When Drama Fever Strikes

There’s a lot more to the Korean drama story than plot twists, broody shower scenes, and chaebols who sweep poor, hardworking girls off their feet. And although this is a blog about Kdrama, the shows themselves aren’t the only things I’m interested in discussing here: There’s also the online fandom that has grown up around them.

Watching Korean drama is a mostly solitary pursuit for me (in spite of my best attempts, I have yet to hook anyone I know in real life). But the more involved I become in the dramaweb, the more I realize that my feelings about the shows I watch are influenced by other people. Take Flower Boy Next Door—I was utterly swept up in the cycle of checking Couch Kimchi for episode stills, browsing Koala’s Playground for early reviews, poring over insanely detailed analysis on Tumblr, and then reading Dramabeans’ long, insightful recaps. Even the Dok Mis among us are never really alone when it comes to Kdrama.

More than any other website I visit (or maintain, even), Dramabeans is the hub of my online drama life. For me at least, it’s more than just another blog—it’s the spine of the Kdrama community. If I hadn’t found it after stumbling across Boys over Flowers on Netflix, I would have shrugged my shoulders and carried on with life, having learned only that Kdrama existed in the world, and that it might be worth watching more.

But the mere existence of a big, constantly updated site like Dramabeans is what brought me into the fold: it legitimized and normalized my preoccupation with Kdrama. Even more than a year later, it’s still my browser’s home page. And if I have time to visit only one website a day, Dramabeans is the one I choose. It’s expansive enough to be complete and informative, but not so expansive that trying to keep up with it would literally be fatal. (Unlike, say, the fun but insanely active kdrama tag on Tumblr.) It tells me what I need to know in the most entertaining way possible, through the voices of people who are smart and funny and insightful about not only Korean culture, but also about so many other things I love—including (but not limited to) storytelling, television, and celebrity.

So like a lot of other Kdrama fans, my hackles went up when I visited Dramabeans on Thursday morning to find a post about legal threats made against the site. Written by Javabeans, the blog’s founder, it read:

Okay, I have to get serious for a moment to address an issue that has just come to our attention. Dramabeans has had its very first DCMA takedown notice delivered, and sadly this is not a “Baby’s first milestone” sort of celebratory event. The notice came with scary legal lingo and accompanying threats to discontinue our hosting service if we don’t comply with the demands to take down our Level 7 Civil Service recaps.

Throughout the post, it was easy to see that she was really upset. And who could blame her? As she and Girlfriday pointed out in one of their amusing podcasts, Dramabeans has been around since 2007. If it were an actual baby (instead of just the metaphorical kind), it would be starting first grade this year. It’s giant and delightfully sprawling, and a lot of people have clearly spent huge chunks of their lives making it wonderful. But when big, well-funded organizations sic lawyers on the average fan, there’s no recourse: You just have to do what they say. The alternative involves a probable shutdown of your site and lots of legal fees.

As a newbie drama watcher, it’s actually hard to
imagine what life was like before Drama Fever was around.

An extra bit of salt in the wound was the source of the threat: Drama Fever, a site that Dramabeans has supported since its inception. I’ve written about Drama Fever a lot here, and have been a premium member since October 2011. During that time, I’ve certainly seen evidence supporting the belief that Drama Fever really might be clueless enough to bite the hand that feeds it: last fall, it spearheaded a witch hunt that resulted in a number of fan-run subbing and streaming sites being removed from the Internet. (This included both My Soju and DramaTic, sites I had long appreciated. DramaTic is back, without his subtitle offerings, in the form of The Vault of Doom. To the best of my knowledge My Soju has never reappeared.)

It goes without saying that dramaweb exploded with rage at the news about Dramabeans, and I’d wager that protests immediately began pouring into Drama Fever’s email. (You can actually read a number of these notes of protest in the Dramabeans comments; they tend to be thoughtful, balanced, and kind, which is pretty rad.)

Within a few hours of the Dramabeans post going up, Drama Fever weighed in on their own blog: 

It has come to our attention that one of the third parties we use to protect our licensed content inadvertently caused problems for our friends at Dramabeans. We’re very sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused. 

We have taken the necessary steps to reverse any claims made and correct this issue. We hope to continue to have an amiable relationship with Dramabeans, which provides a valuable voice in the community of Korean drama fans.

