Dark Energy: What Fansubs Reveal about the Copyright Wars
2010; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2152-6648
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Rights Management and Security
ResumoCan fans who break the law through online piracy ultimately help legitimate markets? Or, to put it another way, is there a market-oriented analog to civil disobedience such that breaking the law should viewed as an ethical means to improve the responsiveness of cultural industries? For most people in the industry, any unauthorized sharing of copyrighted material is piracy pure and simple. It constitutes stealing the fruits of other peoples labor. For others, however, the worlds of media sharing, which include not only fansubs but scanlations, anime music videos, ddjinshi (fanzines), slash fiction, and more, all evoke complex debates about what's proper and what's property. Focusing on the example of fansubs, I argue that a useful way to reframe the debates about copyright and digital technology is to focus on the energy that drives the circulation of media and the devotion of fans, something I propose calling energy. From a dark energy perspective, we can see some of the limitations of focusing on property and law as a guide to progress, and perceive instead the ways value depends on community as much as on markets. Fansubs offer an arena to explore these issues, as well as broader questions of the shape of capitalism, media, and fandom in a digital age.
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