Everyone in Japan, I'm sorry for Reggie's atrocious Japanese. It won't happen again.

Let's read it in Japanese.

I've switched the site over from a static site to one with Drupal and a whole bunch of stupid fun features like actual comments. Please note that I have a steady trigger finger and a banhammer sufficient to deal with the typical kinds of commenting fun that the uneducated 14 year old Family Guy loving masses consider reasonable discourse.

I just need to remind everyone about a little thing called reciprocity, mmkay? Or more specifically, how one's political convictions cannot be interpreted to mean 'everyone but me', and how we need to think about the implications of our actions.

So today the Twitter hashtag #GiveYuTheShenmueLicense started to get popular. Maybe it'll trend, and that'll probably be a good thing because I don't like it when companies ignore their own work (*coughcoughCAPCOMcoughcough*). But I also like to pour cold water on overly optimistic social marketing campaigns too, so first, a little lesson about copyright:

In terms of moving a work from one territory to another, there are several things that have to occur in order to do that. The first, being translation, needs to happen whenever two territories have different sets of languages to cater to. (The most extreme example in the first world is Japan to Western Europe, which requires at least five different translations from Japanese, an orphan language, to at least five completely different languages.) However, just because you've translated something does not mean it's done. There's also localization.

Grey-market importation is a very important right of consumers which allows them to purchase and view works not available in their own territory without the permission of the copyright owner. This is a good thing, especially when there's no real reason for a delay between countries. Many times regions get delayed or inferior releases of content simply because of arbitrary reasons put in place by the owner. This is most a concern in countries like Australia, which are treated like the rest of Asia despite not having any language issues which would preclude a more prompt release.

This is an open letter to the writers behind the Trichordist, mostly because, according to them, I apparantly want to urinate on starving artists' faces until they kill themselves because I think copyright terms are too long.