The Great Anime Fansubbing Scare of '07 (Or not)

[ZodiacX]

Some of you may have picked up on this from various circles, but I'll sum it up here for the non fanatics who dont follow up intensly on this kind of thing.

First thing that happaned was Japan issued a formal complaint with the US, listing greviences including (among other, more important things), the unliscened distrubution of copywrited material online (Fansubs). It seems that many animation coompanies are getting tired of fansubbers, a change of the old "Hey, its free advertising and market research" stance. While this isnt ground breaking, it is important to know for the following, which scared many people.

Earillier this year, a Anime distrubutor in Singapore named "ODEX" launched a very high profile attack on fansub viewers. The first thing they did was attack the ISPs, bullying usernames and address out of them. Then several individuals, mostly teenagers, received legal notices stateing they were actually being SUED for DLing fansubbed anime liscened (in Singapore) by ODEX, some of them for upwards of $3,000 US Dollars (!!!)

Then it hit the US. Users of Comcast and another ISP (I forget the name) received lawyer notices from thier ISPs listing thier DLing of *unliscened* anime. The series in question, of which there were 4 or 5, were yet unliscened in the US at the time, although many of them all allready flagged by a specific company (ie: Gundam 00 everyone knows would go to Bandai, who owns Gundam in the US).

Then reports began drifting in from French users (in France) who were also receiving notices regarding those same series'. In the end, the whole thing ended up being a collosal mistake by an ODEX-employed attack group they paid to attack Singapore DLers, who overstepped thier bounds and began to go international. Still, it really ratteled a lot of people who, for a period of about 3 weeks, had NO idea what was going on, aside from lawsuits and laywer notices being fired seemingly at random regarding unrelated anime series'.

Think this is a general isolated "accidental" incident, or a precident of what may be to come for the future?

[TrunKated]

I wish all these companies who want to make money selling entertainment would rush their wares to market a little more efficiently. Hell, HIRE the damn subbers and SELL their output! Mad at people making clips of bits and pieces? Hire someone to do it and sell it! Think, use the medium, make money. I would love to log into hanna-barbara.com and buy all their shrinking clips. Why not?

[Snowglare]

My problems with anime:

1. Most of it is crap. This is not a criticism of the medium. Most of everything is crap. Games and most Western movies/cartoons have rental stores. Books, and to a lesser extent comics, have libraries. Try finding a free or inexpensive way to check out an anime series you know nothing about. If it's licensed, maybe. If not, you're SOL without fansubs. There's a smattering of anime available at my local libraries, less at any video store I've checked recently, and then the stuff that airs on CN, G4, IFC or another channel. The latter is dubbed into English, often using the same voice actors as every other dubbed anime, some of whom should only have the word "actor" used in reference to them in the loosest way. Not to mention all the editing, because wussy American audiences can't stand the sight of cartoon blood.

2. Bad endings. I've watched more than a few series the whole way through, liking, even loving them until suddenly, the writer gets stuck in a corner and pulls an ending out of his ass. If it were only bad... But no, it's so shitty it completely undermines the entire series, making me lose all interest in watching any episode ever again. Why I should buy five volumes of a series, only to find out with the sixth that I wasted all that time and money? If a movie sucks, you probably spent $20 or less, and you only blew two hours. American TV series can generally be had for $40 or less per season, and that's for stuff you've had a chance to watch legally if you pay for cable.

If there were some way to pay to get Japanese TV imported so that I could watch it for the same price natives pay, well, I wouldn't understand it. It would need to be subtitled, perhaps by a group of... let's call them "fans," in a timely manner. If anime distributors want to curb fansubbing, they might try offering some sort of cheap per-episode DL, so there's a legitimate alternative other than-

3. Licensed anime comes out at a snail's pace and is prohibitively expensive. $30 for a disc with four episodes on it is no bargain. Even with most series being 12-26 episodes, I'd generally have to spend $100+ to get the whole thing, or wait for every disc to come out, then wait a while longer for a cheaper series boxset to come out. Then wait until someone drops the price on that so it's actually reasonable. And that still leaves the problem of whether the damn thing's worth watching once, let alone multiple times.

If fansubbing were shut down (never happen), or I were given sufficient cause to worry about DLing subs, I would buy less anime. I bought none before, having no way of knowing what was good. Now I own some and plan to buy more, though I am of course incapable of buying anything that isn't licensed. Unless ODEX wants me to start purchasing bootleg DVD's. That would cut out the whole DLing business (yay, safety!) and I wouldn't be getting it for free (yay, profit!). Problem solved, eh?

[PrBlahBlahtson]

Originally Posted by Snowglare

3. Licensed anime comes out at a snail's pace and is prohibitively expensive. $30 for a disc with four episodes on it is no bargain. Even with most series being 12-26 episodes, I'd generally have to spend $100+ to get the whole thing, or wait for every disc to come out, then wait a while longer for a cheaper series boxset to come out. Then wait until someone drops the price on that so it's actually reasonable. And that still leaves the problem of whether the damn thing's worth watching once, let alone multiple times.

