Forum - View topicNEWS: Funimation Subpoenas Cloud Hosting Platform Over Copyright Infringement of One Piece Anime
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Suena
Posts: 289 |
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[quote="Revolutionary"]
I'm pretty sure that Funimation's simulcasts were 100% free at the beginning? At least from what I remember. Looking up when they introduced the paid tier....it looks like they didn't start that until 2011. So at the beginning, there was no "paying" for anything (at least not for simulcasts hosted on their site). |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Well, when fans are at a convention, they can get mentally caught up in the moment and blurt out things their mental filter would block out normally. No excuse for them to do so, of course, or to openly mock professionals in their face. I do honestly wonder what those people thought the Crunchyroll people would do. Gasp in horror? Praise them for their supposed good taste? Provoke the Crunchyroll people to try to throttle them?
There's also a cousin of buyer's remorse here: They know what they're doing is morally wrong, so they try to justify their own choices. That is, when you see these people making seemingly nitpicky reasons for not wanting to use official services even when there is no real problem, they're not trying to persuade anyone except themselves. Of course, there is also the group that wants the English localization business to fail because they have a grudge against them of sorts, but I think that group is much smaller (though they can be quite vocal).
Nah, I wouldn't put it above those people, if they got the opportunity to do so.
I can see it now: Q: If you were the CEO of FUNimation, what are your plans for the company? A: Me, I would demolish the company, so the torrenters and pirates can reclaim back their shows! Power to the people and down with The Man! Anime should be free!
The One Piece fandom is split (though not sure if it's half-and-half or if one side is significantly bigger than the other) between the scanlation/fansub fans that want to have all these Japanese-sounding words and between the official translation/actual translating fans who translate the terms. The One Piece Podcast is firmly in the latter, and the former don't really think very highly of them or the people who agree with them. Perpetuating this mess is the fact that the curators of the One Piece Wikia are in the former group. (It used to be that any differences in translating or interpreting names was labeled under "Official Translation/Dub Issues," as if any disagreement with the Nakama-Shichibukai-Yonkou-GomuGomuNoMi side is automatically a problem.) At this point, I feel like the people who openly state they're pirating anime, and do so with an attitude that they'll do that even if the official releases and streams are perfect, are basically doing so as identification within a group. Personally, whenever there is a conflict between ideologies, there is always truth on both sides--otherwise, there wouldn't be a lot of people taking those sides. If you see someone defending absolutely everything on their side while dismissing absolutely everything on the other side, and you know they're not a newcomer, it's an in-group out-group self-identification. Also, anyone who says "Just do _______" like as if it's as easy as the flick of a switch has never worked in that field. It reminded me of the Goat Simulator MMO announcement, which was depicted as some programmers clicking on "Add MMO Support" on their engines and letting the engine construct everything in like 5 seconds.
I could give it a shot: Chopping off the heads would be shutting these down, and once enough of them are down, the cauterization is passing new legislation that makes it harder for these sites to remain financially profitable. Something else to keep in mind is that Heracles was not able to kill the Hydra on his own and needed his brother's help, and the Hydra was created specifically to kill Heracles. The original analogy to whack-a-mole is more apt, if you ask me, the idea being that whacking one just means another one pops up somewhere else.
Well, their programmers are not the same people as their legal team. (Unless they are, and that'd be a horrible way to run a business.)
The thing is that all four factors for fair use are usage of the footage to make a statement. In the United States, at least, they exist at all because of freedom of speech (which specifically means you cannot be punished for speaking what you believe in, as long as you don't do it in a way that harms or threatens somebody else). Footage of One Piece on YouTube is only legally protected if the uploader is using it to say something about One Piece (meaning those videos about analysis, "Top (n)" lists, why One Piece is good/bad, references to other things/in other things, personal anecdotes, even simple plot summaries, are legally protected). Putting up an entire episode or movie without even so much as a description full of commentary (which I'd say is still an incredible gray area) is not an action done to make a statement about the series, and it would in no way be protected under fair use. That being said, I must admit I have watched pirated episodes of One Piece on YouTube. This was during when Viz's manga was nowhere near where the manga or even the anime was at and 4Kids was the only official translation that had gone that far. I stopped at the end of the arc, however, and I haven't consumed One Piece in an illegal fashion since (unless you count looking at the chapter title pages in Japanese as such).
If they got their coffee from the convention center's Compass Cafe or Galaxy Cafe, feel free to laugh at them for as long as you'd like. They're getting supremely ripped off for their coffee when there are coffee shops in walking distance selling drinks for half their price or less, and they're higher in quality. The convention center owns all of the places to eat within the building and take advantage of many convention-goers' laziness in not venturing outside (unless they're disabled, sensitive to sunlight, or otherwise unable to travel around the area). Not to mention if they're at Anime Expo, unless they also pirated the badges or got comp badges from staff, they had each spent US$100+ to get there. Even if they got in for free, the effort they spent getting there is more than the effort required to acquire a subscription.
