Anime and Fair Use

Anime Music Videos are fanvids of animes, but have the fascinating reputation of being supported by anime creators. Perhaps it is the collaborative nature of anime creation, or maybe there is stronger support for fair use under Japanese copyright law. Whatever the reason, anecdotally, anime creators feel more flattered than violated when fans riff off of their works.

For example, in the two years I have attended Fanime (an anime fan convention in San Jose CA) I have seen dozens of AMVs played as part of the schedule  convention. Since Fanime is a successful business which would not needlessly subject itself to claims of copyright infringement, this leads me to think the convention organizers have done one of two things: 1) they have gotten permission for every clip in every one of the hundreds of AMVs they play each year (and a given AMV may sample from 1 or a dozen animes); 2) they have decided that AMVs are fair use. Whichever it is, the relationship between anime creators and fans is a special one, which I think western media could benefit from studying.

Below are three of my favorite AMVs, all of which I believe are using copyrighted content fairly (as always, I do not think the use of the musical setting is fair, as the music is untransformed and not commented on).

The clips in the video below are from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, a movie which sprouted from the popular Final Fantasy video game series.

Watching the above video reminded me of my freshman year of high school, when I first started watching anime. The romantic surety of the characters, the desperate fights, the dramatic black ensembles. And let us not forget the ridiculously proportioned Cloud Sword.

Tainted Donuts is a famous AMV–it narrates what would happen if Cowboy Bebop’s Spike (a green-haired bounty hunter) took out a contract on Trigun’s Vash (a gentle goofball whose body happens to be full of weapons):

Finally, a Fruits Basket AMV. Fruits Basket follows the kind and klutzy Toru Honda, who comes to live with some schoolmates who turn into animals when hugged by the opposite sex. It is one of my favorite animes because Toru is such a strong character in disguise.

Re-watching these videos made me realize that most fanvids are like Hemingway’s stories: 8/9ths below the water. While what is visible of a good fanvid should convey a story, the fanvid references much more than it shows. This means that fanvids are much more meaningful to fans than to non-initiates.

Perhaps this could be added to the broader definition of fanworks: they reference more than they show, and it is those references which draw in and keep fans contributing and consuming fanworks.

Inspirational Quote:

“If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.” Ernest Hemingway

3 Fair Use Fanworks

Is all fanfiction a violation of copyright? Can something which draws on a copyrighted work for inspiration do so without a license? Can a fanvid be transformative and therefore qualify as fair use?

Simply, fair use is the permissible, unauthorized use of copyrighted materials. Everyone reading this has benefited from fair use–every time I quote someone in a paper, read a parody, or (I would argue) read some kinds of fanfiction, I am benefiting from this legal exception to the norms of copyright restrictions.

For the purposes of this post, I would like to group fanfiction, fanart and fanvids under the term “fanworks”. Below are three fanworks which I think qualify (wholly or partially) as fair use.

Here is a Twilight/Buffy the Vampire Slayer mash-up with a good explanation of what fair use is (thanks to Anthea for the link). Also, this video is an excellent summary of why Edward could be considered a stalker:

I think this Twilight fan video is original enough to be considered fair use. I do not think the use of the music is fair, since it is simply an untransformed copy.Tying into the impressive feminist critique of the previous video, note that the song accompanying the following fanvid is “Run” by Snow Patrol, aka, “As if You Had a Choice.” A neat summary of the disempowerment which dogs female Twilight characters. Read the YouTube description for a plot summary of the following video–this creator took a brief mention in the book (Twilight by Stephanie Meyers) about a previous relationship between vampires James and Alice, and spent months tracking down footage of those characters’ actors or lookalikes to tell the story. Impressive effort and  carry-through. Enjoy:

This is a collection of fanart for the epic fantasy series by George R.R. Martin. Again, I don’t think the use of the song is fair.

Inspirational Quote:

“Common sense is not so common.”–Voltaire

FanFiction: a Definition

In long discussions with a wide circle of my friends (including readers, writers, and haters of fanfiction) I have decided it is worth it to make our debates public. This will be an occasional series dealing with small aspects of the immensely controversial (and fun) subject of fanfiction. To start with, I would like to propose a definition:

A  fanfiction (or, fanfic) is an original work explores the world of an original work and which grows from a fan-community (fandom) that is centered on that original work.

NOTE: If you are not a reader of fanfiction, please look at the tropes of the genre from tvtropes.com to get an idea of the discourse surrounding fanfiction.

Most people I spoke to considered all fanfiction violation of copyright, so a more common definition might be: unauthorized fiction using either the universe of another author, or the characters. But I do not believe all fanfiction is a violation of copyright, and so am consciously trying to distinguish that which is a fair use of copyrighted works, and that which is a violation of copyright.

To me copyright protects two things:

1. The monetary value of an original
2. The creator’s artistic vision

Therefore, to me, a copyright violation must do at least one of two things: decrease the monetary value of the original (ie, pirated DVDs sold at half the price of official ones) or it must violate the author’s vision of how the original is used (ie, John McCain using John Mellencamp’s music at his rallies). One of the reasons why I am so interested in fanfiction, other than that I like reading it sometimes, is the copyright and originality questions it brings up.

Some of those questions are:

Can something be authorized and be fanfiction?

• I was thinking of the newest Star Trek (which I loved). The movie was created to feed a fandom, it explores an established universe and uses characters from that universe. Most importantly to me, is that it uses two common fanfic tropes:

1. It uses time travel to delve into an alternate universe (so that the authors do not have to follow the original rules);
2. It explores relationships (Kirk/Uhura, Spock/Uhura, Kirk/Spock) which were never part of the original show;
3. It was not sanctioned by the original author, Gene Roddenberry. So, was the new Star Trek fanfiction?

