Forum - View topicNEWS: Viz Launches Web Release of Rumiko Takahashi's Rin-ne
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ConanSan
Posts: 1818 |
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Well then, this clearly shows that companies are (for the most part) wimps who will not go above thier station because they have a drilled in fear of not american money and forget the World part of WWW.
Now if you excuse me, I'm going to go to **** ****** and see someone scanlate this. I might of even thought of buying the GN if/when it happened but clearly Viz don't want my money in the same way that damn well every other company except from Funimation seem to be. A-and people wonder why Funi's King god head of it all. It's because they damn well offer thier services to more than America. |
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fighterholic
Posts: 9193 |
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It might help to know your country that we know in which specific countries there are lockouts and which ones there aren't. US - okay Japan - locked out Australia - locked out Germany - okay That's the list I've been able to compile so far from reading people's posts. |
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Kalessin
 Posts: 931 |
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Somehow I don't think that where Funimation allows people to view their streams affects their sales much. The same goes for Viz. They make material available online for the areas that they sell in. If their stuff is available beyond that, then those people are just lucky. It's not like Funimation or Viz owe them anything. Since those areas aren't within the area that the product was licensed for, they're not exactly going to be high on the list of concerns for the company in question. That's basic economics. Generally speaking R1 anime and manga companies do not sell to a global market. They sell to the R1 market. Thanks to the internet, people outside of North America can buy their products and in many cases can view their digital content online, but they're outside the R1 market and thus aren't in the sales region for those companies. If a company like Funimation or Viz also licenses a product to sell elsewhere in the world - such as the UK or Australia - then that part of the world then becomes part of their sales area, but other than that, such a company has nothing to do with those areas. Other companies are free to license and sell the products in those areas. If you're not in region 1, then you're lucky to get any products sold there just like everyone outside Japan is lucky to be able to get products from Japan. Just like Japanese companies don't normally sell their products to folks in North America, companies in North America don't normally sell their products to countries outside of North America. Most consumer markets are regional, not global. Maybe that'll change someday, but right now, in spite of the global nature of the internet, consumer products are generally sold on a regional scale. As for Viz locking Rin-ne for some countries and not others, it's likely a contractual issue. They're not trying to rip anyone off or screw anyone over. The have the rights to make it available within North America. It's likely that the contract specifically disallows them from making it available in English-speaking countries where they don't hold the license. Certainly, refusing to buy Rin-ne from Viz later because they didn't make it available to you in an area where they didn't have the license for it isn't going to help you any, and it isn't going to hurt Viz much either. Feel free to tell them how you feel about it - that might change something - but unless they have licensed it for your area, they don't really have the right to make it available to you. Various non-English speaking countries like Germany are probably slipping by because they're not English-speaking. |
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toxictwinkie
 Posts: 13 |
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I had the same problem and I live in Australia, but this proxy program solved the region lock out issue for RINNE! I can even go on Hulu and MTV (Watch MTV shows online) aswell.
 [I couldn't before as those websites were region restrictive eg U.S.A only]
http://www.hotspotshield.com/
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Sven Viking
Posts: 1039 |
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Kalessin: As mentioned earlier, VIZ manga is stocked and sold in Australian bookshops/comic shops/etc. just as it is in the US. As far as I know, the same goes for most countries where English-language manga is bought (i.e. I don't think there are any other English-language publishers of VIZ manga titles).
If they're selling to the English-speaking world at large, why not advertise to it? I admit the possibility of stupid legal restrictions, but if so, I hope they try to negotiate better terms in future. |
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ConanSan
Posts: 1818 |
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All I will say is that I will spend as much effort in purchasing the product as Viz spends to allow me to do as much.
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Kalessin
Posts: 931 |
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Well, then either the Australian bookstores are going to the effort of ordering the books from the US without Viz actually holding the license there, or Viz normally gets licenses for Australia as well as North America. Assuming that the latter is the case, you'd definitely think that they'd make Rin-ne available in Australia, but contracts and such can have a fair amount of stuff that normal people would consider ridiculous. In either case, if Rin-ne is being made available freely for most of the world and only being blocked for specific countries, I expect that Viz has a contractual reason for blocking those countries - even if that contractual reason isn't something that normal folks would think reasonable. Legal nonsense is frequently nonsense, but unfortunately it has a nasty habit of affecting us nonetheless. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Yeah. Australian bookstores, at least some of them, do get books from US distributors. |
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ConanSan
Posts: 1818 |
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Mind you if viz is that adiment in not alowing thier guff to be seen they should realy stop direct international shipping of thier wears.
But that would verge too closely to makeing sence. |
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Sydney2K
Posts: 219 Location: Australia |
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No, proper spelling of your post would be verging too closely to making sense. I did a search earlier today to find out the actual time, but I couldn't find it. Basically years ago Viz found out that it didn't have the rights to distribute any of its properties outside of the US and possibly Europe, and overnight ceased distribution to places like Australia and Britain. That's why when you look in Previews you find that you can't order Viz material if you live in particular countries. This partly changed last year when Madman won the right to distribute the Shueisha properties for Viz. However you find that many comic stores and a few large bookstores (such as Borders or Kinokuniya) stock Viz graphic novels. I'm not sure of the reason for this is, but I think it's because they don't order via Diamond, but use a book distributor. Anyway, there are ways and means of getting around this restriction.
Thanks for the head's up on this- I installed Hotspot and was able to read it. I think it's a promising start, and certainly too early to determine what direction it's going to take, although I wouldn't be surprised if it's more lighter fare than Inuyasha was- cue Ricky Gervais (or Robert Downey Jr.) I think a good comparison would be to compare this with the early episodes of Bleach. Once Rukia "turned" Ichigo into a Soul Reaper, that set the tone of the series. I would suggest that the next five or ten episodes will show us what Ms. Takahashi's leading us- another Urusei Yatsura or another Mermaid's Blood (sic). Widya Santoso |
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Sven Viking
Posts: 1039 |
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Sorry to resurrect the thread, but Mike Montesa (VIZ editor) just commented on the regional restrictions.
http://www.therumicworld.com/blog.php?id=5 Seems that it is due to legal nonsense as some suspected. Though VIZ are the only English-language publisher of this and many other titles (so far as I know), and their publications are read worldwide, they only have the legal rights to publish in the US/Canada. Stupid, but not really VIZ's fault. They should try for better deals in future, imho, but it's highly possible that the Japanese companies would try to milk them for extra money in exchange for more sensible terms. On the other hand, I really wonder about exactly who would complain if they failed to lock out places like Europe and Australia in this case? Would the Japanese companies even care if it's not affecting other licensees? |
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Sydney2K
Posts: 219 Location: Australia |
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Actually, it is their fault. They didn't read the small print, and naturally assumed that their distribution rights extended worldwide, when in fact it was only North America. (This is referring to the withdrawal from the Australian market several years ago.) Widya Santoso |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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Not the distributors where I live. Our companies probably lack the money to be able to provide any free internet distribution due to their smaller market, so they couldn't have had plans to provide their own web releases in the first place. As for whether said distributors would complain about things like this undercutting their actual releases, I doubt it as well: Funimation freely stream several anime already released in this country without local restrictions. I haven't heard of any industrial complaints about this practice, so I assume the same would be the case for manga. |
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