Forum - View topicNEWS: Anime Production Companies, Manga Publishers Crack Down on Piracy
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mdo7
 Posts: 6253 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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@Agila61: Still not convinced, and I can't accept it until I see physical evidence validaing this. Japanese companies just throw in Reverse importation without physical evidence, it would be kinda like prosecuting a murderer without showing physical evidence (witness, murder weapon, and forensic science). I'm sorry, nothing on this forum will convince me on reverse importing until I see some real evidence (no bias, no number fudging, no weird data).
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Kikaioh
 Posts: 1205 Location: Antarctica |
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No, you're absolutely wrong. The reason loaning an actual physical disc to another person is legal is because of the first sale doctrine, which protects a consumer's right to distribute physical goods that they own. That physical disc can be given/sold/lent to other individuals for them to use because it's a protected right that people are afforded in regards to physically owned property, whether it's your DVD collection, your car, your computer, etc., and is an instance where physical property law holds in favor of the consumer over intellectual property protections (it's the basis for why libraries are allowed to exist). But that does not give you free reign to do with your physical disc whatever you want. For example, you can't have public showings of the disc to crowds of hundreds of people, because intellectual property law protects public performance rights of the content for the creator (for the very clear reason that public viewings, unlike lending, exponentially and rapidly increase the capacity for the content of the disc to be enjoyed by others, which is rightly seen as unfair to the original content creators). And in the same way, copyright law affords those same content creators the right to the actual physical copying and distribution of the content, not to you or anyone else. Lending out DVDs and file "sharing" may have similarities, but there are specific important differences between the two that afford them entirely different legal treatment. While the law protects your right to lend out your DVDs to others, it doesn't protect giving out free copies of that content to other people, because the circumstances and actions involved are very much NOT the same. |
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Touma
 Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
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Whether the subject is reverse importation or piracy, do you have any evidence to show that they are lying? Can you provide a reason for why they would be lying? I do not think that protectionism is applicable in this case. I am not saying that they are not lying. I just cannot see what they have to gain that would make it worth taking the risk of being caught in a lie.
If 100,000 people borrow the disc they will probably borrow it from at least 1,000 different people. Which means that 1,000 copies were sold. If one person uploads it for everybody to read then only one copy was sold. The possible future consequences can be debated because nobody knows, for sure, what they will be. But in the given scenario it is a fact that the publisher lost the profit on 999 sales. At least that is how I see it. If I am thinking of it wrong I certainly would not mind being corrected. |
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mdo7
Posts: 6253 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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The lack of evidences from Japanese companies is one evidence that made me question if Reverse importing is real or not. I can't find any article on reverse importing in other product, even Wikipedia doesn't have reverse importing on there. So this makes me question if Reverse importing is nothing but a lie. Protectionalism seem to be the case because a lot of time when anime are licensed overseas, they always carried restriction (ridiculous one that shouldn't be there), and that falls under protectionalism. I took international studies class so I know what's protectionalism is, licensing restriction falls under that category. |
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 7912 Location: Anime News Network Technodrome |
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Please tell us all how Korea is superior to Japan on this issue. |
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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This is similar to the situation in the Caribbean and Sub Saharan Africa vis a vis Latin America, where because of the way licensing regions are set up, a large number of countries do not get a simulcast, even though there are sites willing to simulcast to the countries. Either the minimum guarantee that could be offered for the region was considered "too low" ... or the licensee with those rights does not have those countries as part of the area it serves. So even though there is no rival bidder likely to show up for those rights, the country's rights fall into a licensing black hole. At present, because licensing of simulcasts emerged from licensing for home video distribution, licensing still often involves an exclusive rights approach. But at the same time, anime internationally is a niche market, and the available revenues from a large number of countries are much too low to pay for a lawyer to look over the license for each individual country. So there is a strong benefit in anime to group countries together into licensing regions. And when you combine exclusive rights with multi-country licensing