On the morals of fandubs, scanlations, and copyright: A response to the use of copyrighted materials
This began as a response to a concern about using small samples from copyrighted works for a weekly "Japanese←→English translation challenge" event we are trying to start over at japanese. I started replying to the concern with my own opinion on the matter, and then after I was writing for several hours I realized what a huge tangent I had gone off on. Some serious TL;DR. But it seemed like one of those streams of thought that I might want to reference again some day, so instead of deleting it all, I decided to post it to my journal. Anyone care to discuss their perspective on these issues? Feel free to comment!
fzort wrote:
Well, come to think of it, it's probably not a good idea to post copyrighted material here. :-)
This site has links to jillions of Japanese web comics (under WEB漫画):
http://www.comic-r.net/
I don't think any of them will have furigana, though. :-/
Extended version of my response:
That is a question I was already pondering, and here's my personal take on it: it's not any more right to be citing song lyrics and linking to a youtube video, since most of them are illegally uploaded, than it is to be putting up a couple pages of a manga up on the web for the purpose of a small group translation/learning session.
It would be nice to just go with things we can confidently cite from an legal internet source, but there are two downsides... one is that finding material that's likable is more difficult. It's faster to flip through a book, and you'll have more options, than you will when you browse the web. Web material (as opposed to published material) is also more likely to suffer from poor quality of writing and errors. Even dōjinshi, which are not technically legal but are still small-time published in Japan without legal ramification to the infringing artists, suffer from errors, because they lack the professional editing job of an original published work at a major magazine. There is also the lack of furigana in web comics and the fact a lot of them have handwritten text. That automatically kicks the difficulty up, especially if the handwriting is sloppy.
And honestly, if you want to get really picky about it, creating and distributing translations of any copyrighted work has doubtful "legality," too! The best we can do is claim "educational/personal fair use"! ^^;;;;;
We can go with things distributed on the web if it makes everyone feel better about it--it's not an impossibility, despite the objections I raise--but legally it's only slightly better... IMO. Hotlinking isn't that polite a thing to be doing, so you'll again have the problem of sending people all over the internet for source texts.
Us redistributing maybe, five or six pages, max, from somewhere in a two thousand page series that probably has no hope of English publication anyway is not much of a worry in my mind. We are in a gray area with distributing short texts for this "challenge," I think. And since the "challenges" are time-limited, we don't even have to have the media uploaded to the internet for very long. If we're controlling what's uploaded, we can also take the images down after a month or so passes and the challenge is long-gone history. Our purpose is not distribution for enjoyment--it's distribution for educational practice. If someone in the group has a legal copy, and we're making that distinction in the purpose of our distribution clear, I don't see what's so wrong with distributing. As long as the media in question remains rather exclusive to the group, is only a small part of a larger work, is for a limited time, is not making profit, and is only for educational purpose--it falls under some basic tenets of fair use in copyright law. I'm no lawyer though, so maybe I'm stretching it?
There's always the option of journal-locking the posts, so only members can see and media doesn't turn up in google searches someday.
Now for the tangent, which originally was worked in and among all the text above:
Contrast our potential reasons and methods for "distribution of copyrighted works" with something like scanlations/fansubs, which are all over the internet but are not legal by the current interpretation of copyright law, if we a being perfectly honest with ourselves.
While a claim of "fair use for educational purposes" in our case might find trouble standing up in a court (like I said, it's a gray area,) the industry has got bigger fish to fry as a whole with the scanlation hosting sites that are out there like Onemanga, Mangafox, Mangahelpers, and etc. These sites have made their names redistributing unofficial translations of entire manga series to large amounts of people for free, for no reason other than they don't want to wait for official publication or they just don't want to pay the money. These are the cases which are clearly illegal and which publishers really feel hurt their bottom line.
There's a whole huge, messy argument and problem going on with the high-speed globalization of information, the lingering "napster" generation sense of entitlement to all media at no cost vs. the old "pay to own" culture, the needs of publishers to make money and the desires of fandom to have the latest material from their favorite works localized in their language now. Most publishers don't want to anger the fandom community which is their support, but neither do they want to let the fandom walk all over their legal rights and profit margins. TANSTAAFL, people--There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Somewhere, the media we enjoy is costing someone something--be it time, money, effort or sanity--and it's only natural that that person wants a return. I can't get angry at them for getting grabby about cash in exchange for my enjoyment of their media unless they really start getting obnoxious (don't touch my fanfiction, thank you very much. When you start going after the six-year-olds pretending to be Superman with all their friends, then you can come after my fanfiction. It's the same principle of play, just on an adult level--got it?)
