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Old Apr 10, 2010, 12:39 PM
Cedille Cedille is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: Tokyo
Posts: 2,026
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I'd rather appreciate that we offer a solid definition of what "doujin" and "indies" are, as I've felt the albums we intend to cover with those types on VGMdb are not exactly the same as we do in Eastern.

With "doujin", I think this borrowed word is designed to cover the albums that have copyright-infringing materials on this database, but in Eastern it means pretty much anything published from doujin circles or through the doujin activity so even if it only contains so called Original Works or they pay a licensing fee to JASRAC or to respective copyright-holders, it's still seen as doujin. For instance, now doujin turns into the publisher type, we can see this album as doujin because it's published by a doujin circle, despite no association with specific products.

With "indies", I think in the broadest terms it means any publisher that isn't a large but still professional enough not to be seen as doujin such as SuperSweep, Basiscape Record, Cave, lots of Hentai labels but I think we normally consider those labels mentioned as "Commercial".

The reason why I'm not so sure about merging "Independent" and "Doujin/Fanmade" publisher types back into "Doujin/Indie" is not only because what "Indie" represents isn't so clear but also because all of what little we've classified as "Independent" so far are something we previously considered as "Official" (now "Commercial"), and if the abolishment of "Independent" means we have to set them back to Official, I don't think we need to create "Doujin/Indie" to cover them.
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