[KineJapan] Copyright-free images

[Stephen Cremin]

This doesn't relate to academic publishing.

For Film Business Asia's print magazines, we're often told that we can't reproduce the high-resolution artwork online, even at low resolutions. That's generally for a film's promotional materials, like posters. Only Japanese sales companies demand that we include copyright information alongside stills. 

For reviewing films, we've had problems securing stills featuring the main actor, often when he belongs to Johnny & Associates. For example, try to find an image online from Miki Satoshi's IT'S ME, IT'S ME showing the face of Kamenashi Kazuya, despite him playing more than two dozen roles in the film. 

When ETERNAL 0 was the number one film for several months, it took a lot of time every week finding even medium-resolution stills of the film for our weekly box office reports. That means often scouring for images on Japanese websites where higher resolution images have been posted by mistake. 

There was talk in the discussion below about how book artwork is being designed with small images that can be reproduced from DVDs. The same is true of Japanese films' official websites, where images are deliberately displayed small and at low resolution to stop people "stealing" them. The insanity of it all. 

For one film review, we had an email demanding how we saw the film, where we got the still, and where we got an English title for the film. The sales company refused to provide an alternate still, confirm the English title, or even confirm whether there is an official English title. This was for a rave 8/10 review. 

(In that last case, correspondence was only with a Tokyo-based Westerner working at the sales company, who also asked us to remove critical comments in the review about another film-maker's work that the company did not represent. The directors had adapted different novels by the same author.) 

I won't say that we don't commission Japanese features because of these hassles. But it does make me pause when we include images of Japanese films in product listings guides, etc, because there'll be a crisis if the designer forgets to include the copyright notice and I don't pick that up in proofing. 

Generally, it's hard to get good quality stills of Japanese films unless one goes through film companies. That isn't the case for images of films from South Korea or China, where - call them crazy - but getting dozens of images out there for a film is considered good for promotion and making money. 

Much of this is about control. Aren't the studios, for example, selling packages of films to overseas distributors that are out of copyright? Tucker Films in Italy recently picked up a collection of older titles from one of the big studios, and I'm pretty sure some (if not all of them) are in the public domain. 

What would I like to see? 

Call me socialist, but I'd like to see a law that for a domestic film to be recognised legally with copyright protection outside Japan, it must deposit high-resolution stills, an English-subtitled screener and complete credit rolls to organisations that represent Japanese films such as UniJapan, etc. 

What you don't want to do is shift the power to just one organisation, because then it just shifts the centre of control. We saw that with Kawakita in the 1990s, when Japanese directors complained that their films weren't being shown to festival programmers because they were outside Kawakita's taste/agenda. 

Without that, I can't see there being any major changes, and the industry will continue on its stubborn journey to be positioned outside of world film history. The Cool Japan fund is a lot of money, but it won't have any real impact because the key problems of the Japanese film industry are not money-related. 

In Cannes, I heard from Japanese sales companies that they can get back half the cost of promoting their films, but the paperwork is so extensive that they often don't bother.  Among Asian films, Japanese titles did have the most market screenings, but I think that's more about not wanting to give out screeners. 

Sorry to take this thread in a different direction. And forgive the Anglo-centrism of English subtitles. 

Stephen Cremin 
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