[KineJapan] Copyright-free images

Tue Sep 23 11:50:58 EDT 2014

Everything I know about Japanese copyright law I learnt on this mailing list over the past 15 years.  

Film Business Asia is legally established in Hong Kong, and other than the one time we published a magazine in Japan, I don't feel the need to follow Japan's copyright laws. But we need to pay attention to the concerns of Japanese film companies for business reasons. For example, TBS gave me huge (100MB+) stills of LUPIN THE THIRD for our Cannes magazine, but I still asked permission to reproduce one image online. A lot of it comes down to corporate culture and the person currently handling international sales. Now is a great time to work with Nikkatsu, for example, but that may not be the case in five years time.  

On the socialist question.... The most organised film industry in Asia is that of South Korea, which at one time was backing the Korean Film Council with US$40m of annual funding. That was a three year contract about a decade ago; I don't know it's current funding level, but it must be at least half that. But it also manages a (non-annual) US$430 film development fund, half from the government, half from a 3% tax on ticket sales.  

Here are a handful of related/interesting things that KOFIC (or KoFiC) does:  

+ It set up a national box office system. Numbers are provided throughout the day in real time to the local film industry and nightly on a publicly accessible website (in Korean only). Cinemas that complied with updating their box office systems to provide timely data received tax deductions. (Note that KOFIC isn't quite a government agency, but it had this support.) Nationwide coverage is at around 99% now, and if there are a handful of stragglers, they aren't key cinemas. If I was in charge of the US$300m Cool Japan fund, I'd give US$1m a year to Tokyo-based Kogyo Tsushin to open up its current and historical data. I don't know how you can have a professional film industry without timely box office data. The last time I talked to Kogyo Tsushin, they were providing daily numbers for a fee but only by mail delivery on printed paper, not by fax or email. I think there's an understanding in Japan that magazines/websites can publish weekend/weekly numbers but not in full and that they must not use the addition button on their calculators to work out total box office so far.  

+ Sales companies must report all foreign sales by film by country to KOFIC, on the agreement that the information will only ever be published in aggregate form. This doesn't just include sales prices for films, but also the overages they are paid when the film makes money down the road. (Hong Kong sales companies informally share these numbers between themselves; I suspect Japanese companies do also.) It's somewhat frustrating that KOFIC don't break the figures down more, because the US sale of SNOWPIERCER has distorted last year's numbers. But one can see how sales to China are going up each year, what percentage of income is from minimum guarantees or overages, how much the VoD market is growing. While this information is primarily published in Korean only, for Cannes this year KOFIC published a 57-page English-language version of their statistics handbook with numbers for 2013. The book hasn't been posted as a PDF to my knowledge - a common practice at KOFIC - but they have published a condensed version with the cover image. I guess they were okay with Cannes market guests picking up copies at their pavilion booth, but not with making it too public:  
http://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/jsp/news/kofic_news.jsp?blbdComCd=601007&seq=1622&mode=VIEW

+ It set up a DVD viewing room for festivals. Although KOFIC recently relocated to Busan, they still have a Seoul office where festival programmers can watch screeners. I don't know if there are subsidies for English subtitles, but I would estimate that somewhere between 95-99% of Korean films are subtitled. In the past 15 years, there are very few examples of Korean-language narrative feature films on DVDs that don't have English subtitles. In Korea, domestic films do not screen with English subtitles in cinemas, except at special screenings, as in Japan. I don't know if sales companies are required to submit their screeners to KOFIC, but I can't imagine a situation of one refusing to send them the DVDs of their lineup. A lot of that comes down to the trust built up between KOFIC and the industry, and how much they are intertwined throughout the year. I don't know to what degree sales companies restrict which films are shown to festival programmers; I suspect they are some restrictions for forthcoming titles but not for films that have already had a public screening anywhere in the world. Note that there is a law for half-a-century that film producers must submit a print of their film to the Korean Film Archive, a separate entity to KOFIC, which is why they have a fairly comprehensive collection. Like any Asian archive, it can be difficult to get access if you're not "famous" from an American/European institute, but it's more accessible than the NFC.  

