Trump with no problem (as many political cartoonists do) and I own that because I made it. Why the hell does some random digital character have more rights than a human? I know this is a bit of a silly analogy, but your comment is silly to begin with. It's obvious that if I'm taking someone's art or work and re-selling it with some minor transformations, that's wrong. But if I put work into making something that has my flair, my touch, my innovation, why should the original artist profit from it?
- chmike 11y ago
  I gave the reason, you are ignoring it. Because a creator has the right to decide how it's character is drawn, in what context it's put, for what it is used, etc. it is also a protection against parasites and stealers. If you don't understand that you are not a creator. Create your own characters and the problem is solved. Or ask for a license. The creator may give you a free license if your drawings and use of it match his liking. A copyright is a protection, not an interdiction. Ask the permission to the creator. The decision belongs to him and that is, in my opinion, right. Don't down vote me if you simply disagree with me.
  - Flimm 11y ago
    You seem to think that the right of a creator to control how people use their creation is self-evident, along with other self-evident rights, like the right to a fair trial. Other people like me don't feel that it is self-evident, rather, we feel that it is only justified if it effectively encourages the sciences and the arts. Our axiom, the self-evident truth that we're working for, is the flourishing of arts and science, and if we can find a way to do that which doesn't allow creators to dictate what people do with their copy of Mario, all the better. Once we realise that we're assuming different axioms, we can stop talking past each other.

leni536 11y ago

OK, there are like three things about copyright that I don't fully get: 1. What counts as copying? 2. What counts as creative work? 3. What counts as fair use? For me all this three are huge gray areas. I honestly can't decide if derivative works from this game's characters could be sold freely despite what the original author says under the current US law. Please don't mix trademark into the question, I don't know if Undertale or its characters are trademarked or not. For the sake of clear discussion about copyright let's assume that they are not.

KaiserPro 11y ago

The problem is this. In order to make money you need to be reasonably sure that someone can't take your stuff and sell it as their own. This is a separate issue to stuff costing too much, or DRM. Everything you create that is original is copyright to you. This is known as your moral rights. This means that if you come up with a novel character, design or mechanical item, you have the ability to exclusively produce, market, license or sell that thing. This is good, because thats how the economy works. If you make an item, and a large corporation comes along takes them all and sells them as their own, that would be theft. This however is a problem for giants like google, youtube and facebook. When you publish something to the giants, you sign away your moral rights. This is mainly to allow things like recompression and excerpts. (Because your emails/videos/photos are your own copyright, google must seek permission to display, alter or create derivative works.) Its very much in their interest to dilute and dissolve copyright laws. They have managed to capture the general dissatisfaction at the high price of music and movies to push their agenda, which is to sell adverts on the back of someone else's work. If we take a specific thing like dōjinshi, The people creating the subtitles are not breaking the law. The act of transcription is their own copyright. What is illegal is selling/distributing the video as well without paying the original owners. In the digital economy, we need strong copyright, or us small people will never be able to make a living.