Author: Bai Lin
For cartoonists, the most annoying thing is probably that the work has been pirated by others, and cartoonists naturally hate pirates. But in Japan, which is known for its strict copyright protection, there is a manga artist who not only downloads pirated manga, but also uploads them to his online manga website to sell advertisements to make money, and even publishes other people's works without authorization. He's Magic Teacher! and Ken Akamatsu, author of "Pure Love Tenant Pretty Landlord".
Despite all this outrageous things, when he announced that he was going to build the comic book site into an "e-book YouTube", he received the support of nearly 280 cartoonists and publishers. What's going on here? And listen to me...
Magic Teacher! Ken Akamatsu, author of "Pure Love Landlord Pretty Tenant", is now serialized in "UQ HOLDER! Magic Teacher!" 2》
<h1>1. Fair Use and Safe Haven Principles
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This has to start with the change of the law by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan. On February 13, 2017, the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan passed a resolution amending the Copyright Law after a year and four months of discussion. If this resolution is submitted to Congress in accordance with the procedure and passed, the permission of the copyright owner is no longer required for the production of electronic versions of the book in the future. It also allows companies to store e-books in their own databases for users to search for and display some of the content. This marks the official entry of the Fair Use Principle into Japan, where more copyrighted content can be freely exploited by others than before.
At the same time, the "safe haven principle" has been implemented on the Internet in practice. This principle means that if the internet service provider provides the service, it is impossible to determine whether the uploaded content is infringing. After a copyright infringement incident occurs, if the provider deletes the relevant content in a timely manner after receiving the notice of the right holder, it can avoid compensation.
Akamatsu Ken's judgment of the situation is that after the "fair use principle" is introduced to Japan, global giants such as Google or Amazon will definitely build "YouTube-like e-book submission sites" to collect all Japanese books and make maximum use of this "fair use principle".
Google Books can search for the original novel and manga adaptation of the newly released animated movie "The Nap Princess"
Google Books can now search the text of the e-book, and even the comic lines that were originally pictures have been parsed into text by the program for users to search. Although the law on the principle of fair utilization has not yet been officially passed, Google is already using these book data in practice. Moreover, it is expected that after the passage of the bill, the operational space of multinational enterprises will be further expanded.
<h1>2. The danger of multinational corporations dominating the world
Akamatsu ken will be wary of multinational corporations, not only because of their powerful powers, but also because they often become the actual executors of cultural trials. In many countries, the specific censorship criteria for cultural products such as animation and manga are often set by various industry groups, and companies have a lot of discretion in their own territory. For example, the game platform Steam basically prohibits most descriptive games, and can only detour through patches, but the official is open to several AVG networks.
Steam's unexpected green light of "Lily on the House", although the scale is not high, is still 18 forbidden games
However, not all businesses are so good at talking. Especially for large companies that have gained monopoly positions, it is difficult for individual manga artists to bargain with Japanese publishers.
Ken Akamatsu said: "In Japan, the search engine and online video Google are the only ones, the smart phone and music market has become Apple's territory, and the e-book and cloud host are monopolized by Amazon. We, the Japanese, can only take advantage of these services. Things placed on those platforms are removed and have no right to object. Under such circumstances, giving such foreign-funded enterprises the right to censor and delete Japanese cultural products is actually quite dangerous. ”
In fact, foreign companies and Japanese creators have already collided many times - for example, in 2015, a large number of popular manga artists and artists such as Gun Huren, Asahi, Dongye みかん, and Wudao Ruizhi were banned from their accounts by Twitter.
The obvious feature of this ban incident is that there are many "Lolita to painters" in the banned accounts.
Now when the big gun reeds send similar pictures, they will try to intercept insensitive parts, or save the country by retweeting fan twitter curves
The reason for this is that, on the one hand, the British and American staff who manage the operation do not understand the Lolita control culture and are likely to resent this performance. At the legal level, although countries such as the United States regard the two-dimensional Lolita as an artistic creation without punishment, there are also countries in Canada where fictional works can also violate the relevant prohibitions. For multinational companies like Twitter, it is a low-cost practice to directly ban these troublesome few users.
Similarly, the recent "Pawoo Lockdown" incident is also such a transnational legal and cultural collision, but because the platform itself is actually in the hands of Japanese companies, the final result is much better than Twitter.
The problem happened with the recently popular decentralized microblogging service Mastodon, which functions like Twitter, and while it is possible to tweet, it does not have an absolute official center where anyone can build their own server for people to sign up. Recently, the Japanese quadratic map station Pixiv, they also set up an official Mastodon server "Pawoo" for Japanese players to register to play.
