Closer To The Ideal

Fanfic is already a huge phenomena in the US. Fans write stories about their favorite characters from TV shows. For instance, on Fan Fiction Net, there are currently over 10,000 stories posted by fans about Hannah Montana. These remixes tend to explore either romances that the fans want to see in the main series, or various plot twists that are perhaps too daring, in some ways, for the actual TV series.

In the US, fanfic is something of a hidden niche. The largest media companies are wary of fanfic, but so long as fanfic remains a tiny niche, few legal cases are brought.

The situation is different in Japan, where fanfic is out in public and on a huge scale, sold as comics at conventions that attract 10,000s of people. Here the manga companies are trying to work out a new relationship with their fans by allowing the fanfic to thrive.

In anmoku no ryokai, manga publishers might have found a tentative, imperfect, but ultimately more promising answer — a business model that could help media companies in both Japan and the US begin to navigate these potentially treacherous new waters. Instead of rewriting a national statute or hashing out separate individual contracts or crafting special licenses, it leaves everything unsaid in order to simply give the new arrangement a test drive. It takes the situation out of the realm of law and plops it into the realm of economics and game theory. It places the established publishers and the dojinshi creators in something resembling the prisoners’ dilemma: If they cooperate — that is, if they honor the terms of anmoku no ryokai — they both gain. But if one overreaches — if publishers crack down aggressively or if dojinshi creators go too far — they both suffer.

Instead of negotiating a formal pact, both parties can advance their interests through the deterrent of mutually assured destruction. What that accommodation lacks in legal clarity, it makes up for in commercial pragmatism. If the experiment fails, then everyone reverts back to the legal status quo. But if it endures, and if everyone comes to realize that the interests of the copyright holders and the fans are aligned, it could become the prelude to wider adoption of Creative Commonsstyle licenses and a more coherent set of rules for a remix culture around the world.

One afternoon in May, I walked into K-Books, a third-floor bookshop in Akihabara, a neighborhood of flashing lights and moving bodies that is the epicenter of Tokyo’s otaku culture. In one section of the store, I found graphic novels by Clamp, that circle of women who went from amateurs to best-selling pros. I bought a copy of Chobits, their series about a young man who has a friendly female android assistant; a volume of xxxHolic, about a high school student who works for a witch (despite the trio of x’s in the title, it’s not porn); and a hardcover edition of Card Captor Sakura, about a girl with magical powers. And in a nearby section of the store, I bought dojinshi versions of those same titles. For 210 yen ($1.80), I picked up Hacker Chobits, in which the female android expands the frontiers of “friendliness.” For 630 yen ($5.40) I bought a yuri, or lesbian, version of xxxHolic featuring the two main female characters of that series. And for another 630 yen, I purchased the 70-page, sprightly illustrated Sakura Remix, wherein the heroine encounters a strangely amorous frog and later discovers a hidden video camera in her classroom at an especially inopportune moment.

The official versions and the remixed versions weren’t side by side. But they were for sale perhaps 10 yards away from each other. In the same store. Think about that in a US context. You walk in to Barnes & Noble and walk out with a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — as well as an unauthorized remix of a May-December romance between Hermione Granger and Professor Minerva McGonagall. Our American IP lawyer is starting to get woozy…

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 11:04 am and is filed under business, copyright. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.