Unjapanologist

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 spent two hours tossing around ideas for how to legalize doujinshi and make sure that possible tightening of Japanese copyright law (via, say, the TPP) won't harm either doujinshi creators or media companies.

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In this post:

*Grumblings about the "I don't speak for the OTW" disclaimer and about diversity
*Very lengthy rantings about copyright legislation and why the OTW should do its utmost to make sure all fans feel comfortable approaching it for tools and resources
*An endorsement of Betsy Rosenblatt for the board

If you're pressed for time, please skip the grumblings and rantings and go straight to the endorsement. Lucy Pearson withdrew her candidacy while I was writing this, so I feel it's doubly important to stress why Betsy deserves a vote. Also, general_jinjur explained the OTW's voting system with pictures of smarties on a pai sho board yay very clear graphical representations, and what it comes down to is, the order in which we rank candidates during voting can matter a lot.

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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. boundbooks uses Mander's own quotes to relate how the sorry tale began and to show that, while he claims he intends to make the website in question "better" for its users, Mander is actually astoundingly clueless about what fans want. Nothing bona fide to see here. When the OTW posted a quick overview of the incident and its ramifications for the fic authors involved, Mander showed up in the comments to mansplain his plans and contrast them rather hilariously with what he refers to as the OTW's "vision" and their execution of it (he can do better because the OTW are just volunteers. Someone please point him to the Wikipedia entry for open source).

In short, train wreck. A very large part of me is too tired and heat-dead right now to do anything but snigger and microwave more popcorn, and Mander has already been told everything he needs to know directly and also indirectly by the many awesome posts about his antics currently gracing the internet. elf  is keeping track of links to said awesome posts.* But rambling is fun, so I'm going to try and make a point or two about what does really irk me about this beautiful technicolor fail.

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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 a very active fashion, as participants in a fandom- might be very useful for libraries to learn more about. Basically, I gave a quick primer on fanwork and tried to convince everyone to help and encourage young library users to write fic about their favourite books :)

( Presentation (in Dutch, sorry) under the cut )

The day was great fun -very good talks, excellent supply of munchies, and many interesting new people, including the author of the absolute awesome comic version of The Forever War. Of course I forgot to bring my copy and couldn't beg for a signature, and then spent most of the time being fannishly dazzled instead of trying to talk to the man. Some other day, then.

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 through the address I provided to the group, inviting me to join a service called Grouply which gathers a user's Google and Yahoo groups in one place. She used the address lamiha80@gmail.com , with username Laura Hale on Grouply. On Grouply, she's a member of no less than 448 different Yahoo and Google groups on various fandoms. Presumably, she's been contacting a lot of other people this way to try and add them to her network. Don't listen to her if she does, she will waste your time, try to trick you into making money for her, and possibly try to get at your personal information to sell it.

Enough of my time wasted for today, back to work. Must finish article in just over a month, not enough time, ack.