Some companies are trying to compromise by keeping ahead of the fansub/scanlation community, and this is where official distribution websites like Crunchyroll.com and Hulu.com are coming in, at least in the North American market. However, whether this business model can be sustained is still up in the air. Last I heard, the big news was that Crunchyroll.com had "broken even" in the month of May. It's been over a year since the website went completely legal, and the news in May is still only about it breaking even???
Hulu? If anyone knows the inside scoop on how that website is doing, I'd love to hear it. I will gladly watch three or four commercials during a break if it means I can watch my favorite anime for free, and have the peace of knowing that it's perfectly legal.
Frankly I think that if all the people who read scanlated manga actually go out afterward and buy the official publication to "make up" for reading the scanlated one, then I highly doubt publishers would be complaining and going after these sites. That would clearly be vindictive and petty, and "vindictive and petty" is bad for PR. People who read scanlations but then go and buy the official translation may stand on shaky legal ground, but their moral ground is reasonably firm IMO, and I can't really condemn them for taking that route. I doubt most reasonable people in the publishing industry would, either. If I had the money to commit to such a system, I might actually read scanlations, which I don't at this time (but I'll take my official copies in the original Japanese, thanks.)
The price and availability of an official translation/copy really is preventative for me and many others, and even though this shouldn't be an excuse for those who go ahead and read only fan scanlations, it's a common one.
What's my conclusion about all this? The internet and the freedom of media/information has broken down the old system of big media creation and profit, which relied on people valuing the physical form that the media came on. Napster was the first major breakdown of this system, and the record labels are still slowly bleeding out from the massive wound that Napster shot through them back in the 90s. Other media is suffering in similar ways. People, increasingly, do not value the form their media comes in, and controlling the form was the old way of controlling who got copies. I myself am a hybrid of the old and new media systems--I buy most of my music online, but I buy my music on CD when I value it greatly enough that I want a physical version of it, with a little booklet and tangible copy and everything.
And even though I talk about the physicality of a CD, consider this: I recently bought my first iTunes "LP" (Muse's album, "The Resistance,") and when I finally got it downloaded and started looking at it, I was blown away by how amazing the LP system was. Not only did you get the equivalent of a CD booklet, you also got customized interactive album navigation, and even a custom screensaver for when you're playing the music! I thought, "I'd never go to the store and buy CDs again if all albums were available like this."
Take note, media magnates: in the end, it's not so much about the physicality of a CD, it's about the perks you get, like a booklet with pictures and artist comments on the songs--that's why I buy CDs. You can't get those things with some free MP3 off of Kaaza, even if one likes the ease and low cost of obtaining media that way. So, when I find something digital that delivers the same experience of a physical CD, I'll chuck the CD with little hesitation and a big grin.
The middle man of media creation--record labels, publishing companies, distributors--is likely a dying breed. They are making their money off of distribution, making them nearly obsolete. Artists don't necessarily need people to distribute for them anymore. Oh sure, it will be slow death for these organization because they are so entrenched, but the more quickly and easily people can distribute basic media like movies, music, and images for free, the less profit there will be for these middle men.
So, where will the profit come in? And how will creators get known without large distributors hawking the creations? That's what most creators and the people who distribute have yet to figure out. Instead, they are putting around either wringing their hands at the massive "pirating" going on, on embroiling people in legal cases (RIAA, MPAA)--it slows the tide of "piracy" and makes people hesitate, but it doesn't stop it.
The problem with it all is that this is the Information Age, and information is the important thing--but neither is it something you can lock down and hand out only to those you deem "worthy" of receiving. Pandora's Box has been opened, and no matter how many times you try to stuff a few things back into the Box, and no matter how many padlocks and guards you put around the Box after that, it's not going to undo the damage.
The scariest thing about all this is: the issue of copyright is being redefined by these battles between individual distributors and big companies, and when the dust settles, someone's going to be in a choke-hold, begging for air and not getting any. The question is, will it be the consumer seeing their rights to information restricted, or will it be big media distribution be seeing their request to exclusive control denied?
