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sub_dividedFall classes. I’m overscheduling again, I must be crazy. Isn’t this a major indication of insanity? Repetition of harmful behavior, inability to learn from mistakes.
This is another one of those posts I’m going to regret in the morning. I’ve been talking too much lately. One of these days I’ll take a nice, leisurely vow of silence – maybe a week a so – just to be sure of where I stand. That way I could think things though without vomiting half-finished ideas all over the keyboard.
Or maybe I’d only succeed in driving myself insane(r). Hermetically sealed thoughts aren’t worth much on the open market anyway.
TOKYOPOP and the exploitation of social networks
TOKYOPOP recently revamped its website – design majors, don’t look – to something less focused on delivering “official” content, more focused on creating community through blogs, forums, art and photo galleries, even fan-made music and comics. The average tokyopop.com member is in middle-school, so naturally idiocy abounds. Among other issues, a large portion uploaded art, photos, and especially music and comics are both stolen and in violation of copyright. CrazyNekoRun is a good example of the kind of inter-community strife this creates, to say nothing of the moral and legal issues. Telophase outlines a more practical approach.
I say TOKYOPOP’s thriving art thief industry is karma, if not something more sinister.
More on That
First: why did TOKYOPOP move to embrace user-submitted content? According to this guy -- a site maintainer -- the company’s primary goal is to promote “a Manga lifestyle – that’s right, with a capital M.” His statement is a little confused, so I’ll clarify: a Manga lifestyle is one where everyone can buy, read, and discuss manga openly, without shame or fear of social ostrazation. In TOKYOPOP’s ideal world, manga in the U.S. would be like music, television, sports, videogames (in recent years), movies, books that aren’t fantasy, or manga in Japan: something it’s okay to like.
How does a site designed to cater to serious enthusiasts contribute to this goal? Casual manga readers – the kind TOKYOPOP wants to create – aren’t going to spend time creating content (words or images) for a manga-publisher website. Nor will they spend time wrestling with the interface to construct a vast social universe of “fans,” “pops,” and guestbook comments (okay, maybe they will – middle school girls, and all that). In any case the ultimate effect is to draw people to the website, where they can learn about TOKYOPOP products, provide TOKYOPOP with free marketing research, and spread the word of TOKYOPOP. It’s free publicity (and as we all know, there is no such thing as bad publicity).
What TOKYOPOP really wants is a way to increase interest, without having to pay for it. Coincidentally, this is also exactly what art thieves want.
I know what you’re thinking. Every article on Wikipedia, every video on youtube, is user-submitted. Fans routinely spend hours and hours enhancing the value of someone else’s intellectual property, with no expectation of payment. Every time I post an entry to livejournal, I am promoting livejournal. All of this is voluntary, so who’s harmed here, again?
But TOKYOPOP is a step beyond any of these things. There are two different issues here, so I’ll present them one at a time:
Modus Operandi: Ratio of Paid to Free Content
More and more often, professional news outfits are using news blogs as sources of information, essentially profiting from someone else's (unpaid) journalistic work instead of doing their own. On the other hand, Keith Oberman has yet to do more than one ten-minute blogger segment in an hour-long show.[1] The rest of his show is, presumably, put together in-house. Whereas on the new tokyopop.com site the vast majority of what's there wasn't created by TOKYOPOP -- or even by TOKYOPOP's users.
Or here's another example in the same medium, publishing. 1up.com draws a lot of fans who write for free. But it also pays a lot of people to write. Paid content is clearly separated from unpaid content. (tokyopop.com separates editorials – which are paid, though not very well – from blogs, but doesn’t separate employees’ blogs from users’ blogs). Stolen or irrelevant content – mp3s uploaded to filefront.com, for instance – is clearly, CLEARLY stated to be inappropriate (and, incidentally, illegal). The site is better policed; more than one person is responsible for maintaining it. In short, many times more resources are given over to 1up.com, whose mission statement is “the definitive one-stop website for gamers.”
Tokyopop.com on the other hand...strikes me as primarily concerned with getting more for less. This is a subjective judgement, of course – you could argue that the two really aren’t that different.
Raison d’Etre: What exactly is being promoted here?
Everyone loves wikipedia. And Youtube[2]. And – if you’re reading this – possibly livejournal. None of these services would be as popular if many thousands of people in no way affiliated with them didn’t contribute. But the distinction is: why do these sites exist?
Wikipedia.org: Comprehensive repository of collectively accumulated factual information (some parts more factual than others).
Youtube.com: Home of some amateur video and a lot of copyright infringement. Youtube’s ultimate purpose, however, is to promote itself as a place that streams interesting video. Vids that secretly promote political agendas, while not against the terms of service, are slightly underhanded, wouldn’t you agree?
