Manga Authorship Crisis

What is Authorship?

 

According to Carolyn Guertin, author of Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art, authorship means the following things:

 

“a declaration of property and an economic claim”

~ Guertin p 1

 

A Pre-nineteenth century definition

“a collective exercise [which] Even in our contemporary world [includes] editors, publishers, critics, mentors, literary muses, and collaborators”

~ Guertin p 2

 

“According to Foucault, [authorship is] a principle of ownership – or possessive individualism – in the Eighteenth century with the arrival of copyright law”

 ~ Guertin p 2

 

Defines the author “as the ‘originator and therefore the owner of a special kind of commodity, the work’”

~ Authors and Owners by Mark Rose qtd. in Guertin p 3

 

The Most Comprehensive Definition

“a collaborative zone where it is possible to speak of resistance, appropriation, negotiation, contingency, translation, otherness, commonalities [and] allows ambiguity, complexity, and hybridity to play out within new aesthetics”

~ Guertin p 7

 

 

So what does this mean for manga?

Manga authorship is the aesthetically and conceptually unique identity a mangaka develops, through a collaborative effort with their editor(s) and publisher(s), which exercises their right to free expression without violating any copyright law.

 

Please proceed to the Publisher & Editor Issues page.