Netflix now streams Lee Chang-dong's entire catalogue, which is the rare streaming announcement where the thing for sale is worth the monthly fee. This is a filmmaker whose movies are slow, unhurried and built for the one night you actually put your phone down. The algorithm will now file them next to a reality show about people getting engaged through a wall. Both are available at the same price.

Read the licence, not the press kit. A full filmography is a shelf, and shelves are the product. Once a service holds all of a director's work, it holds the answer to "where can I watch that," and the answer is a login. Everyone who ever tried to find a good copy of an old festival film on a bad stream knows what that is worth. Everyone who loves cinema also knows what happens to a shelf when the quarterly numbers get tired.

Meanwhile, at JYP, someone in legal had a productive week. The company has five FANOMENON trademarks registered in Japan, all held under the company name. Not the fans' name. The company's.

Picture the meeting where this was a good idea. Somewhere in a conference room, the thing fans do for free at 2am, the voting, the streaming parties, the translated clips, got a filing number. The fans supply the energy, and the company supplies the paperwork that says whose energy it is.

Put the two stories side by side and you get the whole business in one story. One company is buying up the back catalogue so the past lives on its servers. The other is registering the word for the audience so the present does too. A director's life work and a fandom's favourite noun, both now sitting in somebody's asset column.

Nobody has said what FANOMENON will be used for in Japan. That is the fun part of a trademark. It does not need a plan, only a lock.

Enjoy the Lee Chang-dong marathon. Just do it before the shelf gets reshuffled, and do not call yourself a fan in a Japanese trademark filing.