Pixiv's official Mastodon sub-server "Pawoo"
Just a day later, "Pawoo" was isolated because someone put Lolita to the yellow map on it - the overseas server took the initiative to disconnect from the Japanese server in order to avoid legal problems, and this incident was jokingly called "electronic disconnection" and "pawoo lock country" by Japanese players.
However, many Japanese users said that this is good - so that those Lolita painters who have been banned by Twitter can move in this new position with peace of mind. It can be seen that many times, this kind of actually belongs to the part of the minority, and the decentralized regional platform also has its own unique advantages - the independent values and judgment standards of the niche platform will greatly alleviate this cultural and legal conflict.
<h1>3. The issue of money that cannot be ignored
When Japan cooperates with multinational companies, in addition to controversial content review standards, the allocation of money can also cause problems. Negotiating with a large platform like Amazon, Japanese publishers are often in a weak position with authors. The "Japan Amazon Monthly Book Service", which began in August 2016, is a typical example, and the distribution of revenue from this service has gone wrong and caused a lot of chaos.
This e-book rental service is launched by Amazon in Japan, readers only need to pay 980 yen, you can borrow more than 120,000 e-book library, Amazon will pay the publisher according to the number of pages read by the reader. In order to promote, Amazon's service was free for the first month, and after the campaign began for a period of time and poured in more than expected readers, Amazon found that it could not make ends meet, so it moved a large number of popular books out of the lending library...
In an IT network live broadcast, relevant people revealed that the five-month budget of Amazon in Japan ran out in the first week
The incident provoked an outcry from publishers. Kodansha, which was actively involved in the program, had all 1,200 critically acclaimed books removed in September. In October, Kodansha publicly declared that it "strongly protests against such unilateral acts."
Kodansha's official protest letter
Kodansha President Noma Fumi said angrily, "Obviously we have spent so much effort with the writers to provide rental services, so how do we explain it to the writers!" ”。 After that, Amazon only expressed great regret, but did not add the books back to the library.
Kodansha provides electronically borrowed books
Not only publishers, but also writers who do solo publishing at Amazon have the same problem. For example, IronSugar, a fan group that has been praising Amazon's book rental service, occupies the top few adult lists and makes a lot of money, and in February 2017, the comics he put in Amazon's lending library were suddenly forcibly deleted.
IronSugar's work once dominated the top few adult lists
The author himself complained that he had passed censorship last year and was forcibly removed after selling it for a few months. And this takedown has neither prior notice nor clear standards or instructions, and Amazon's discretion is too great.
Although repeatedly protested by the author, Amazon emailed back to explain that this was because "the work did not comply with Amazon's regulations." But the author disagrees with this statement. In fact, comic books have become the hardest hit area to be removed, an important reason is that comics are read faster than text books, and Amazon needs to pay more than other books in the same reading time.
IT news reporter Nishida Sochika said that before amazon operated the European and American borrowing library, the proportion of pure text books such as novels is very high, but the Japanese library has many magazines, manga and photo collections, Japanese readers read these books much faster than expected, plus they are still running free promotions in the first month, of course, they will lose a lot of money.
Although in business, it is true that the business that does not make money cannot be done. But on the other hand, for publishers and authors, the fact that there is no initiative at all when negotiating with a large platform like Amazon is also very worrying.
At the same time, it is conceivable that if there are more other options, publishers and cartoonists will have more initiative when things go wrong. In fact, Japan now has online eBookJapan, DMM and other online e-comic services, and Amazon, a super-large transnational platform, although very influential, has not become the only choice.
<h1>4. Preemptively set up an author-led platform
As a manga artist, in order to cope with this situation, Akamatsu Ken's idea is to "build a platform for the joint writers themselves before being dominated by foreign companies." The platform that Ken Akamatsu calls "e-book YouTube" is the "Manga Library Z" www.mangaz.com that he established two years ago and did a lot of experiments (long press the link to choose to copy, and then click [Access Now] to jump).
This "Manga Library Z", formerly known as Akamatsu Ken's "Out of Print Manga Library", Akamatsu Ken set up this website originally to combat piracy and solve the problem of unusable out-of-print manga.
In 2015, Akamatsu Ken himself searched for "pure love landlord zip" on Google, and the results were all pirated download links. A long time ago, this kind of comic sharing was mainly through P2P software, and uploaders would not get actual benefits, but now that the mainstream download method has more of a choice of paid network disks, uploaders can indirectly earn income from downloads. Despite this situation, the Japanese government has also organized publishing houses to combat piracy. But Ken Akamatsu found a serious problem, that is, in practice, the copyright protection system is basically only popular or new works, "no one is protecting those out-of-print comics!" ”
So he came up with the idea of building a comic book site led by an author. He downloaded a pirated image of his comic "Computer Lover's Dream", uploaded it to the online comic site, and collected income through advertising, which became a major topic at the time.
