Today was the last day of the Japan Society for Research in Cartoons and Comics' annual big meetup, and the topic of the final session was doujinshi and copyright. On stage were a manga researcher, a fan researcher, an IP lawyer, a representative from a large publishing company, and a professional mangaka with strong ties to doujin fandom. They ( Read more... )

New post up at Symposium: on regional releases and disrupting international fandoms.

In other words, on those pesky "not available in your location" videos ;)

This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/52150.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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Two articles recently accepted for publication/presentation: "Why we should talk about commodifying fan work" will appear in Transformative Works and Cultures in November, and "Open source production as a model for commodification of derivative works" will be presented at the Asian Workshop on Cultural Economics, which is organized by the the ( Read more... )

So, a Mr. Keith Mander bought up a Lord of the Rings fic archive with the express intention of making money out of it. Well. The relationship between Mander, LotR fic authors, and unfortunate legal reality as personified by the Tolkien estate is best summed up by this beautiful parable.
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Today I took part in a study day on comics in the library for Flemish librarians, organized by the most excellent Strip Turnhout. My presentation was on manga in the library. I tried to emphasize that manga aren't that scarily different from US comics or European strips, but that the way readers in Japan and manga fans overseas read manga -often in ( Read more... )

Couldn't concentrate on work and ended up reading stuff on fandom_wank all day long. Now now, FW is very educational as well as amusing. Maybe I'd spend less time chewing on my own toes if I wondered "How would this look on FW?" every time I was gearing up to say/do something that might be vaguely significant.

I've spent a lot of time following the ( Read more... )

I'm sure many people are familiar with this leech person's tactics, but another warning couldn't hurt. (If the name Laura Hale doesn't ring a bell, please look at this or this post, among many others.) I'm on a manga/anime research mailing list, a Yahoo group. Laura Hale, who is apparently a member of said group as well, recently contacted me ( Read more... )

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.
The online Japanese-Dutch dictionary (full name 'Japans-Nederlands woordenboek Waran Jiten') created by the Catholic University of Leuven's Japanese Studies staff and students is, of course, mainly a dictionary. But its wiki format leaves room for getting creative with the ( Read more... )