Answerman

What Do I Do With All These Bootleg DVDs?

Vee asks:

When I was much younger, my dad used to travel a lot to Hong Kong and Malaysia. I was big into anime then and so, he'd pick me up bootlegged anime DVDs and the occasional trinket here and there... That was about eight years ago and I now know how crappy piracy is in comparison to the official product, and thus support my own local anime DVD distributors. Now I have a pile of pirated box sets in my closet that I have no idea how to get rid of. I don't want to sell them on at a flea market or on eBay (especially since there's often crackdowns on people selling bootleg movies and such), no second hand store will be able to sell them, and the same goes for other places I could donate them... Since you're in the DVD/Blu-Ray business, what would be the best way to get rid of them, if there's a chance for them to be recycled or taken off of my hands?

You are far from the only one who ended up with a bunch of ill-advised purchases of bootleg anime DVDs. Once upon a time, people bought a ton of these. They were especially a problem in cities with large Chinese populations, like New York, San Francisco and Toronto. Each city's Chinatown would have a ton of CD/DVD/VCD shops, and most of them would have a decent selection of bootleg anime discs. On occasion these discs would be a godsend -- sometimes some really hard-to-find and out-of-print anime would find their way to these stores. But more often, you'd get stuck with a disc that, compared to a legit release, was pretty crappy.

Beyond being illegal and probably funding organized crime (I've heard lots of allegations that those bootleg shops are primarily backed by Chinese Triad groups), those discs, quite simply, suck. Without knowing what discs you bought, I would predict that many of them have video that came off of a VHS tape, and I'll bet most of them have garbled, near-incomprehensible translations that routinely can't even keep characters' names straight. Most of those discs don't have English dubs. Many had bootleg company logos burned into the video, and some are compressed so badly that the video looks like an early YouTube video. Giving them away is about as kind and touching of a gesture as giving someone a dead squirrel.

You might find some second-hand or charity shop that would take them, but that would really just be taking all of that disappointment and resentment in buying shoddy product, and paying it forward. I kinda-sorta-don't-really believe in karma, but if karma is actually a thing, donating bootleg DVDs to Goodwill is almost certainly bad karma. Because some unsuspecting shopper is going to buy them and bring them home and inevitably be really really disappointed. It's just a mean thing to do to someone.

So, if you can't sell them and you can't give them away, that leaves one option: disposal in the most environmentally friendly way possible. Some bootlegs come in standard DVD cases, which can be easily re-used, or bundled together and used as office supplies. Check with your local city recycling program -- many will take CDs and DVDs and their cases, though some areas may require you to separate the paper and the plastic.

If that's not an option, I'm afraid you're stuck with simply throwing them out. It's not the most ecologically friendly solution, but it sure beats setting fire to them.

Justin Sevakis is the founder of Anime News Network, and owner of the video production company MediaOCD. You can follow him on Twitter at @worldofcrap, and check out his bi-weekly column on real, strange stories from the anime business, Tales of the Industry.