Livejournal: Created as a social-networking tool – like Facebook – but many people use it as a blogging tool. So if I use it to blog, and if by using it to blog, I attract other people who are also interesting in blogging, and they use it to blog, and this increases the revenue Sixapart (livejournal’s owners) uses to expand services available to bloggers…isn’t this logical?
Tokyopop: A publisher of English-language manga, both in-house (though their Rising Stars of Manga contest) and licensed from Japan, Korea, China(?), I think France, possibly also Thailand? Don’t quote me on that. Also, recently, they’ve been publishing novels-in-translation[3]. Blogging, forums, art galleries, photo galleries, and online popularity contests are completely irrelevant.
So what TOKYOPOP is doing, essentially, is asking users to enhance the value of their product in ways that do not actually enhance the value of their product -- which is, after all, printed books and magazines. Not even news or opinions like 1up! This strikes me as foul play; I'd rather see the money spent on better copy-editing and translation, even if it's not very much money.
But I’m exaggerating
TOKYOPOP isn’t a dark and sinister force of evil. It isn’t doing anything that hasn’t been done before, or that other interest groups aren’t doing right now. The reason TOKYOPOP doesn’t pay more people to work on its website is that it can’t afford to – manga is the one healthy section of the publishing industry, but the companies involved are still running on very slim margins, with many employees who are underpaid and overworked.
Really, I don’t know why I’m spending three single-spaced pages on this. I suppose it’s because I think there are people, on both sides – TOKYOPOP management and tokyopop.com members – who aren’t thinking about context.
One final note, of course I don’t think inviting volunteers to post cosplay photos on your company website in hopes of harnessing the power of myspace – or livejournal, or deviantart, or fandom in general -- is exactly like posting other people’s art or music to increase the size of yourfriends fans list. Cosplay photos are consensual as long as that’s you dressed as Sailor Moon. Stolen artwork, on the other hand, is almost always posted without permission. I suppose what is getting to me is that there are scanlations uploaded to the manga section of an official U.S. manga licensor.
Notes
[1] Actually, I do take issue with blog segments on major news channels. Interviewing an influential Lebonese blogger; surveying a number of blogs to determine the political climate in one section of the internet; talking about one or more blogs in pieces about blogging; all of these things are fine. Reading from a single blog in lieu of writing your own stories is not fine, it’s lazy. And it perverts the original meaning of ‘news’: discussion becomes news, actual events are increasingly of secondary importance.
[2] EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER SEEN ‘YU-GI-OH’ MUST WATCH THESE PARODIES RIGHT NOW: Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series. OMG. I died laughing!
[3] BLUmoon is one of TOKYOPOP’s novel re-writers. Shockingly – or maybe not, haha -- I recognize this person from fandom. She writes decent fanfiction. I find this reassuring and kind of want to know which titles she’s working on.
This is another one of those posts I’m going to regret in the morning. I’ve been talking too much lately. One of these days I’ll take a nice, leisurely vow of silence – maybe a week a so – just to be sure of where I stand. That way I could think things though without vomiting half-finished ideas all over the keyboard.
Or maybe I’d only succeed in driving myself insane(r). Hermetically sealed thoughts aren’t worth much on the open market anyway.
TOKYOPOP and the exploitation of social networks
TOKYOPOP recently revamped its website – design majors, don’t look – to something less focused on delivering “official” content, more focused on creating community through blogs, forums, art and photo galleries, even fan-made music and comics. The average tokyopop.com member is in middle-school, so naturally idiocy abounds. Among other issues, a large portion uploaded art, photos, and especially music and comics are both stolen and in violation of copyright. CrazyNekoRun is a good example of the kind of inter-community strife this creates, to say nothing of the moral and legal issues. Telophase outlines a more practical approach.
I say TOKYOPOP’s thriving art thief industry is karma, if not something more sinister.
More on That
First: why did TOKYOPOP move to embrace user-submitted content? According to this guy -- a site maintainer -- the company’s primary goal is to promote “a Manga lifestyle – that’s right, with a capital M.” His statement is a little confused, so I’ll clarify: a Manga lifestyle is one where everyone can buy, read, and discuss manga openly, without shame or fear of social ostrazation. In TOKYOPOP’s ideal world, manga in the U.S. would be like music, television, sports, videogames (in recent years), movies, books that aren’t fantasy, or manga in Japan: something it’s okay to like.
How does a site designed to cater to serious enthusiasts contribute to this goal? Casual manga readers – the kind TOKYOPOP wants to create – aren’t going to spend time creating content (words or images) for a manga-publisher website. Nor will they spend time wrestling with the interface to construct a vast social universe of “fans,” “pops,” and guestbook comments (okay, maybe they will – middle school girls, and all that). In any case the ultimate effect is to draw people to the website, where they can learn about TOKYOPOP products, provide TOKYOPOP with free marketing research, and spread the word of TOKYOPOP. It’s free publicity (and as we all know, there is no such thing as bad publicity).
What TOKYOPOP really wants is a way to increase interest, without having to pay for it. Coincidentally, this is also exactly what art thieves want.
