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NEWS: Anime Production Companies, Manga Publishers Crack Down on Piracy


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Kikaioh



Joined: 01 Jun 2009
Posts: 1205
Location: Antarctica
PostPosted: Sat Aug 02, 2014 7:02 am Reply with quote
mangamuscle wrote:
With that line of thought entrepreneurship would be dead and buried long ago, there would be no innovation, only endless arguments of why it can't be done. Reading your later comments, it is quite evident it is quite more comfortable for said companies to sue their customers, no doubt "Greed works 24x7, and it is legal".


You're being a backseat driver armchair general. It's arrogant to accuse the industry of being greed-hungry sue-hounds, just because they're not willing to take a risk on reverse importation. Not surprisingly, when it's so very easy and free to pirate content, it's clear you lose sight of the actual real cost that goes behind creating these works. When it takes $100,000 - $300,000 just to make a single episode of an anime, and hundreds of people spending decades of their lives honing their craft, your offhand complaints and accusations that they're not willing to risk financial loss comes across as wholly unreasonable, absolutely ridiculous self-indulgent whining. If you think that sort of incredibly expensive risk is worth it, then risk it yourself --- complaining about how other people ought to risk their money and very livelihoods, esp. if you have no direct first-hand experience or stake in the workings of the industry, is obnoxious.

sol20 wrote:
Ok, so the sharing illegality makes since, the downloading seems weird and at the same time I just can't see how anyone could even attempt to stop sharing content for the reason as how old and natural it seems to be.
(ex. printing press , vinyl records, cassettes, vhs etc.)


Again, file 'sharing' isn't the same as sharing a physical object. Modern file 'sharing' actually involves the additional step of making a copy that you give to another person. Unlike real-world sharing of physical objects, file-sharing ultimately produces an intact copy of the original, so instead of the second person possessing your original copy, you both now possess a copy of the work. It would be like making a physical copy of a book/vinyl record/cassette/vhs that you then give to another person --- that's more than simply sharing, that's copyright infringement.
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Touma



Joined: 29 Aug 2007
Posts: 2651
Location: Colorado, USA
PostPosted: Sat Aug 02, 2014 8:23 am Reply with quote
mangamuscle wrote:
agila61 wrote:
That only argues that there might exist some changes which wouldn't have the feared effect: that does not prove that any particular change wouldn't. The case still needs to be argued on its merits, not with sweeping hand-waves.


With that line of thought entrepreneurship would be dead and buried long ago, there would be no innovation, only endless arguments of why it can't be done.

That is not true.
A smart entrepreneur will not invest money in a project just because there is a chance that he might not lose his investment. He will consider the possibilities and not spend his money unless he thinks that he will probably make a profit.

And I do not think that entrepreneurship is the issue in regards to piracy.
Wanting to stop the pirates does not mean that the producers might not change some of their methods of marketing and distribution to something similar to some of the things that the pirates are doing.
It just means that the people who own the products want to be in control of their products.

I see stopping piracy and innovation to the anime industry as two separate issues.
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TarsTarkas



Joined: 20 Dec 2007
Posts: 5827
Location: Virginia, United States
PostPosted: Sat Aug 02, 2014 9:32 am Reply with quote
It really is a useless venture. The article says the main push is against China. They can't do anything effective, without the support of the Government of China. Who sees that happening anytime soon.
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ian137



Joined: 31 Jul 2014
Posts: 3
PostPosted: Sat Aug 02, 2014 9:38 am Reply with quote
agila61 wrote:

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.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.
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.

This region block and license problem is not new it's been there for a long time and i wish Japanese govt started take measures around this problem more. Ok! lets say they got success in their in there "anti piracy" program and all the websites have been closed. have they ever given the thought what about would to happened to us? There is almost 0 kind online transmission system in our country no way we can pay them online and watch anime and read manga. yep there are not much fans in our country so MAY be we should quit.
"doremon" is really popular among kids in our country. If anyone wants to make money just draw-print some "doremon" picture some kid or (his parents for him) will definitely buy it.
Before "doremon", "DBZ" was popular like this and now they is also "Beyblade: Metal Fusion". But sadly people call it cartoon not anime. We have huge population are I am sure if Japanese govt sell "Doremon" or "DBZ stuff at the rate of they sell in their country they they would earn a lot even if these anime is really old. But of course no one is up for the risk.
Just because they think they wont get minimum it doesn't mean they won't get more than that.
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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 02, 2014 2:23 pm Reply with quote
ian137 wrote:
agila61 wrote:
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. ...

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.


This region block and license problem is not new it's been there for a long time and i wish Japanese govt started take measures around this problem more.

This is more an issue for the anime industry to get together on to resolve, to develop standard contract terms which simplify the approval of simulcast and (later) catalog streaming for niche markets.

Individually, those markets are not lucrative, but if anime can increase its ability to have income-generating distribution into all of those fringe markets, then taken together its possible that new revenue sources might emerge. Plus, if its done so that it doesn't impose additional contracting costs on the licensors, then that would solve the problem of "it costs us money to stream to you ... because what we had to pay a lawyer to look over the contract was more than the revenue the contract would generate".

