Hello

Welcome! I’m Nele Noppe. I do research and resource-building on Japanese-language fanworks and their role in the cultural economy, to support efforts worldwide to improve the legal and economic position of all fanworks. This site contains some basic info and aggregates content I publish elsewhere. In the spirit of open notebook research, I try to make as much of my research progress and results public as-it-happens. Most of the visible action takes place in this notebook, on twitter, and on my blog.

The basics: my PhD research focuses on doujinshi, Japanese print fanworks that are often sold for money with the tacit approval of copyright holders. I frame doujinshi exchange as a hybrid economy that straddles fannish gift economies and commercial economies. By comparing these fanworks with other kinds of works that are exchanged in such “hybrid” economies, like open source software, I’m developing a vocabulary for explaining fanworks as a sort of “open source cultural goods” that fit in very well with many other “open” movements today. Open source is already a well-known and well-understood mechanism for “non-professionals” to create valuable things for the sake of fun and community instead of for profit, while still interacting in a mutually beneficial way with the commercial economy as well. I’m convinced that framing fanworks as part of an “open” movement should be very helpful in explaining (also to non-fannish open culture activists, policymakers, and so on) what role fanworks play in the broader cultural economy.