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NEWS: Anime Firms Say They Were Forced to Take Low Tenders

This has no direct link to piracy, or even to the American market. This is pretty much completely a report about the ways show sponsors are taking advantage of smaller studios.

Whether their hand is being forced by not having the capital is another matter, but even if that is the case, it's a pretty crappy thing to do to a vendor to hire them to do all this work, then kill the job without paying. But in a buyer's market, it happens quite a bit. This sort of thing happens with American retailers and smaller DVD labels, to name just one example.

I guess you can twist almost every piece of industry bad news to be about piracy in some regard, but I really wonder if some of the people pointing fingers here really understood the article.

I understood the article better than you think. If it is the case of the commissioners stuffing a vender after all that work, wouldn't that vender have a just cause for a law suit for payment due?

I guess you can twist almost every piece of industry bad news to be about piracy in some regard, but I really wonder if some of the people pointing fingers here really understood the article.

The commission surveyed 533 companies, and 114 responded.

What's going on with the other 400? Did just the 114 with issues respond & the others are just fine, or are they keeping quiet out of fear it could affect their futures? 42% of the respondants = about 50 companies or about 10% of all the companies questioned.
Is this a tip-of-the-iceberg thing, or just a small glitch exposed through this survey? A handful of studios abusing power or all of them doing it?
That response pool is rather unsatisfactory considering only 1 in 5 responded (Or is my math that bad these days?)

I don't know the details of Japanese business regulations, but it's basically accepted world wide that if you hire someone to do a job, you must pay them for that work if it is good work to agreed specs… Also a rouge commissioner would only end up getting blacklisted as no one in their right mind would take work from a reputation like that soon enough, basically putting that commissioner out of business anyway.

Piracy, illegal downloading have caused much of this problem. There really isn't a simple answer to this, or at least not yet. In the US, the economy has been in a reccession, but hopefully that will change. The only suggestion I can think of this placing quality over quanity and marketing only what sells.

This is where most people make a mistake. They want something to blame, so they put the blame on the piracy and illegal downloading. Instead of hurting the industry, it actually showed the industry the way of the future that they should have been heading toward all the time. And sales did go up and new markets were created worldwide for anime because of the piracy - they were the ones that actually created the initial markets in countries that Japan never wanted to move into.

BUT a lot of things were totally missed by what it meant for the piracy to be so rampant - within Japan. They totally missed the ONE thing they should have been paying attention to - the Japanese consumer. The Japanese consumer obviously wanted the product, BUT could not afford it at the prices it was being released at. Elsewhere in the world, while thinpacks of entire seasons were becoming the norm (for pirates to sell) and boxed sets of entire seasons were the norm for legal sales, the anime industry in Japan continued to crank out 50,000yen two episode DVDs and 75,000 yen two episode DVDs with fan specials. This is the SAME as I was paying for VHS tapes 30 years ago from Japan! For some reason, the anime industry never "got with times" with more modern pricing structures for releasing their DVD products. And now it is even worse with BD products. The Japanese consumer just CANNOT afford it!

That, coupled with the fact that so many people in Japan have a NEGATIVE reaction to anime and manga nowadays, unlike 20 to 30 years ago where it was almost nothing but a POSITIVE reaction, and the stories don't grab you anymore, and most shows are about nothing but trying to get cheap panty shots in, they wonder WHY the "popularity" of anime is dropping...

There was a one-time boom in the early 1990's where moe was the "in thing" for about a 2 year stretch. Instead, it somehow became the market mantra for all anime after that. At somewhere around about 2000 is where the moe market hit it's peak, and about when the mantra of "look, the pirates are stealing our money" began. It was never about pirates - it was always about the anime industry as a whole being ignorant to what reality was and ignoring 50 years of previous work that showed them where they should have been aiming, instead of where they ended up aiming.

Actually it happens everywhere if you think about craftsmen - say a jeweller - with rich, powerful customers. Or apparently, if you are an airplane mechanic in the USA who has made a formal complaint about your company not servicing the airplanes properly - you'll be blacklisted and never work in the airplane maintenance industry again, even if one of your company’s planes subsequently crashes (saw this on TV the other day )

Piracy does indeed have a contribution to the SOL anime industry.