Thursday, December 12

SXSW /interactive/tech_report/recent_interviews/l_lessig There's this amazing culture of Doujinshi, which are amateur cartoons. The comics market is huge here, with comics making up something like 40 percent of published work. Doujinshi are copies of comics. People copy comics, change a character, develop a story line. And that's a huge market over here. There are annual conventions where 400,000 people show up to trade. It's a form of expression that would be illegal in the United States. It's clearly a derivative work; it's a violation of copyright. But it's not treated as illegal in Japan and so it has produced an extraordinary amount of creativity around creative work that would be a good investment for people in the US to watch. It shows how less control can actually mean more creativity.

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