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December 8, 2005
Opening designs the old fashioned way
While secrecy is a good way to protect designs from pirates (see earlier posting), openness can be a way to make others work for you. The open-source movement is the classic example. The "anime" industry (Japanese-style animation) uses "pirates" (aka hard core fans) as both a screening mechanism and as a workforce. Here is how it works (according to Fortune):
The most dramatic example of [the industry's open] attitude is their tolerance for folks who have the potential to put them out of business: pirates trading anime online. And not just trading, but competing to see who can create the best subtitled version of a particular show.
This is open-source TV programming. "Fansubbers," as they're called, can spend more than a dozen hours collectively just to get a half-hour show ready for English speakers. The process is as orderly as an ant farm, with each fansubber having a specialized task. TV watchers in Japan start the process by recording an anime show and uploading it to the Net, typically a few hours after it airs. Bilingual fans around the world download the show and start writing out translations in text documents, which they post online or e-mail around. The first drafts have all kinds of mistakes - words are translated too literally or just wrong - and other translators make refinements. At this stage, self-appointed editors ask questions and make changes, then fan typesetters plug in the subtitles as well as the translations for words that pop up on signs or characters' T-shirts. Finally someone somewhere encodes the completed version - and here there's competition to see who can encode it with the fewest glitches and the best filters - and runs it through BitTorrent, a piece of software that allows large files to be downloaded quickly. Typically the fansubbers organize themselves in teams to make the process move more smoothly. All this is done for free.
Now comes the really interesting part -- US companies then license the best of these translations for distribution in the US. And the system works.
Part of the reason is that the fansubbers police themselves with a zero-tolerance policy that would impress Eliot Spitzer. The first rule of fansub club: Don't trade fansubs once a U.S. company licenses a show. . . .
The fansubbers themselves also scour the Net to make sure that despite all their hours spent translating, no copies of their work remain. "If you really like the show, you should go out to buy the DVD," says the fansubber who goes by the online handle Quarkboy. In real life, Quarkboy is Sam Pinansky, a 25-year-old physics Ph.D. student at University California at Santa Barbara who's researching string theory. Pinansky doesn't mind the ephemeral nature of what he does. All he cares about is making sure there's plenty of anime out there for him. "If you do buy the DVD, more shows like it will be licensed in the future. Our whole goal from the beginning was to get more people to like anime."
This works for marketing as well:
Fansubbers also act as free focus groups for the U.S. anime distributors. The more people rally to translate a show on the Internet, the more likely it is to do well as a commercial product.
Innovation through anti-secrecy.
Many paths to the same destination.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at December 8, 2005 9:12 AM
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Comments
Haha! That's me!
Posted by: Quarkboy at December 14, 2005 3:25 PM