That begins and ends my reason for not buying anime in stores. If I felt that it was reasonably priced, that would be one thing, but $30 for four freaking episodes is just taking the money out of my pocket and slapping me with it. I'm not even sure what anime you're buying, because about the tmie I stopped it seemed like it was $30 for THREE episodes.

If they want to make their price a bit more reasonable, we'll talk. Until then, I consider their efforts to steal from me and excuse to steal from them. And somehow I doubt that you can break it down to actually show that they're barely breaking even with that pricing scheme.

- edit -
Yes, PrBlahBlahtson just advocated stealing. And it's the only category that I'll do it in, too.

[Snowglare]

Heh. Yeah, they used to be 3 eps per disc. Maybe still are sometimes. Either way it's crazy. The only excuse I can think of for prices being near that high is the licensing fee, and that would only apply with something like DBZ, Bleach, or Naruto. I was able to get a three-disc complete series box of Elfen Lied for $32 at Best Buy because most people either haven't heard of it or have and don't want it. Yet that was originally released as four separate discs (collecting a whopping thirteen episodes) at $30 a pop. With current MSRP, there's no way I'm buying anime that isn't on sale.

You think that's bad? Try looking up Blue Sub 6, or the Solbianca remake. One episode per disc, thirty bucks per disc. I remember being annoyed at how much it would cost to collect the entirety of Neon Genesis: Evangelion at four episodes a disc. I gave up completely when they started packing three episodes on instead, and kept using the shittiest masters imaginable. I had second generation VHS copies that looked better than some of those episodes.
Mind you, thirty bucks for a few episodes is nothing new. Buying anime on VHS for the same price set a precedent that they certainly weren't going to give up in the face of a new medium.

[resiz3d]

My biggest issue with licensed anime is how much of it gets "americanized". Apparently we're too stupid and xenophobic to learn about another culture.

I love fansubbers who leave in all the weird japanese eccentricities, put notes up at the top of the screen (or at the beginning/end of an episode)

And lord, don't get me started on how they raped One Piece.

[Snowglare]

Originally Posted by resiz3d

I love fansubbers who leave in all the weird japanese eccentricities, put notes up at the top of the screen (or at the beginning/end of an episode)

I like that, too, though it's sometimes annoying when they neglect to translate certain common words and phrases with no note as to what they mean. But the more I watch, the more words I pick up and can recognize by ear.

[CK01]

Originally Posted by Bieeanda

You think that's bad? Try looking up Blue Sub 6, or the Solbianca remake. One episode per disc, thirty bucks per disc.

You really don't want to know how bad the cost to content ratio for anime releases is in Japan then...

Nowdays a lot of the reason why fansub sprung up and was so vital to anime fandom outside of Japan are completely invalid. Anime and manga are all over the place at a price often far less than the the Japanese get it, releases gaps are tiny compared to the 90s and much more obscure shows are being released. People are really just so used to not having to pay than any amount more than 1 cent is too much.

I have no problem with people downloading fansubs, more power to you. But the nice moral reasons of the good old trading VHS tape days are long gone and the constant fact that fansubs are illegal and have always been illegal from day 1 is going to going to overshadow any other consideration.

Originally Posted by CK01

People are really just so used to not having to pay than any amount more than 1 cent is too much.

Pretty much.

Mind you, I was getting out of anime by around 2000, but I remember a lot of serious goofiness on the part of fansubbers in the late nineties. I even recall a few times that people were angry that Distributor X had licensed a show that Fansub Group Y was in the midst of hacking together from copies of the official series manga. That's saying nothing about the posturing and threat displays between rival groups that chose the same series to fansub.

I'm not going to say anything about dumbing down, or subtitles vs. dubs. Just because these companies don't do what the hard-core enthusiasts want them to do, doesn't make them stupid. Simply stated, the less investment a viewer has to make in a series (beyond money, of course), the more penetration it's going to achieve with the general public.

[PrBlahBlahtson]

Originally Posted by CK01

People are really just so used to not having to pay than any amount more than 1 cent is too much.

If I had to name a figure, than I'd have to say CD price range. If they could bring a 4 or even 3 episode DVD down to the $12-20 range, I could see that as reasonable. Until then, I'm quite familiar with out to forward ports on a router.

On that same vein, though, I'm not certain about some of the "fansub" groups. For example, KickAssAnime (KAA) just takes the english release, dumps the DVD and releases it as a "fansub." Lies.

[Shadow00000]

a 9 years old sued for US$2,000 ?

Let's go to the legalities, distribuiting copyrighted media without the rights to do so is illegal, either be downloads, DVD, VHS etc., selling for making profits is even worse legally. Copyrights are mostly International, though criminal laws are in the mayority of the cases applied for commercial copyright infringement. In any case look at YouTube and others broadcast websites, which do have money to be sued.

If the problem is the media distribution, why simply don't just make and release a script through Subtitles formats, though some formats are inferior there are at least 17 formats to choose, each one with different capacities, there has to be one which is in par to the actual needs.

I guess is the idea of acceptance, theorically RAWs are usually as easy to find as fansubs, doing something like that would just throw out most of the problems with the rest of the internet media, the standard Copyright Infringement. There are multiple sites which offers scripts or subtitles for movies, and they aren't bothered because they don't distribute copyrighted content, of course someone does...but not them, unless proven otherwise.