ABSTRACT
In Chapters 1 and 2, I provided an overall picture of copyright discourse, illustrating the principles and the problems behind its cultural control. I also have pointed out that copyright’s simple ethics betrays its deep roots in the capitalist system, which makes copyright unapproachable as an ethical system to understand contemporary culture. Despite its seemingly irrefutable principle of “thou shalt not steal,” copyright is in fact an extremely complex set of laws, discouraging us from critically and experientially engaging with the practices and meanings of different cultural copyings. A major aim of the book is to demonstrate the distance between this legal regime and the actual cultural scenes, and that there are still many forms of copying actually taking place with which copyright fails to come to terms. Beginning with this chapter, I contextualize copyright’s philosophy and implications in actual instances of copying that take place in cinema. And I will take leave of the legal vocabularies and arguments and concentrate on the film culture. In this chapter I examine a common marketing and artistic practice of recent Asian films – the mutual copying of action and violence. I want to illustrate how a careful examination of this practice of copying could cast new light on our reading of copyright and allow us to re-examine the meanings of authorship and creativity. I am specifically interested in the theme and form of violence because it tests the limit of the idea-expression dichotomy – is violence an idea or an expression? The production and reception of violence also demonstrates some predicaments of transnational popular culture in which copyright is developed. I hope that this chapter can provide a unique perspective from which to understand how globalization engenders a unique inter-Asian cinema permeated with violence, and how this violence can in turn help us re-examine the core principles, and their failures, of copyright’s control.