J-comi, the predecessor of manga library Z, after Ken Akamatsu publicly released the manga, now Google searches for the download address of old works in Japanese, and the first one has become Akamatsu Ken's own public version
Ken Akamatsu not only puts his past works online for people to read, but his platform also accepts works by other cartoonists. Instead of letting old works, especially out-of-print comics, be exploited only by pirates, he said. If you can make these works "re-evaluated" through the Internet, it should help many cartoonists.
"Manga Library Z" 2015 Rule Description
Witnessing the changes in regulations and the expansion of multinational companies over the years, on April 4, 2017, Akamatsu Ken officially announced the construction of "e-book Version YouTube". Then the biggest difference between the rules of this site and other Japanese manga sites is to learn the YouTube model of this one - "If these e-books are not actually uploaded by the copyright owner, the real copyright holder can choose to "delete it immediately", "leave it alone", or "transfer the advertising revenue to yourself".
It can be seen that in addition to continuing not to compete with the publishing house for business, the most eye-catching core of the rules is that "a third party can upload comics without the authorization of the original author for people to read online", and there is a set of comics that are like this -
"Manga Library Z" is a manga for readers to read for free - Yuichi Kumakura's "Thief King JING". The uploader is unknown and it is impossible to determine whether the consent of the original author has been obtained.
After the manga was uploaded, "Manga Library Z" checked the email address and IP address of the uploaded user and found no abnormalities. Staff members sent letters asking about the source of the copyright and have not received a reply. Finally, Akamatsu Ken personally ran to the publishing house, told the relevant person in charge that "if the author appears, please contact immediately", and temporarily stored the advertising proceeds of the work in the fund pool.
Akamatsu Ken said that he was obviously not completely righteous and innocent, but whether this matter was good or bad was left to others to evaluate. If the opinion of most people is that "even if it is a win-win design, but as long as it cannot be completely self-justified, then this thing should not be done", then he will stop. In the end, the audience's reaction, including Yuichi Kumakura's old fans, was basically on the side of supporting this action.
Ken Akamatsu's initiative is also supported by research. Professor Tatsuo Tanaka of Keio University published a paper in which he found that "pirated manga will reduce the sales of the latest works on the one hand, but also promote the sales of old works on the other hand."
The research material is the official Japanese anti-piracy initiative", the Manga-Anime Guardians Project
Ken Akamatsu's idea was also "although the piracy of the latest works should continue to be prevented." But for old works, it is better to simply let the writer download pirated files of his own works and then use them to obtain revenue or promote themselves." According to Ken Akamatsu himself, this initiative has also been supported by several major publishing houses. In the end, he also won the joint approval of nearly 283 manga artists, including Waeden Shiki and Hosato Looku.
Wei Deng Shishu also puts his old works on this website
Although the revenue from advertising clicks is meager and cannot be compared with the popular works, it is difficult to make money for old works, such as science fiction writer Taizo Kobayashi once said one thing -
One day he received a notice from the publisher: "We have introduced a new publishing technology, and in the future, the library can be republished at least 100 copies." For this hundred books, if the unit price is 500 yen, the royalties are 5,000 yen (about 300 yuan) - but if you think about it, until now you can only choose to print 0 or 1500 copies, which is a good choice compared to "not reprinting" and leaving the work out of print.
Akamatsu Ken announced that in September 2015, the total revenue of cartoonists and the top ten individual benefits of advertising were announced
Akamatsu Ken's manga library Z, although small in scale, has also become a new choice for old works to re-enter the stage. Referring to the figure above, the manga artist Tsuji Tsutomu's monthly income is 99,000 yen (about 6,000 yuan), which is equivalent to 2,000 reprints a month according to Kobayashi's algorithm. Before the introduction of the membership fee system, Akamatsu had subsidized adult comics at his own expense because of the low advertising of adult comics and the low click income, so that the income was the same as that of ordinary comics.
In addition, the Manga Library Z often engages in crowdfunding activities with cartoonists to bring additional income to cartoonists
Yes, Ken Akamatsu did pirate and sell advertisements, and may have published other people's works without authorization. But he ordered a pirated version of his own work, and did not put the advertising costs of other people's works into his own wallet, even if the public comics did not have a definite license, which is based on the principle of fair utilization that Google has been using on platforms such as YouTube. This small platform based on out-of-print comics has made many comics re-emerge on the one hand, and on the other hand, it has indeed brought benefits to creators.
Although his actions were not without problems though. But his purpose is not only to help creators obtain income, but also to preemptively build a platform dominated by Japanese writers, to increase the choice of writers, and to resist the impact of multinational companies. It's no wonder that many viewers and cartoonists support his "e-book YouTube" initiative. What do you think of Ken Akamatsu's approach? Feel free to write a review and discuss it with you.
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