Japan Faces Digital Black Ships?

We naturally assume that the Japanese market is far more advance digitally than the West but that is not the case. The lead that they have show in Keitai novels and Manga comics may be ahead of the curve but there are salient lessons to be learnt there. The Japanese market itself is defined differently with magazines, books and comics often all together within the same channel and and figures. In 1997 the market was some $30 billion US, today it is under $20Billion, so in just over 10 years it has shrunk 30%.

Japan has a fixed price system which is controlled under a network of wholesalers. The major publishers are currently experiencing a continual downturn in both sales and profit and most marked is the drop in comic book. Bookstores over the last 10 years have dropped by 20% from around 21 thousand to 16,400.

So will the new digital age stimulate the market or cause further collapse? Will it open up trade just as Commander Perry did with his Black Ships some 150 years ago?
We listened with interest to Hiroshi Kagawa, Publisher and owner of IBC Publishing at the recent Seoul International Book Fair.

One aspect that we didn’t respect was the Asian approach and attitude to copyright and how it differed to that in the West. Kagawa talked about the obvious issues he faces operating in a country with 50 years rules and a global market that has 70 year ones. Most interesting was his insight into contracts and the fact that they are drawn up after the publication not before, are based on a few principles and not buried in detail and specifics and that they are based on relationships. He asked whether Japan could manage the transition to the contract world of the West and if not the potential implications.

However they appear not to be waiting for the Black Ships and Kodansha, a major publisher, is planning to create 20,000 e titles this year and already have some 7,000. Major publishers have formed an association of epublishing called Denshokyo.

Kagawa closed by stating that we have created a digital tangled web where we are in danger of loosing the reader. He believes we need to find new ways of untangling the web and creating simpler and short digital entry to content. ‘In a digital era we may lose our patence and endurance to read heavy content.’

Copyright Infringement: Who knows best?

As we are about to get the UK Digital Bill pushed through parliament by use a government ‘wash up’, we looked across to France to see how they have faired with their ‘three strikes law’.

France's recent disconnection law has still to cut off it first P2P pirate, but according to a team of French researchers who affiliated with the University of Rennes, online copyright infringement is down on P2P networks. However, they also claim that copyright infringement is up in other areas such as online streaming and one-click download services like Rapidshare. A report on the research by Ars Technica , claims that since the law was passed, the total people infringing has actually increased by 3%.

The research was based on 2,000 phone surveys in Brittany and claims that 15% of P2P users have already stopped using the networks, but found that over 60% of those former P2P users had simply migrated to alternative illegal streaming sites and HTTP-based download services. The cultural change expected by adoption of the Daconian ‘stick’ approach has apparently failed to address the fundamental problem and merely made consumers turn to other sources. The problem is not in enforcing the law, but in educating consumers and providing a market of ‘give and take’. It like soft drugs you don’t lock up the casual user, you target the source and face the reality that a certain amount of tolerance is required. Copyright infringement will never be a zero tolerant zone in a digital world.

The research backs up what recent the BBC Panorama report in claiming that pirate users are also regular digital music or video buyers and not everything they download is illegal. This is even more a reason to not criminalise users, but to look to ways in which to strike a compromise and gain and share a level of common understanding. To often we find its commercial bodies who drive the draconian measures, only to find that they alienate and don’t work.

We were surprised at the pages of comments on the Ars Technica article and perhaps these start to show the divide in thinking between the sides. It is alarming how easy it is to drive consumers into a position which many on the other side don’t accept or understand. This cultural gap was further amplified in another article about French language comics and a term we had not heard before ‘Scanlations’. Scanlations are the unauthorized scans , translations, editing and distribution of comics. The practice is often used to take Japanese (manga), Korean (manhwa) and Chinese (manhua) comics and make them available on the web for free. The issue is that the copyright is infringed and the problem is significant with sites being openly embraced in the western readers and now evenly openly available via mobile apps. The opportunity arose due to the general lack of Japanese manga releases outside of Japan and that importing manga directly from Japan was expensive and required knowledge of Japanese language and culture to understand the originals and translate then for western youth.

Now some 750 French-language comics authors and creators have signed a declaration to stop granting digital rights to their publishers until digital industry models are established and the broader issues of copyright infringement are addressed. This was reported by Icarus Publishing in an article ‘Why should publishers pay for digital rights?’ and reference a very informative article by Jason Thompson, ’How To Illegally Read Manga Anywhere: The iPhone Manga Wars of 2010’

However as with the Ars Techinca article we were surprised at the volume and strength of comments on the Thompson article. It clearly indicates that we have a growing digital divide and one that needs to be listened to and understood if we are to avoid creating a wider chasm between users of digital stuff.