Digital Culture in Transition: Open source culture and the cult of Hatsune Miku
alexleavitt [ at ]gmail [dot] com
Alex Leavitt
Toyota commercial that partners with Cryptone and this character vocal series. The first is Hastune Miku and a few others. They upgraded and released new audio for them. Miku uses a voice actress. The vocaloid franchise series are proprietary software. The commercial videos boosted her popularity. The vocaloid software creates actual music rather than just a monotonous voice.
What does it mean to have open source culture, social media and cultural salience [how does something become so important or a celebrity]. Open source is hybrid economies – according to Lessing. Software that is being shared by people because there it is not proprietary.
Piapro character license: it is proprietary but the culture surrounding it is free bec it uses GPL. It is derivative work. In Japan there is no fair-use clause as there is in US. This Piapro is derivative and non-commercial. They want you to use their product and keep remixing it and link it, but go to our website and link to it. GPL has the four freedoms – but proprietary software of course is against it. But the culture that forms around the Cryptone characters is free, but they still have it as proprietary. It is a concept that is popular in Japan. It is allowed by the culture. You can do all this stuff as long as you are not using it to make too much money. They have things you cannot do at all, but some are semi-allowed: if you’re doing it for corporate, talk to us.
Social media: Nico nico douga is a video site but transferred to youtube by fans mostly for a global audience.