Like Japan and elsewhere in Asia, at least among the larger scale film industries, Korean audiences are watching more local films and less foreign films. And I see signs that Korean sales companies are cutting back on their international promotion, but we'll have a clearer idea after a few more markets. But the outward-facing nationalism of Korea is quite distinct from the inward-facing nationalism of Japan. I don't think Korean film companies need much encouragement to subtitle their films in English, even if/when the DVD market collapses completely. Note that in Beijing and Shanghai, most local films have English subtitles in the cinema, on DVD and on VoD. I don't think that would be possible in South Korea and Japan for cultural reasons: audiences would reject it. In China, English subtitles are increasingly considered something that boosts a film's domestic box office. The argument that I've pushed - and am hearing repeated back to me more and more - is that audiences perceive the film is better quality if it has English subtitles. It has parallels with the trend to put English-language voiceovers on Taiwan film trailers a decade ago, which played a part in the mid-2000s domestic success of local films (that also saw the wider introduction of English subtitles).  

Of course, one can never just follow the Korean example, because Korean politicians/bureaucrats/etc are unique. What works as an agreed industry practise in South Korea could only work in Japan as a policy change. Even then it would need someone heading an organisation like UniJapan to enforce these policies, and not just let them be ignored. That happened in the Philippines, where the Film Development Council of the Philippines' Briccio Santos used long-standing laws to force companies and individuals to hand over films against their will for the forthcoming archive, etc. But for a maverick like that to emerge in Japan, s/he needs to be supported by policy to fight through the stagnation. In Japan, the exhibitors and agencies are too powerful and are holding back the Japanese film industry, to the great frustration of film producers and sales agencies. But I also think that the Japanese media must take a large share of the blame. Press should refuse to promote films that don't give them access to stills, that ask them not to photograph the third guy from the left at a press conference, etc. In the past twelve years, I've lived in countries with a very competitive press - Taipei and Beijing - who would be fired if they obeyed such instructions. Japan forgot that films, audiences and film culture come first.  

Stephen  

On 23 Sep 2014 17:01:50, Mark Roberts <mroberts37 at mail-central.com> wrote:  
Hi Stephen,  

I appreciate hearing about your experiences. True, it’s not directly about academic publishing, but it gets back to the same root cause: the policies and attitudes of rights holders in Japan.  

Out of curiosity, do you know if there are any laws in Japan that support these policies against the reproduction of high-resolution artwork? Where does this come from?  

I am curious because the last time I had to deal with this whole issue, it started when the typesetter claimed we did not have the right to print full-sized DVD stills, and that we “had" to reduce them to 30% size. Again, this is for the low end of academic publishing, so we are not even talking about something as posh as a magazine format. For the publication I was doing, “full-sized” meant 10.5 cm wide on matte-finish paper. The first galleys came back from the typesetter with tiny thumbnail-sized images, which I would have been embarrassed to send to the authors for proofreading, let alone to publish.   

Imagine the author is discussing a wide-screen landscape shot, both author and editor took pains to get the best resolution possible from a DVD, and then the proofs come back with dinky 2 cm tall images. The captions were dialled down to a 6 point typeface so they would fit. The people in the images were a few mm tall. I asked the typesetter what this was all about but he never came back with any explanation based on law. It was claimed that this was some kind of “industry practice” but it seemed totally arbitrary. I was finally able to overrule this, but now, two years later, it may be necessary to go through the whole discussion again.  

Next, I am curious to hear more about your “socialist” idea for copyright protection outside of Japan. Do such policies exist in other countries, either formally or informally? Any that you cover in Film Business Asia? Do other East Asian countries have organisations that provide what you describe to industry media and/or researchers?  

Thanks,  

Mark  

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