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NEWS: New Anti-Piracy Act from U.S. Congress Leaked

Drafted. The bill was drafted. I don't think your drafts that NO ONE is voting on yet have to be made public.

Jetto wrote:

If you want to watch unlicensed stuff that bad then move to Japan. Otherwise, stop QQing. It is not your God-given right to watch unlicensed anime.

It's easy to say if you don't watch anything unlicensed, or if you're the type of person who doesn't think about other people.

[b] or if you're the type of person who doesn't think about other people.

I'm not sure how any citizen of the US can be comfortable with this knowledge.

"It's easy to say if you don't watch anything unlicensed, or if you're the type of person who doesn't think about other people. "

Exactly. I'd happily pay monthly for something like Crunchy if it had all the shows airing. But on the flip side, I'm not going to prevent myself from watching classic shows like Madoka just because no American company licenses it or puts it up for legal stream. No real anime fan would.

JDuks wrote:

Drafted. The bill was drafted. I don't think your drafts that NO ONE is voting on yet have to be made public.

Thank you for the correction. I had edited my post several times, but still failed to edit it completely. There was to be a "potential" in there. :oops:

This still does not remove the knowledge the leak was from a congressional source, which is more troubling than any piracy issue to date.

I'm not sure how any citizen of the US can be comfortable with this knowledge.

Those of us with a working knowledge of how our representative democracy operates aren't particularly concerned with this totally normal event

OH NO GUBMINT GONNA TAKE MY FREE CARTOONS

So do you expect every member of congress to issue a national press release every time they think about starting to write a bill, no matter how many months later they plan to actually introduce it?

We, as citizens, have every right to know what our government is doing.

It scares me to think you don't believe we have this right.

I'd like to see something be done to effectively shut down the monetization of piracy online. I realize internet culture doesn't recognize entertainment product as being exactly that - a commercial product created for profit, rather than an art-for-art's-sake-only endeavor that somehow "should" be enjoyed and consumed by all regardless of monetary ability to legally enjoy said product - but the people profiting off of pirated movie streaming/download websites are scumbags and *some* form of effective and efficient enforcement needs to be in place to shut this stuff down.

RyanSaotome wrote:

The problem is that at the same time, they'll be shutting off people from watching new anime that airs in Japan. Some of it will be picked up by Crunchy, sure, but the majority of it will never be shown in legal ways, nor be licensed here, so pirating it is the only way we can ever see those types of shows. By cutting it off (hypothetically speaking), it would have no advantage to the anime industry in the west at all.

Are you under the impression that the US industry is still being 'helped' by fansubs? Or that you having limitless illegal access to everything that airs on Japanese TV, licensed or no, is somehow beneficial to anyone but you?

...not that i don't already know what the response to these questions are

Five pages of commentary and the most important aspect of this bill is overlooked: The contents were leaked.

This means a democratic congress introduced a bill in secrecy.

This means a democratic congress motioned the bill in secrecy.

None of which is covered under an act of war.

Yet piracy is the issue?

Perhaps it is just me who hasn't seen a single news article written indicating businesses have shut down because of piracy.

Probably because they're buried between all those record-breaking sales news articles I keep seeing pop up everywhere.

I would argue that the people who think unfettered, unchecked mass piracy of global entertainment industries is a good thing are the ones who do not care about other people, namely the hundreds of thousands of people who rely on profit from those works to make their living.

Zac wrote:

I would argue that the people who think unfettered, unchecked mass piracy of global entertainment industries is a good thing are the ones who do not care about other people, namely the hundreds of thousands of people who rely on profit from those works to make their living.

That argument doesn't really make much sense when it's well known what most Japanese animators actually make. These people sign over their creative rights and most don't even get a percentage of the profits while the companies in charge of distribution keep the lion's share. This doesn't really make sense anymore with the internet making distribution so easy. The way fansub groups sprout like weeds makes it clear that the cost to distribute entertainment media is cheap and that maybe middlemen don't deserve so much of the overall profit.

Can attitudes towards piracy really change when the entertainment companies so obviously manipulate our copyright laws and screw over any content creator who doesn't have an AAA+ hit?

There are answers though. Amazon allows authors to sell their own ebooks and they get 70% of the sale price. It wouldn't be that hard for manga publisher to try out a similar business model. Maybe a better use of the entertainment industry's money would be to experiment with alternative business models rather then buying more lobbyists.

I'm not going to prevent myself from watching classic shows like Madoka just because no American company licenses it or puts it up for legal stream. No real anime fan would.