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Japan seeks international coordination to thwart online manga, anime piracy
(english.kyodonews.net)
this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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Because capitalism
I get that Lemmy's (and Reddit's) favorite Bogeyman is capitalism, but the system of economics generally has absolutely nothing to do with region locking content.
Generally, content is region locked for reasons such as:
trademark is already taken in the destination country and the IP holder doesn't want to register a new name
traditional Japanese companies literally do not care about any market outside of Japan even if that market offers more potential profit
the author doesn't want to sell to the destination country
the destination country has content restrictions or censorship preventing sale of the work
the IP is licensed to a thirdy party but the third party refuses to make the content available in the destination country for whatever reason
But the content creator generally has little to no sway in foreign licensing decisions, as the publisher ultimately owns that IP in its current form. E.g., When a creator writes a manga in a Kodansha-owned magazine, Kodansha then makes the foreign publishing and licensing decisions, independent typically of what the author may or may not want.
It depends. Sometimes the authors retain the rights either through a less restrictive publisher or through self-publishing and can set terms for their works, while other authors cannot.
In your example, Kodansha may own the right to publish the manga in their magazine but that doesn't always mean they own the IP for that manga. So if Kodansha decides to publish an issue of their magazine that has that manga in another country, they can, but they may need permission from the mangaka depending on how the rights were sorted. However, Kodansha may not own the IP rights and could therefore not release the individual manga. This is generally all stuff stipulated through contracts, and a particularly influential mangaka may get more leeway with a less restrictive contract over someone new or without a track record.
This gets even messier when multiple people or companies own partial rights to an IP. In those cases, usually one company just stops caring but refuse to sell their share, and the IP effectively dies forever.
My argument is that companies are offering money for the exclusive license to a work for a given region (i.e. licenses are sold on a geographic basis, or linguistic, in some cases), and thus the result is that there doesn't exist a single distributor globally.
There cannot be one single global distributor. They would need too much specific knowledge of trademark and copyright laws for every destination country, among others, in order to do that. Plus that would be a distribution monopoly, which in many Western countries is illegal.
It's not a distribution monopoly because the licensing firms then sell through other avenues (like how, for example, Seven Seas sell their books through Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, etc.). I'm notably omitting Yen Press and J-Novel Club in this discussion because they're wholly owned by Kadokawa (the latter I don't believe should have been permitted by the FTC, but what do I know).
I don't see how trademark and copyright law would be a hindrance. Any multinational company and any company with global markets has to gain this expertise, and they contract lawyers to do so.
Steam can do it. Bandcamp can do it. Netflix can do it. Amazon can do it. What is supposed to be so different for manga or anime?