Copyright infringement as user innovation

Yasuhiro Arai () and Shinya Kinukawa ()

Journal of Cultural Economics, 2014, vol. 38, issue 2, 144 pages

Abstract: Copyright holders of major manga and anime in Japan have been ignoring copyright infringement by $$d{\bar{o}}jinshi$$ (or doujinshi), a Japanese word referring to self-published works created predominately by amateurs. Many of $$d{\bar{o}}jinshi$$ are derivative works of popular anime or manga but are sold without official permissions from the copyright holders. Thus, it is highly possible that the activity of $$d{\bar{o}}jinshi$$ creators violates Article 28 of the Copyright Law of Japan, which states the rights of original authors in the situation of exploitation by derivative works. We demonstrate that ignoring copyright infringement by a derivative creator can be optimal for the copyright holder based on an economic model that incorporates both positive and negative externalities of derivative work. We also demonstrate that when unauthorized use of the copyrighted work is optimal for the copyright holder, it is also optimal for social welfare although the opposite is not necessarily true. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Keywords: Copyright; Derivative work; $$D{\bar{o}}jinshi$$; User innovation; K39; O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10824-013-9200-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jculte:v:38:y:2014:i:2:p:131-144

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10824/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10824-013-9200-3

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Cultural Economics is currently edited by Federico Etro and Douglas Noonan

More articles in Journal of Cultural Economics from Springer, The Association for Cultural Economics International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().