Quoting manga

[Aaron Gerow]

In a court decision that means a lot for people like me who write about 
manga, but which may also have implications for film, a Tokyo court 
yesterday ruled in favor of the author of a book criticizing _Gomanizumu 
sengen_ by Kobayashi Yoshinori and which printed images from the manga 
without permission.  

The book, by Uesugi Akira (?), a lecturer at Kansai University, entitled 
_Datsu gomanizumu sengen_, used images from the manga to critique 
Kobayashi's denial of the existence of comfort women, even though the 
text did not specifically discuss Kobayashi's use of images.  Kobayashi's 
side, arguing that a quotation of the text of the manga, not the images, 
was all that was sufficient, claimed that the printing of the images as 
well exceeded the limits of permissible quotation and was motivated by a 
commercial desire to feed off of Kobayashi's success.  Kobayashi asked 
for a court order to prohibit sales of the book and 26 million yen in 
damages.

The court argued that the conditions for permissible quotation in a 
critical work were: 1) that the division between the critical text and 
the text being quoted be clear; 2) that the quoted text be in a 
subsidiary relation to the quoting text.  The court said that as long as 
these two conditions were cleared, the quoting of the images from a manga 
were permissible.  Concurring with the defendant's argument that 
Kobayashi's manga cannot be criticized without citing both the image and 
the text of the manga, the court said that the image and the text in a 
manga are indivisible and thus that there is a need to include both in 
quotations.

Kobayashi's lawyers, fearing rampant use of "quotations" in subsequent 
publications, criticized the decision.  

I should note that scholars of manga like Natsume Fusanosuke (of the same 
Natsume family as Soseki) and Yomota Inuhiko, annoyed by the labor and 
problems of getting permission to use images from manga in their 
writings, have recently taken the stance of publishing without getting 
permission.  This decision supports their move and is a boost for manga 
scholarship, especially since there are many artists and productions 
which demand monetary payment for the use of even one frame of a manga.

It is not clear what implications this has for film scholarship, since 
manga and film are different arts.  But since the court upheld the 
long-held definition of quotation, I think we can safely say that the use 
of still frame images from a film in printed publications, or possibly 
even short moving images in a multimedia publication can easily be argued 
to fit the conditions for permissible quotation.  Note that the case of 
publicity stills is different: they can have their own copyright separate 
from that of the film.

Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
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