Can fanfiction (which includes fanfiction, fanart and fanvideos) be fair use?

• I am thinking of some innovative and transformative fanfictions which I have read.

What do authors think of fanfiction?

• J.K. Rowling likes it, George R.R. Martin does not. What do other authors, published or not, think about other people riffing on their worlds?

What is the history of fanfiction?

• I remember something about Arthur Conan Doyle’s fans writing and publishing their versions of Sherlock Holmes stories?
• This history could also include works like Macbeth which drew heavily from other published works. This leads to:

If it’s not fanfiction, what is it?

• In defining fanfiction, I have come upon an array of terms which imply some kind of derivation without infringement: adaptation, historical fiction, novelization and more. Can any of these terms be applied to fanfiction?

In my months of research on plagiarism policies, I found that the issue of originality is rarely clear-cut. For example, Gene Roddenberry is known as the creator of Star Trek. But what about the dozens of writers who wrote the episodes for it? And the accusations that Gene Roddenberry passed their ideas off as his own? In dealing with the second piece of my definition of copyright, if we were to choose an artistic vision to be true to, would it be Roddenberry’s? His writers’? His actors’?

Even with something as simple as a book, with only one person’s name as author, originality can be difficult to determine. Is the Lord of the Rings truly original since it drew heavily on Norse mythology? LotR drew from public domain works, which is perfectly legal. But is it a completely original work? Does it need to be?

Even more interesting, is the emerging reciprocal relationship between creators and fans and the questions it engenders. For example, the writers of the the next Star Trek movie are “checking out [fans'] reaction[s]” on the new script. Another example, in Supernatural’s episode “The Monster at the End of this Book” there is a scene where the Winchester brother’s are reading fanfiction on a novel based on their lives. So, who’s the author now?

Anyway, fanfiction is fun to read/watch, and a great way to start conversations and pick fights. This will be an occasional series on feelingelephants, with a few guest bloggers.

Inspirational Quote:

“I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it’s dull, you’re just not communicating.”–Poul Anderson

Copyright Term Extensions, Historically

Here’s how I came to be so interested in intellectual property, in policy, and the technical aspects of both of these things. I’ve traced some of my more structured fascination back to this Keynote (as opposed to PowerPoint) presentation by Lawrence Lessig. This presentation built on the anger I felt when I saw that Tom Dooley was a copyrighted work. My grandmother taught me Tom Dooley, and Cotton Pickin’ and Mountain Dew, and in my copy of Rise Up Singing they were all copyrighted. I was filled with righteous anger. How could people make money off of works which I learned from my grandmother? What did it mean that I could not publically perform songs which she told me she had learned back home in Tennessee when she was a girl?

I am sure, being the vocal person I am, I brought up my anger in one of my classes with Ms Nace. Later, she sent me this keynote:

In the version I had, the last slide was a list of websites I could go to if I wanted to learn more. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was one of them. I applied for an internship, got it, and here I am today, four years later, in love with the Berkman Center and planning on Law School after undergrad.

In support of the presentation above, I found this amazing graph:

Historical Increases in Copyright Terms

I found it when I was researching the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. The graph is, fittingly, licensed under Creative Commons Share-Alike License. It is also fairly damning evidence of the stead historical increase in copyright terms. This is a trend which I have never heard fully explained–do we in 2008 need so much more protection than Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway or The Brothers Grimm?

Inspirational Quote:

Dick Armey – “You cannot get ahead while you are getting even.”

The Internet is for English Teachers (and their resources)

Sometimes I think the internet is dominated by English teachers. Literary Fanfiction, trailers for books on YouTube, and sites like tvTropes.com seem like really good teacher’s resources dreamed up by bored English teachers. I’ve written about fanfiction before, and you can see a movie trailer for a book series below.

I want to talk about tvTropes. tvTropes is probably one of the quirkiest and book-geekiest sites I have seen. The website is a comprehensive list of tropes found in television, anime, movies and books. But, because it is a wiki, the tropes have names like:

• ICallItVera
• PublicDomainArtifact or
• ImportantHaircut

It’s oddly addictive reading through these irreverent, fan-obsessive and eerily accurate descriptions of these tropes. Each trope page (put together by groups of tropers, ie, those who lurk on tvtropes.org) starts with a description of that trope, and then tons of examples. For Machiavelli Was Wrong the description (sans links) is:

Bands of heroes are generally held together by The Power Of Friendship, Love, or just general loyalty to the hero. Bands of villains tend to be held together by fear of the head villain. Eventually, villains often discover to their surprise that while fear might be easier to establish, love has a lot more staying power.

It then goes on to gives examples Machiavelli being wrong in books and tv shows, touching on the contrasts between Harry Potter and Voldemort’s gangs, the differences in loyalty for Buffy’s Scoobies and the vampires she fights. It also, in typical English teacher fashion, points out that Lord Vetinary in Discworld  subverts this trope (this then leads to the VetinaryParadox).

The writing is chatty and full of inside jokes. That can make it confusing to peruse or simply delightful, depending on the reader and the situation. The website is also organized by works (and authors, and characters, and and and…). You can read a summaries and lists of tropes for

• The Lord of the Rings
• Snow Crash or
• Hamlet

I can’t wait until my generation of teachers gets into the classroom and hooks the energy of these fans (who, despite the thesis of this post, are probably mostly bored teenagers) and channels it into exploring outside the world of the web. It will be great fun.

PS: the trailer for a books series I linked to is for the Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. It is one of the best trailers I have seen–I love the use of the Hans Zimmerman music to make it epic. Here is the video:

Inspirational Quote:

“Take away my people, but leave my factories, and soon grass will grow on the factory floors. Take away my factories, but leave my people, and soon we will have a new and better factory.” Andrew Carnegie