this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (8 children)

Why the fuck do they even do that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (7 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (6 children)

I get that Lemmy's (and Reddit's) favorite Bogeyman is capitalism, but the system of economics generally has absolutely nothing to do with region locking content.

Generally, content is region locked for reasons such as:

  • trademark is already taken in the destination country and the IP holder doesn't want to register a new name

  • traditional Japanese companies literally do not care about any market outside of Japan even if that market offers more potential profit

  • the author doesn't want to sell to the destination country

  • the destination country has content restrictions or censorship preventing sale of the work

  • the IP is licensed to a thirdy party but the third party refuses to make the content available in the destination country for whatever reason

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But the content creator generally has little to no sway in foreign licensing decisions, as the publisher ultimately owns that IP in its current form. E.g., When a creator writes a manga in a Kodansha-owned magazine, Kodansha then makes the foreign publishing and licensing decisions, independent typically of what the author may or may not want.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It depends. Sometimes the authors retain the rights either through a less restrictive publisher or through self-publishing and can set terms for their works, while other authors cannot.

In your example, Kodansha may own the right to publish the manga in their magazine but that doesn't always mean they own the IP for that manga. So if Kodansha decides to publish an issue of their magazine that has that manga in another country, they can, but they may need permission from the mangaka depending on how the rights were sorted. However, Kodansha may not own the IP rights and could therefore not release the individual manga. This is generally all stuff stipulated through contracts, and a particularly influential mangaka may get more leeway with a less restrictive contract over someone new or without a track record.

This gets even messier when multiple people or companies own partial rights to an IP. In those cases, usually one company just stops caring but refuse to sell their share, and the IP effectively dies forever.

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