It’s all well and good that Drama Fever apologized, although I don’t think they had much of a choice; their blog entry is essentially a plea for Dramabeans to call off their fans. When similar charges had been lodged against My Soju and Mr. X’s blog, the fan response was too slow and decentralized to save them. But Dramabeans is too beloved and too obvious a target. (And let’s not forget that they probably haven’t even violated copyright.) 

I’m not sure that forgiveness is in order just because Drama Fever tried to take back their threat and said that they weren’t even involved in the first place. When you’re running a business, you don’t get to claim ignorance and blame things on a third party—the things people do on your behalf are still your responsibility. If Drama Fever really didn’t know this was going to happen, they should have been monitoring their representatives much, much more closely.

I do think it’s unlikely that Drama Fever really meant to hurt Dramabeans, though. The two sites are closely related: Ever since Drama Fever’s website redesign, they’ve been running links to Dramabeans recaps on all their show pages. (See below for a trippy example—the Dramabeans post about Drama Fever’s legal threats actually appeared on Drama Fever’s Level 7 Civil Servant page.) They’ve also featured frequent Dramabeans poster gummimochi on their podcast, and once upon a time purportedly offered special discounts to Dramabeans readers. Drama Fever is by no means a perfect organization, but they’re smart enough to realize that working with the fans is usually more effective than working against them. (I’ve benefitted from this fact myself—as one of the winners of a review contest held on Drama Fever’s blog last summer, I got a significant break on my annual membership fee this year.)

Dramabeans updates on Drama Fever’s “Level 7 Civil Servant” series page.
Hmm...wonder why that image is missing?

So as traumatic as this whole experience may have been for everyone involved, Drambeans was probably always safe. But could this be the beginning of the end for it—and all the other recappers out there?

A quick search of the watchdog website Chilling Effects reveals five pages of Drama Fever-related copyright claims against other websites. As much as we might hate to admit it, most of these cases are probably legitimate: the Internet if full of sites that genuinely infringe on Drama Fever’s legal rights. They either distribute video illegally or provide soft subs, which amount to unauthorized translations of copyrighted works.

(As a point of clarification: even if Drama Fever has the right to cause trouble for sites like My Soju and Mr. X’s blog, I think it’s foolish of them to actually do it. The real way to dominate your field is to be the best player on it, not alienate people who might be your supporters.)  

But all Dramabeans did was post screen grabs as part of episode recaps, not stream video or provide word-for-word translations. It’s hard to believe that this would truly be legally problematic. I’m no lawyer, but I do know that United States law allows for use of copyrighted material in some instances; as other Dramabeans supporters have pointed out, it’s called fair use. From the Copyright Office’s website:

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair.

• The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
• The nature of the copyrighted work
• The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
• The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work 

The distinction between what is fair use and what is infringement in a particular case will not always be clear or easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.”

Recapping pretty clearly fits into the acceptable realms of criticism, comment, and scholarship. I worry about the rest of this information, though: as an ad-supported Website, Dramabeans is using the material in a “commercial nature.” And between the quotations and images in any typical recap, their posts really do borrow substantially from copyrighted material. 

Someone who doesn’t understand the dramaweb could even argue that recaps would hurt the “potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work.” What do recaps exist for, if not to make it unnecessary to actually watch the show? Of course, we know better—recaps exist to help us appreciate the shows. They explain things we might not understand on our own, as international viewers who rely on subtitles. They allow us to squee en masse at broody shower scenes. And they draw our attention to series we might have missed. As I’ve said over and over again, Drama Fever should thank their lucky stars that there are people out here interested enough in their product to write and read recaps.

I’m unsure if Drama Fever really could have won a court case against Dramabeans. Ultimately, they didn’t even need to—all they have to do to get their way is to scare us into submission with the occasional threat against something we love.

This particular case had a reasonably happy ending (and inspired some deeply amusing fan art, thanks to Dramabeans’ request for stick figure images for use in future recaps of Level 7 Civil Servant). It still made me contemplate life without Drama Fever, though. Is the value of not supporting a suspect organization worth losing the shows I love so much? I’m not sure, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Drama Fever is the Walmart of the dramaweb: We may not like its business practices, but it’s awfully hard to say no to what it offers.

(P.S.: I swear I’ll stop with all these serious, tl;dr posts next week. I just hate to miss writing about such an important moment in the history of drama fandom, even if everyone else is writing about the same thing.)