When Piracy Becomes Promotion

How unauthorized copying made Japanese animation profitable in the United States.

Henry Jenkins from the December 2006 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

/span> /p> p> span class="c1">The Japanese media companies’ tolerance of these efforts is consistent with their treatment of fan communities at home. The underground sale of fan-made comics (known as dojinshi ), often highly derivative of the commercial product, occurs on a massive scale in Japan, with some comics markets attracting 150,000 visitors per day. Rarely taking legal action, the commercial producers sponsor such events, using them to publicize their releases, recruit new talent, and monitor shifts in audience tastes. In any case, they fear the wrath of their consumers if they take action against such a well-entrenched cultural practice—and if they did pursue infringers, the legal penalties in Japan are relatively light. o:p> /o:p> /span> /p>

Many media companies in the U.S. would have regarded all this underground circulation as piracy and shut it down before it reached critical mass. Instead, we have moved from a world where Speed Racer operated on the fringes to one where Pokémon is better known in the United States than many of its American counterparts.

Henry Jenkins is director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and author of Convergence Culture (NYU Press), from which this article was adapted. He would like to acknowledge the help of MIT alumnus Sean Leonard, whose research on fansubbing has appeared in the International Journal of Cultural Studies and The UCLA Entertainment Law Review.

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