Well, they're teenagers, who may not be that experienced at budgeting, prioritization, or patience. But the real issue is not what they can afford; it's what they're willing to afford. Your typical American likely has at least one thing they cannot afford and have to pay monthly or yearly with interest (such as a house or a car), whereas there are a gazillion things he or she CAN buy but decide not to because either they're not interested enough in buying it, there is something they want more with that same money to spend, or their budget says no. For instance, ever since I got my new job, my income has gone up and I have the money to buy a Stratocaster guitar. But I'm not going to because I don't know how to play a guitar and am not interested enough to learn how. I know it's hard for some people, but if they genuinely cannot budget a Crunchyroll or FUNimation subscription, they can just, well, not consume anime. I am an extremely light consumer, watching perhaps a single show per season--I may well be classified under "casual." For this reason, the subscription may not be worth the price for me. But I won't go pirating the stuff. I just plain won't watch anything.
Piracy is not one of the reasons why the show was taken off Toonami. Low ratings was the reason why, and Jason DeMarco really likes the show and kept it on the air for months, if not years, after it stopped being viable and more successful shows could've taken its place. You might blame piracy for the low ratings, but that alone isn't usually enough, considering other anime on Toonami get much higher ratings. In fact, the pattern is that the viewership goes down once One Piece airs and then goes back up once it's over, implying that there are Toonami viewers who intentionally skip One Piece but watch the other shows. If piracy really were the problem, the viewership would be low all across the board, but you have shows like Soul Eater, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, One Punch Man, and Kill la Kill that were airing alongside One Piece, ARE heavily pirated, and got much better ratings. Rather, there are other factors, such as the offputting art style, that they began in the middle of the series, that they began on the goofy Davy Back arc and then got caught in a bunch of filler, that they are far behind the Japanese broadcast, and the aforementioned split among One Piece fans where one group will absolutely refuse to consume any official material. |
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Stuart Smith
 Posts: 1298 |
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So how did that work for shows like Dragon Ball Super, Detective Conan, or JJBA which took a long time to be officially streamed? Was there no discussion of them here until then? I don't really remember. For shows like Pretty Cure it seems like a given any fans of it are pirating it given the only official version is a kids dub for Smile. One could say a lot of news about series not available here or OVAs/Movies which never get streamed are a bit of an entrapment situation then since the only fans here would be pirates. For example, as far as I know the Fairy Tail OVAs nor the first 7 One Piece movies were ever picked up by Funimation. -Stuart Smith |
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Revolutionary
 Posts: 601 Location: Too Far South |
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[quote="Suena"]
Yes, in the beginning of the simulcast there was only a non-HD version streamed for free. I'm not sure when the transition to HD was made. But it was a major complaint among people at the time. To tone down the language, people often said the stream's quality was "garbage". But it was FREE. It was a FREE, legal Simulcast in which the episode was uploaded an hour after being aired in Japan. It shocked me that people thought they had some form of entitlement to demand that the stream be in HD or they wouldn't watch it. The companies were listening to what anime fans wanted and were trying to bridge the gap in a completely unforeseen way... But they got hit over the head by piraters with false entitlement they had caught from pirating HD episodes for free. On the note of the stream's quality being referred to as "garbage", though. I see that as just another excuse. Why do I say that? Because I've seen people say that the quality of VIZ's online WSJ service's scans is "garbage", too. That's when you know they're just completely full of it and are just looking for excuses to justify not paying money. I'm so grateful for the services we have today. There are still some issues that may need to be addressed, but things are completely different than they were ten years ago, when legal anime streaming to my knowledge was yet to even exist. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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How does that even work? Viz gets the scans straight from the source. The authors and editors scan them in at Shueisha, page by page, and Viz gets those scans directly. That results in the highest possible quality source. You can even zoom in to ridiculous extents. I can understand people not being happy with the quality of translations, or the series they make available, or that we get it 5 days behind the speed-scanlators, but not the image quality. |
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Revolutionary
Posts: 601 Location: Too Far South |
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As I said, people are just looking for excuses. BTW, anyone who legitimately holds it against VIZ that their WSJ is released on Monday instead of earlier has serious issues. Everywhere you turn and look in this community, all you see is more false entitlement. The early release of WSJ is one of the most irritating things to me right now. Because of that I have to avoid One Piece conversations a great portion of the time. Not because I'm behind, but because it gets illegally released before it even gets released in Japan and no one seems to care. ...But that's a discussion for an entirely different topic. Sorry. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Oh yes, I know all about that regarding conversations about One Piece. I check to see which part of the fanbase they're on first to see if I can speak about what to me is the most recent chapter, but I only have the Monday and Tuesday between Viz's release and the Wednesday speed-scanlators to talk about it with the people who follow that. The people who expect Viz to bring out their manga on Wednesdays because the speed people do it don't really get that it's not supposed to officially come out until Monday. (How do these guys get it so fast? Are they the copies that are supposed to be sold at retail stores and provided in advance so they could set them up for the customers?) |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13568 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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I consider these overlooked forms of American copyright infringement or piracy: retroactive term extensions, not do doing what copyright is supposed to do, and copyright restorations. For the middle item, read "To Kill A Mockingbird is a fine example of how copyright is failing us all", a 5/4/14 entry on a blog calledThe Reinvigorated Programmer*. Note, while blogger Mike, does have entries about American copyright, he lives in somewhere in the UK.
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