(the) Road to the Deep East

Niwango, which administrates the most famous Japanse broadcasting website Niconico douga, announced that it will delete all derivative works including fan movies called 'MAD movies' from Niconico douga today on July 2nd.

According to Niwango, Niango had been talking with some Japanes animation related associations, The Association of Japanese Animations(AJA), Japan Video Software Association(JVA), and Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (MPPA) over the problem of copyright infringement. And Niwango finally promised three associations to delete all illegal clips including anime MAD movies.

AJA is an association for animation production which major labels such as Disney, Kadokawa , Studio GHIBLI. belongs to. It means now anime fans can't post fan movies based on Suzumiya Haruhi series or Howl's moving castle. .

At this point, this decision just influences the clips posted on Niconico douga, but it will be a matter of time that this banning spreads to other video sharing websites like youtube or dailymotion.

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I'm not interested in anime at all and don't watch them all, so personally, this news is not shocking at all. However, for Japanese otaku industry, this news must be a huge earthquake. This decision means anime industry began to regard fan fiction as an illegal product.

Since the invention of video tape, anime fans had been enjoying creating these fan movies privately. After some video sharing website started, the number of MAD movie creaters shot up until even non-anime otaku people like me can recognize the existence of them.

But now, anime industry is going to forbid all this kind of fan movies.
example of MAD movie(it seems it was not made by Japanese, though.)


It sounds to me a little strange. As many anime fans knows, in Japan, there is a huge market of derivative works of anime or game products, called dojinshi, and nearly one million of fans gather at Comic Market and trade them twice a year, and it is said some popular dojinshi creators earn 10 million yens in a year.

Meanwhile, nobody earns from fan movies posted in niconico or youtube. While anime industry is overlooking commercial dojinshi sellers regarding them fan activitists, it bans volunteer mad movies. I can't understand, but they may be thinking these mad movies can become a beginning of illegal downloads.

Will this strategy work and can they stop illegal uploads and downloads of original works? I don't think so. Far from it, I bet some mad movie fans will have hostile feeling against anime company, and won't buy the products again. I think anime industry should have found a symbiotic relationship with creativity of anime otakus somehow, just like Star Wars and its fans.