Related reading about media in the Information Age and the struggle over who controls the distribution of media, and why:
The Future of Music Business Models @ techdirt.com
The War on Sharing: Why the FSF cares about the RIAA lawsuits @ fsf.org (fsf=free software foundation)
Book--Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation by J. D. Lasica
PS: VIZ, I love you for distributing series like Bleach with soft-subs so I can watch it without them if I want. Funi, really? Hard subs? No love from me on your One Piece distribution there, you guys.
fzort wrote:
Well, come to think of it, it's probably not a good idea to post copyrighted material here. :-)
This site has links to jillions of Japanese web comics (under WEB漫画):
http://www.comic-r.net/
I don't think any of them will have furigana, though. :-/
Extended version of my response:
That is a question I was already pondering, and here's my personal take on it: it's not any more right to be citing song lyrics and linking to a youtube video, since most of them are illegally uploaded, than it is to be putting up a couple pages of a manga up on the web for the purpose of a small group translation/learning session.
It would be nice to just go with things we can confidently cite from an legal internet source, but there are two downsides... one is that finding material that's likable is more difficult. It's faster to flip through a book, and you'll have more options, than you will when you browse the web. Web material (as opposed to published material) is also more likely to suffer from poor quality of writing and errors. Even dōjinshi, which are not technically legal but are still small-time published in Japan without legal ramification to the infringing artists, suffer from errors, because they lack the professional editing job of an original published work at a major magazine. There is also the lack of furigana in web comics and the fact a lot of them have handwritten text. That automatically kicks the difficulty up, especially if the handwriting is sloppy.
And honestly, if you want to get really picky about it, creating and distributing translations of any copyrighted work has doubtful "legality," too! The best we can do is claim "educational/personal fair use"! ^^;;;;;
We can go with things distributed on the web if it makes everyone feel better about it--it's not an impossibility, despite the objections I raise--but legally it's only slightly better... IMO. Hotlinking isn't that polite a thing to be doing, so you'll again have the problem of sending people all over the internet for source texts.
Us redistributing maybe, five or six pages, max, from somewhere in a two thousand page series that probably has no hope of English publication anyway is not much of a worry in my mind. We are in a gray area with distributing short texts for this "challenge," I think. And since the "challenges" are time-limited, we don't even have to have the media uploaded to the internet for very long. If we're controlling what's uploaded, we can also take the images down after a month or so passes and the challenge is long-gone history. Our purpose is not distribution for enjoyment--it's distribution for educational practice. If someone in the group has a legal copy, and we're making that distinction in the purpose of our distribution clear, I don't see what's so wrong with distributing. As long as the media in question remains rather exclusive to the group, is only a small part of a larger work, is for a limited time, is not making profit, and is only for educational purpose--it falls under some basic tenets of fair use in copyright law. I'm no lawyer though, so maybe I'm stretching it?
There's always the option of journal-locking the posts, so only members can see and media doesn't turn up in google searches someday.
Now for the tangent, which originally was worked in and among all the text above:
Contrast our potential reasons and methods for "distribution of copyrighted works" with something like scanlations/fansubs, which are all over the internet but are not legal by the current interpretation of copyright law, if we a being perfectly honest with ourselves.
While a claim of "fair use for educational purposes" in our case might find trouble standing up in a court (like I said, it's a gray area,) the industry has got bigger fish to fry as a whole with the scanlation hosting sites that are out there like Onemanga, Mangafox, Mangahelpers, and etc. These sites have made their names redistributing unofficial translations of entire manga series to large amounts of people for free, for no reason other than they don't want to wait for official publication or they just don't want to pay the money. These are the cases which are clearly illegal and which publishers really feel hurt their bottom line.
There's a whole huge, messy argument and problem going on with the high-speed globalization of information, the lingering "napster" generation sense of entitlement to all media at no cost vs. the old "pay to own" culture, the needs of publishers to make money and the desires of fandom to have the latest material from their favorite works localized in their language now. Most publishers don't want to anger the fandom community which is their support, but neither do they want to let the fandom walk all over their legal rights and profit margins. TANSTAAFL, people--There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Somewhere, the media we enjoy is costing someone something--be it time, money, effort or sanity--and it's only natural that that person wants a return. I can't get angry at them for getting grabby about cash in exchange for my enjoyment of their media unless they really start getting obnoxious (don't touch my fanfiction, thank you very much. When you start going after the six-year-olds pretending to be Superman with all their friends, then you can come after my fanfiction. It's the same principle of play, just on an adult level--got it?)
