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Saying this as a former translator for a scanlation group, I find it pathetic when people treat anime/manga as a human right, or try to justify their piracy by harping on about accessibility, or the classic "it's ok because I bought some stuff". Just admit it, you pirate it because it's easy and there are no consequences to you. I guarantee that's the number 1 reason why people pirate.

Lynx Raven Raide wrote:

SonicSP wrote: Copyright laws in most country are a sham anyways, given the absurdly amount of time (it should be more closer to patents) it last and how restrictive it is. If they don't want to reform the system, then so be it. To a degree I disagree. People should be paid for the content they have created, and more often than not piracy sites* make money off other people's work without returning much if at all. Where I do have an issue with copyright laws is when corporations get involved and milk some of that revenue off the creators by insisting on being included with the copyrights. To add to that sometimes it can be more restrictive where the creator might be fine with something in the distribution (digital, another country, etc.) where as the corporation wants to maintain a monopoly on the IP and blocks it. *I say sites, because generally stuff like IRC groups and non-ad-based torrent sites just either accept nothing or enough for hosting, so effectively free. Yes, they are still robbing the creator, but kind of a lesser of two evils situation

still evil though

In my opinion the emotional reaction of the Mangaka doesn't mean much. Plenty of people get irrationally mad about good things happening. I'm not calling piracy a good thing, I'm just saying that an emotional reaction is not an accurate measure of anything objective so it doesn't mean anything here.

But that said, Blanchimont does have a valid point in that many people first hear about a title via piracy and then go on to purchase the real deal. For example, I can name several shows which I was first introduced to via fansubs:
[...]
The real list is probably three times that long but that's all I can recall off the top of my head. I went on to purchase the entirety of all those series, on Japanese LD. So in my case, "piracy" via fansubs resulted in me spending several thousand dollars in total on those shows.

Of course the opposite happens too: I'm sure there are people out there who consume pirated media and don't spend a penny. But without good data we have no idea which of the two camps dominates, and that's something I'd really love to see, alas it's also something that's really hard to measure.

While scanlations and fansubs might be hated amongst publishers and creaters alike, I think it would be wrong to ignore to good sides of it - e.g. even if someone never paid a dime to read/watch the stuff they pirated, they will help spread the good word for the works they liked, and that can lead to others purchasing it, instead. Call it 'free advertisement', if you want.

If you get an artist's work for free and then show it to a friend while also showing him how to get it for free (not to mention introducing him to a massive community of people dedicated to getting that artist's work for free, sharing files and offering his new work the second it's available at no charge without his blessing), you are not creating a fan or helping the artist, you're adding another leech into the system.

AkumaChef wrote:

In my opinion the emotional reaction of the Mangaka doesn't mean much. Plenty of people get irrationally mad about good things happening. I'm not calling piracy a good thing, I'm just saying that an emotional reaction is not an accurate measure of anything objective so it doesn't mean anything here.

In what universe is "I draw art for money, and I'm mad because these people are enjoying my art without paying for it" not a perfectly rational reaction?

It's pretty safe to say that your case is very much an outlier. It's also safe to say that the opposite case is by far more prevalent. Back in the 2000s, even an average show could pull 50k-100k downloads from the fansubbing scene. If even 10% of those pirates bought the shows, companies like Geneon and Bandai might still be around today, but they're not. And we've heard from people in those companies that many shows struggled to break 4-digit sales, with an unlucky few barely breaking 3 digits. Judging by the list of 90s shows you've presented, you're also an outlier in terms of age; younger generations have only become less collection-minded over time.
View numbers on bootleg streaming sites easily reach into the hundreds of thousands or millions for airing anime (the same stuff that legal sites are streaming, so it's not a matter of pirates seeking out old/obscure content), but sales haven't gone up proportionately. Between that, the "too young / can't afford it" crowd, and the rise of "ideological" pirates -- those who refuse to pay because they feel legal services aren't "competing the right way" or some other grievance -- that's a whole lot of anime viewers in the "pirate everything, pay nothing" camp.

First, it's not "fansubs" anymore, it's generally "lower-quality re-encodes of official streams hosted on bootleg streaming sites." But where are all these mythical pirates who're getting something for free, but tell their friends to go pay for it? Isn't it more likely that they'd give their friends the hookup, and provide them the links/files to watch/read on the same illegal site? Then those friends tell their friends, and suddenly all that "free advertisement" is only benefiting the for-profit bootleggers.