Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity

Of course, Walt Disney had no monopoly on "Walt Disney creativity."Nor does America.The norm of free culture has, until recently, and except within totalitarian nations, been broadly exploited and quite universal.Consider, for example, a form of creativity that seems strange to many Americans but that is inescapable within Japanese culture: manga, or comics.The Japanese are fanatics about comics.Some 40 percent of publications are comics, and 30 percent of publication revenue derives from comics.They are everywhere in Japanese society, at every magazine stand, carried by a large proportion of commuters on Japan's extraordinary system of public transportation.Americans tend to look down upon this form of culture.That's an unattractive characteristic of ours.We're likely to misunderstand much about manga, because few of us have ever read anything close to the stories that these "graphic novels" tell.For the Japanese, manga cover every aspect of social life.For us, comics are "men in tights."And anyway, it's not as if the New York subways are filled with readers of Joyce or even Hemingway.People of different cultures distract themselves in different ways, the Japanese in this interestingly different way.But my purpose here is not to understand manga.It is to describe a variant on manga that from a lawyer's perspective is quite odd, but from a Disney perspective is quite familiar.This is the phenomenon of doujinshi.Doujinshi are also comics, but they are a kind of copycat comic.A rich ethic governs the creation of doujinshi.It is not doujinshi if it is just a copy; the artist must make a contribution to the art he copies, by transforming it either subtly or