Friday, September 15, 2006

GikII 2.04

The workshop finalised with a session on Cultural Property & IT Law (2): My Game, My Rules. The fire was opened by Nicholas Gervassis with “When James T. Kirk met Buffy: Legal Facts and Fan Fiction”, where he explored what happens when devoted fans of movies, TV series or comic books go beyond the realm of exchanging views and opinions about their sphere of liking and start modifying the original work to create something that might be categorized as derivative work. Some of these fans take extreme liberties over the limits where they can push the engaged themes to, and usually without the original creator’s consent, which opens the flanks to attacks on fan-fiction due to lack of respect of the artistic integrity of legally protected materials, among others copyright violations.
Jordan Hatcher followed with “Law, Anime and Fansubs” and examined the anime industry in depth to see how the fansubs might help to achieve ripeness, broad the consumer base and increase the value of the anime’s market in certain societies, resulting in a situation where the potential damage that the anime industry could suffer due to translation and distribution of works by fans is outweighed by far by the benefits that the industry gets out of the copyright violation. It went further into analysing different instances where the industry engaged and dealt with the phenomenon, not always in the same manner (click here for Jordan's full paper).
The presentations ended in a not very glorious manner with my “The Moral Rights of the Morally Wrong: International Issues on the Commercialisation and Protection of Pornographic Japanese Manga”. The presentation first tried to explain the relation of Japanese culture and Japanese people with nudity and erotism and the historic origins of Japanese pornographic manga. It then went into how Western influence helped to shape the current Japanese manga scenario and output and the problems presented when through the posting of pornographic materials in Internet issues of copyright and obscenity arise. The problem becomes particularly acute in some regions of United States where due to the criminalisation of copyright infringement (proposed and imposed around the world by the same United States) the public resources of communities that abhor the idea of pornography of any kind might need to be used to defend the interests of those that produce pornography with a great degree of perversion (which because of being “virtual” with no real persons involved it was deemed to be protected free speech even in the case of “virtual” teen pornography).

GikII ended with a plenary session where the idea of making it an annual event was made explicit and Lilian also talked about the possibility of publishing the papers as a book. Then, to clarify what Internet is about, everyone enjoyed an example of what we were talking about.

And here is the octopus (which is an old piece of Japanese erotic art, not pornography)

1 comment:

opengovaustin said...

Thanks for the post. My full paper, in case anyone would like to have a look, is here. 2:4 SCRIPTed 551, December 2005 --Jordan