1/11/2003

OTAKU PRECEDENT

Finally, an article about manga and copyright issues that is not predicated on an appreciation of Katsuhiro Otomo or Richard Stallman (despite the fact that the link came through /.). The article, Copy Cats and Robotic Dogs, posits that lawyers could stand to take a lesson from the way the manga (graphic novel) industry tolerates the burgeoning dojinshi (derivative amateur works) industry in Japan. The idea of heavy-handed copyright stifling innovation is not new, but this pithy piece gains extra points for having a real world industry to take examples from, rather than merely empty, angry philosophising about the potential benefits of imagined copyleft utopias (GNU excepted).

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