I know what you’re thinking. Every article on Wikipedia, every video on youtube, is user-submitted. Fans routinely spend hours and hours enhancing the value of someone else’s intellectual property, with no expectation of payment. Every time I post an entry to livejournal, I am promoting livejournal. All of this is voluntary, so who’s harmed here, again?
But TOKYOPOP is a step beyond any of these things. There are two different issues here, so I’ll present them one at a time:
Modus Operandi: Ratio of Paid to Free Content
More and more often, professional news outfits are using news blogs as sources of information, essentially profiting from someone else's (unpaid) journalistic work instead of doing their own. On the other hand, Keith Oberman has yet to do more than one ten-minute blogger segment in an hour-long show.[1] The rest of his show is, presumably, put together in-house. Whereas on the new tokyopop.com site the vast majority of what's there wasn't created by TOKYOPOP -- or even by TOKYOPOP's users.
Or here's another example in the same medium, publishing. 1up.com draws a lot of fans who write for free. But it also pays a lot of people to write. Paid content is clearly separated from unpaid content. (tokyopop.com separates editorials – which are paid, though not very well – from blogs, but doesn’t separate employees’ blogs from users’ blogs). Stolen or irrelevant content – mp3s uploaded to filefront.com, for instance – is clearly, CLEARLY stated to be inappropriate (and, incidentally, illegal). The site is better policed; more than one person is responsible for maintaining it. In short, many times more resources are given over to 1up.com, whose mission statement is “the definitive one-stop website for gamers.”
Tokyopop.com on the other hand...strikes me as primarily concerned with getting more for less. This is a subjective judgement, of course – you could argue that the two really aren’t that different.
Raison d’Etre: What exactly is being promoted here?
Everyone loves wikipedia. And Youtube[2]. And – if you’re reading this – possibly livejournal. None of these services would be as popular if many thousands of people in no way affiliated with them didn’t contribute. But the distinction is: why do these sites exist?
Wikipedia.org: Comprehensive repository of collectively accumulated factual information (some parts more factual than others).
Youtube.com: Home of some amateur video and a lot of copyright infringement. Youtube’s ultimate purpose, however, is to promote itself as a place that streams interesting video. Vids that secretly promote political agendas, while not against the terms of service, are slightly underhanded, wouldn’t you agree?
Livejournal: Created as a social-networking tool – like Facebook – but many people use it as a blogging tool. So if I use it to blog, and if by using it to blog, I attract other people who are also interesting in blogging, and they use it to blog, and this increases the revenue Sixapart (livejournal’s owners) uses to expand services available to bloggers…isn’t this logical?
Tokyopop: A publisher of English-language manga, both in-house (though their Rising Stars of Manga contest) and licensed from Japan, Korea, China(?), I think France, possibly also Thailand? Don’t quote me on that. Also, recently, they’ve been publishing novels-in-translation[3]. Blogging, forums, art galleries, photo galleries, and online popularity contests are completely irrelevant.
So what TOKYOPOP is doing, essentially, is asking users to enhance the value of their product in ways that do not actually enhance the value of their product -- which is, after all, printed books and magazines. Not even news or opinions like 1up! This strikes me as foul play; I'd rather see the money spent on better copy-editing and translation, even if it's not very much money.
But I’m exaggerating
TOKYOPOP isn’t a dark and sinister force of evil. It isn’t doing anything that hasn’t been done before, or that other interest groups aren’t doing right now. The reason TOKYOPOP doesn’t pay more people to work on its website is that it can’t afford to – manga is the one healthy section of the publishing industry, but the companies involved are still running on very slim margins, with many employees who are underpaid and overworked.
Really, I don’t know why I’m spending three single-spaced pages on this. I suppose it’s because I think there are people, on both sides – TOKYOPOP management and tokyopop.com members – who aren’t thinking about context.
One final note, of course I don’t think inviting volunteers to post cosplay photos on your company website in hopes of harnessing the power of myspace – or livejournal, or deviantart, or fandom in general -- is exactly like posting other people’s art or music to increase the size of your
Notes
[1] Actually, I do take issue with blog segments on major news channels. Interviewing an influential Lebonese blogger; surveying a number of blogs to determine the political climate in one section of the internet; talking about one or more blogs in pieces about blogging; all of these things are fine. Reading from a single blog in lieu of writing your own stories is not fine, it’s lazy. And it perverts the original meaning of ‘news’: discussion becomes news, actual events are increasingly of secondary importance.
[2] EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER SEEN ‘YU-GI-OH’ MUST WATCH THESE PARODIES RIGHT NOW: Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series. OMG. I died laughing!
[3] BLUmoon is one of TOKYOPOP’s novel re-writers. Shockingly – or maybe not, haha -- I recognize this person from fandom. She writes decent fanfiction. I find this reassuring and kind of want to know which titles she’s working on.