Piracy for the Love of Fandom

Image Source: http://www.anigamers.com

A fansub (short for fan-subtitled) is a version of a foreign film or foreign television program which has been translated by fans and subtitled into a language other than that of the original. This is usually common with animes and asian dramas.  Most of these shows in order to get "dubbed" or "subbed" in another language, needs to be licensed in another country. This happens when the series has already finished airing in the home country. Also, when it takes a while for these shows to be officially released in DVDs. Fansubs, however, does it semi-real-time. When an episode is aired, give or take in less than a week, a fan sub will be out, thereby giving non-east asian speakers almost the same pace as their home country counterparts.

Scanlation on the other hand, is pretty much the same thing, although it involves comics, particularly manga. It involves scanning the pages and translating, hence the word. Again, fans do this because it takes ages for manga to be released and more often than not only those popular titles make their way into the English market.

While most of the fansubbers (the people who do the translation and the actual subs) and scanlators (for manga) do it for free and do not gain any profit whatsoever (except maybe the eternal gratitude of the fans), it cannot be denied that under the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, such an act is illegal, to wit:

Authors of literary and artistic works protected by this Convention shall enjoy the exclusive right of making and of authorizing the translation of their works throughout the term of protection of their rights in the original works. (Article 8,  Right of Translation)

In the recent years, Japanese Copyright Holders have been aggressive in their fight against piracy, taking down streaming sites as well as actually arresting persons related to such offenses. What has been controversial about this is that minors are involved -since most of the people who do these works are below 20. In fact, just last year a 14-year old boy was arrested for leaking manga in Youtube. This reminds me of  Lawrence Lessig's lecture on Remix and how we need to change the current copyright rules in place. This only reiterates his claim that children are now being viewed as criminals.

------
Entry no. 15
Soleil Flores

[READ ALL OTHER ENTRIES]

Nemo dat quod non habet (You cannot give what you do not have): err... who's to say you don't "have" an ebook that's in your file directory?

A law school buddy I've been hanging out with during the holiday break was surprised to learn that J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series were actually well-written. Initially, I thought he was reading the original copy of the book --- he's more of a library person, you see (e.g. he claims he prefers to work on soft copies, but after I shared to him an ebook on international law, he proceeds to borrow the original hard copy from the UP library). Anyway, he was reading Harry Potter from an ebook he downloaded online. Yes, he didn't purchase it.

Envious at his leisure reading, I decided to engage in some educational reading myself. My ebook of choice is Economic Analysis of the Law: Selected Readings, edited by Wittman. The editor's introduction was quite promising: the collection supposedly creates a "unified vision of the law," which is "in contrast to law school, where torts, contracts, and corporate law, etc., are treated as completely separate fields, each with their own logic."

From the articles on intellectual property in the book, I quote this clincher:

"With intellectual property, the marginal cost of spreading an idea, record, or book is very low, especially in comparison to the cost of producing the first copy. Just think how expensive it is to produce the first copy of Microsoft Word (trademark) and how cheap it is to reproduce. . .William Landes and Richard Posner discuss the optimal protection of intellectual property rights given the costs and benefits inherent in the particular situation.

If there are no intellectual property rights, then the incentive to produce the song. book, etc. is greatly reduced but the intellectual property that is produced will be spread optimally. Subject to certain caveats, greater protection of intellectual property rights will increase the production of intellectual property, but will result in less than an optimal distribution. An important caveat is that if copyright protection were too expansive, say ideas were copyrightable, then the production of new ideas could be reduced because of greatly increased transaction costs (negotiation with the original holder of the idea or litigation in court to determine whether the new idea was really new). Not surprisingly then, ideas, plots, and book titles cannot be copyrighted. Landes and Posner not only consider the general outlines of copyright protection, but also explain many details (e.g., why music copyright is stronger then the copyright for books, why copyright holds for a particular length of time after an author’s death, and why there is a fair use doctrine)." (emphasis added)

So I kinda browsed through the entire section, but didn't actually delve into the nitty-gritty portions. Admittedly, I was more interested in other parts of the book on the environment. (I'm required to write a paper for my envi class.)

But the above excerpt makes me ponder about sharing and reading ebooks for academic purpose. Does reading for academic purposes have a more legitimate claim on fair use over reading for leisure purposes? Don't all reading have academic value? What is an author's incentive for writing a book? I believe it concerns artistic expression or academic distinction more than money, and it's the publisher who's more interested in the big bucks. But why should a publisher be entitled to earn large margins? And what is the economic incentive for purchasing v. downloading ebooks? I think, when it comes to ebooks, the real market forces should be allowed to thrive. No copyright = free flow of ideas = more information to work on = more information. More production, more distribution, more production.



-------
Salma F. Angkaya
Entry # 6