regions, you get the situation where a licensor only wants the license for a part of the region ... but to get those rights, they have to contract for the whole region. And because they have exclusive rights, their contract means that everyone else is blocked out of the whole group of countries. Two contracting terms can help reduce that problem. One is a standard shared simulcast contract term. If simulcast rights from, say, one week after broadcast premier through to the end of the broadcast season after the series ends are written into a contract as non-exclusive rights, then it becomes possible for Crunchyroll or Diasuki or Viki (or two or three of those) to acquire global rights outside of Japan without any holes in the rights. If some areas do not have a strong enough streaming video advertising market to sustain the royalty rates per view that the licensor is looking for, that could be subscriber-only simulcast for some of those, but still, there would be a legit source, and when someone clicks on that anime on the M.A.G. site, there could be their country flag showing up in the corner of the legit options that are available to them. The second contracting term is "use it or lose it" on exclusive rights, in which if a licensee gets exclusive VOD and simulcast rights for a region, and they only offer the stream to some of the countries in that region ... then the rights for those "blocked" countries automatically revert to a simulcast partner that picked up non-exclusive worldwide residual rights. That would normally be a streaming partner that has guaranteed rights for some other part of the world ... if a Daisuki partner was a licensor, those rights would automatically revert to Daisuki, while if Crunchyroll and/or Viki acquired the anime rights for some substantial part of the world, they might be given worldwide residual rights for subscribers. The third approach for difficult to monetize countries would be sponsored torrent download releases. Under a sponsored torrent download release, a subtitled release of lower resolution ~ say, 853x480 ~ would be encoded with the sponsors advertising included at launch, the OP, eyecatch and ED and with those animated "brought to you by Coke" (eg), and "www.coca-colacompany.com/cola-video/" ... at the bottom right corner on a 4 minute repeat message, with the video being put up on an official torrent seed (to avoid the streaming bandwidth costs) and the sponsor paying an agreed amount per thousand downloads. |
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mdo7
Posts: 6253 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Zac, this has nothing to do with South Korea. This is based on what I observe and I couldn't find anything to back up Reverse importing, this is not a South Korea soapboxing. This is notthing related to South Korea, I've been looking into Reverse importing for a while and I can't find any real substantial and sufficient evidences confirming reverse importing (whether it's anime or other product) hurting any market. That's why I'm a skeptic. |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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I don't think you necessarily need such extensive documented proof, just use some logic and you'll see that spending $99 for 26 episodes is much cheaper than spending $594. The degree to which it occurs is debatable, but for every instance where a Japanese fan buys the American release, that's a ton of money lost, and the profit margins for most anime are already tiny as it is. So if they're not buying domestic Japanese, it may as well have not been sold at all. In any case, reverse importation doesn't seem like something the companies fear: we still get our streams and then the eventual releases about on the same time frame as we always have. The only aspect of anime where the potential fear has crippled the international product is for h-anime.
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Blanchimont
 Posts: 3445 Location: Finland |
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I agree that lending 1 copy to one person is not the same as sharing one copy with 1000 persons. However I can't completely agree with the rest of your analysis.. Detract those; ..who would not buy a copy in any case (unrepentent pirates, casual viewers who'll just switch to other media) ..who want to check it out first before deciding on a possible purchase ..who can't simply afford (young people, students, residents in economically less fortunate places on earth ) ..who could afford but may not have the budget to include this one and give priority to other anime (let's face it, most of us can't afford to purchase everything we watch even if that option was possible..) ..who prefer to support in other ways, merch, import versions, music, figures etc ..who are region-blocked from watching or making a purchase, and import isn't viable (no viable payment methods(no card), not of age, custom fees too costly(Brazil), region-blocked on CR etc) ..who decide to purchase or otherwise support after having no interest prior ..who promote it to their friends or on social media, and some of those friends or followers decide to purchase it later on I think you'll find that 999 figure shrinking quite a lot... |
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mdo7
Posts: 6253 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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I understand the logic. But still logic is not really good sufficient evidence to back up reverse importing really hurt the market. I've been looking into other instances of reverse importing hurting other products (non-anime one) or non-Japanese items that suffer from reverse importing. There's not a single article or weblinks (go look it up on google, I can't even find any research on reverse importing hurting non-Japanese/non-anime products) that tells me about reverse importing, not even Wikipedia has an entry on Reverse importing, so it's hard for me to believe if reverse importing is really real or not. That's why I'm a skeptic. |