Some companies are trying to compromise by keeping ahead of the fansub/scanlation community, and this is where official distribution websites like Crunchyroll.com and Hulu.com are coming in, at least in the North American market. However, whether this business model can be sustained is still up in the air. Last I heard, the big news was that Crunchyroll.com had "broken even" in the month of May. It's been over a year since the website went completely legal, and the news in May is still only about it breaking even???
Hulu? If anyone knows the inside scoop on how that website is doing, I'd love to hear it. I will gladly watch three or four commercials during a break if it means I can watch my favorite anime for free, and have the peace of knowing that it's perfectly legal.
Frankly I think that if all the people who read scanlated manga actually go out afterward and buy the official publication to "make up" for reading the scanlated one, then I highly doubt publishers would be complaining and going after these sites. That would clearly be vindictive and petty, and "vindictive and petty" is bad for PR. People who read scanlations but then go and buy the official translation may stand on shaky legal ground, but their moral ground is reasonably firm IMO, and I can't really condemn them for taking that route. I doubt most reasonable people in the publishing industry would, either. If I had the money to commit to such a system, I might actually read scanlations, which I don't at this time (but I'll take my official copies in the original Japanese, thanks.)
The price and availability of an official translation/copy really is preventative for me and many others, and even though this shouldn't be an excuse for those who go ahead and read only fan scanlations, it's a common one.
What's my conclusion about all this? The internet and the freedom of media/information has broken down the old system of big media creation and profit, which relied on people valuing the physical form that the media came on. Napster was the first major breakdown of this system, and the record labels are still slowly bleeding out from the massive wound that Napster shot through them back in the 90s. Other media is suffering in similar ways. People, increasingly, do not value the form their media comes in, and controlling the form was the old way of controlling who got copies. I myself am a hybrid of the old and new media systems--I buy most of my music online, but I buy my music on CD when I value it greatly enough that I want a physical version of it, with a little booklet and tangible copy and everything.
And even though I talk about the physicality of a CD, consider this: I recently bought my first iTunes "LP" (Muse's album, "The Resistance,") and when I finally got it downloaded and started looking at it, I was blown away by how amazing the LP system was. Not only did you get the equivalent of a CD booklet, you also got customized interactive album navigation, and even a custom screensaver for when you're playing the music! I thought, "I'd never go to the store and buy CDs again if all albums were available like this."
Take note, media magnates: in the end, it's not so much about the physicality of a CD, it's about the perks you get, like a booklet with pictures and artist comments on the songs--that's why I buy CDs. You can't get those things with some free MP3 off of Kaaza, even if one likes the ease and low cost of obtaining media that way. So, when I find something digital that delivers the same experience of a physical CD, I'll chuck the CD with little hesitation and a big grin.
The middle man of media creation--record labels, publishing companies, distributors--is likely a dying breed. They are making their money off of distribution, making them nearly obsolete. Artists don't necessarily need people to distribute for them anymore. Oh sure, it will be slow death for these organization because they are so entrenched, but the more quickly and easily people can distribute basic media like movies, music, and images for free, the less profit there will be for these middle men.
So, where will the profit come in? And how will creators get known without large distributors hawking the creations? That's what most creators and the people who distribute have yet to figure out. Instead, they are putting around either wringing their hands at the massive "pirating" going on, on embroiling people in legal cases (RIAA, MPAA)--it slows the tide of "piracy" and makes people hesitate, but it doesn't stop it.
The problem with it all is that this is the Information Age, and information is the important thing--but neither is it something you can lock down and hand out only to those you deem "worthy" of receiving. Pandora's Box has been opened, and no matter how many times you try to stuff a few things back into the Box, and no matter how many padlocks and guards you put around the Box after that, it's not going to undo the damage.
The scariest thing about all this is: the issue of copyright is being redefined by these battles between individual distributors and big companies, and when the dust settles, someone's going to be in a choke-hold, begging for air and not getting any. The question is, will it be the consumer seeing their rights to information restricted, or will it be big media distribution be seeing their request to exclusive control denied?
Related reading about media in the Information Age and the struggle over who controls the distribution of media, and why:
The Future of Music Business Models @ techdirt.com
The War on Sharing: Why the FSF cares about the RIAA lawsuits @ fsf.org (fsf=free software foundation)
Book--Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation by J. D. Lasica
PS: VIZ, I love you for distributing series like Bleach with soft-subs so I can watch it without them if I want. Funi, really? Hard subs? No love from me on your One Piece distribution there, you guys.