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mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
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By the same logic, why spend $99 when you can spend $9.90? If they really tried, the japanese buyer could get cheap releases from south east asia. Heck, this applies also to hollywood flicks, people from the USA can get the region A blu-ray release from south of the border for a fraction of the price. But the simple truth is that very few people do it because they want the box, the menus, the buying receipt, etc. in the language they are more proficient. |
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mdo7
Posts: 6253 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Yeah, and don't forget for DVDs, UK/Europe and Japan share the same region code, so a Japanese person can just import the UK/European version. But still, there still lack of sufficient evidences to confirm if reverse import really hurt the market. As I said, I can't find evidence of reverse importing hurting non-Japanese and non-anime products. Also Japan is not the only country that overpriced items, but other countries like Australia is overpricing items too, yet I never heard of Australia putting a ban on reverse import or brought up reverse importing as an issue. |
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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The situation with the murder trial is that the burden of proof in a murder trial lies with those accusing someone of murder. Somebody can be unconvinced of the innocence of the accused ... but if they are also unconvinced of their guilt, they have to consider the person as innocent. So, on the argument about whether some changes in business practices risk an increase in reverse importation ... consider which side carries the burden of proof. The companies know that without the current Japanese collectors market, many of their productions will lose money and they will have to cut back dramatically. After all, they are sitting on the production committees, they know the budgets for the series, and they know what part of those budgets are being provided by Japanese home video distributors looking to recoup the cost from home video sales. The fact that substantial reverse importation becoming established would destroy their current business model is not something that has to be "proven" to them. They can directly observe it as an empirical fact. When asking companies to take an action that some of them view as gambling with losing a revenue stream that will throw them into bankruptcy, the burden of proof lies with those arguing that a proposed action does not create a risk of substantial reverse importation. The equivalent of the prosecution in the murder case is the side arguing for adopting the new business practice that some fear may increase reverse importation. Those are the people who have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the fears are misplaced.
That just shows that a lot of people do not look hard for evidence that supports an argument they would prefer to be false. The reason that Australia does not focus on reverse-import is that the primary issue for Australian publishers is parallel imports, since they make far more money from authorized publications of books written overseas than from books written in Ausralia, and of the minority of their sales of books written in Australia, many are not published anywhere else, so reverse-importation is not an issue. At one time, Australia widely banned parallel import ~ import of licensed items into Australia without the licensor's approval, in parallel with imports that have the licensors approval. When those restrictions were lifted on most items, they were retained for books and, despite strong argument by a number of people for lifting parallel import restrictions on books ... Australian publishers have fought hard for the retention of parallel import bans on books, and they remain in place. Why you would appeal to Australia as an example when you appear to be totally ignorant of one of the most hotly debated issues in intellectual property rights in Australia is a bit of a puzzle. |
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor
Posts: 7912 Location: Anime News Network Technodrome |
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Uh huh. You're also a "skeptic" about nearly everything else Japan does. If it weren't so transparent what you're up to and what your agenda is I wouldn't call you out on it. Every single argument is "Japan = dumb, backwards, inferior" with you. Even if that isn't the literal written text it's the most obvious subtext to nearly every argument you make on this site. I don't know why you think people can't see through it. Which is kind of funny, to be honest with you. |
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Touma
Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
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Lack of evidence is not evidence. I asked if you have any evidence that anybody is lying about anything. And you did not say why they would be lying. It really does not matter if we are talking about piracy or reverse importing. My questions apply to either.
But you are talking about what might happen in the future. I am talking about what would have had to have happened already for those people to read, or view, a copy that was bought by another person, or persons. The point is to show the difference between lending a copy and uploading a copy. |
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