Quote:
Ok! lets say they got success in their in there "anti piracy" program and all the websites have been closed. have they ever given the thought what about would to happened to us?

Likely not. For most of those companies, their focus will normally be on the markets that are generating revenue now, and how to increase that revenue, not the more speculative ideas about how to generate additional revenue from countries that are not currently generating much money for them.

Quote:
There is almost 0 kind online transmission system in our country no way we can pay them online and watch anime and read manga. yep there are not much fans in our country so MAY be we should quit.

Fans of anime wouldn't want that, and some people in the industry are also fans of anime ... but if the upside revenue potential is not strong, they do need to have systems were they can be confident that there is no big downside either.

Given that, what kind of quality of video do people demand? And what kind of equipment do people normally use to watch it? Its possible that there is a market segment where its the video resolution that is the protection against reverse import. If there was some standard low resolution which would still be of interest in many of the current overlooked low income country markets, there might be less resistance to looser restrictions on the digital distribution of that current anime that fell under that threshold.

The key there would be getting a substantial number of international licensors to agree on a common standard, to make it worth while one or more of the international streaming distributors to set up to distribute anime under the looser restrictions applying to anime under that standard.

Indeed, if part of the M.A.G. process involves an opening to get innovative ideas about how to market their work across the so-called "digital divide" in front of a substantial number of anime companies, so that a few of them can experiment with them and see if they work, that seems like it might be the most useful thing that could come out of the process.

Obviously the M.A.G. people would be most likely to be thinking of something like that as window dressing, but if its a useful opening, the original rationale for doing it is not a problem.

Quote:
"doremon" is really popular among kids in our country. If anyone wants to make money just draw-print some "doremon" picture some kid or (his parents for him) will definitely buy it.

Before "doremon", "DBZ" was popular like this and now they is also "Beyblade: Metal Fusion". But sadly people call it cartoon not anime. We have huge population are I am sure if Japanese govt sell "Doremon" or "DBZ stuff at the rate of they sell in their country they they would earn a lot even if these anime is really old. But of course no one is up for the risk.

It would be the companies, not the Japanese government.

The government ministry is being brought in to help negotiate with the Chinese government to put some teeth into their commitments in the last year or two to better address piracy.

But for this side of things, the important part is the number of different companies in the Japanese anime industry that have got together to be involved in this process.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
mangamuscle wrote:
agila61 wrote:
mangamuscle wrote:
You do realize that most companies (not only japanese) oppose change, so even if someone came with some proof, their mentality is set in doing business as if the world around them was not changing at an accelerated pace.

That only argues that there might exist some changes which wouldn't have the feared effect: that does not prove that any particular change wouldn't. The case still needs to be argued on its merits, not with sweeping hand-waves.


With that line of thought entrepreneurship would be dead and buried long ago, there would be no innovation, only endless arguments of why it can't be done.

Untrue ... the need to work out the argument in detail for the specific market in question does not hobble innovation at all, since innovators do not invest money based on a broad sweeping argument ... they invest money by working through the specific details of the market in question.

Inventors don't always do that, but that gets into the substantial differences between invention and innovation.

Quote:
Reading your later comments, it is quite evident it is quite more comfortable for said companies to sue their customers, no doubt "Greed works 24x7, and it is legal".

Another example of the sloppiness of your argument, which renders it fairly useless for persuading anyone who doesn't already agree with you: the fact that some company producing content of some type in the United States follows that strategy doesn't actually prove anything about either companies in other markets, or companies in other countries.
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revolutionotaku



Joined: 19 May 2011
Posts: 886
PostPosted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 2:46 pm Reply with quote
The Japanese government passed an anti-downloading law back in 2012.
The digital music industry dropped 24% one year later in 2013.
animenewsnetwork.com/news/2013-09-30/1-year-after-japan-stricter-download-law-music-sales-stagnate
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phifedawg



Joined: 24 Jun 2013
Posts: 40
PostPosted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 5:48 pm Reply with quote
revolutionotaku wrote:
The Japanese government passed an anti-downloading law back in 2012.
The digital music industry dropped 24% one year later in 2013.
animenewsnetwork.com/news/2013-09-30/1-year-after-japan-stricter-download-law-music-sales-stagnate

5 seconds on google, found some fun graphs here: http://musicbusinessresearch.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/the-recorded-music-market-in-japan-1990-2013/
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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
Posts: 3213
Location: NE Ohio
PostPosted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 11:06 pm Reply with quote
revolutionotaku wrote:
The Japanese government passed an anti-downloading law back in 2012.
The digital music industry dropped 24% one year later in 2013.
animenewsnetwork.com/news/2013-09-30/1-year-after-japan-stricter-download-law-music-sales-stagnate


From the article that phifedawg linked to: "In 2008, the digital music sales peaked at an all-time high of ¥ 91.0bn (EUR 644.6m)."

So because of a law passed in 2012, digital music sales peaked in 2008 and then began to decline.

Ooooooooooooh Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay then. That clearly explains it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For those who want to push on the "make it accessible" angle, there's a Change.org petition to CODA from a Latin American angle at:
https://www.change.org/petitions/content-overseas-distribution-association-c-o-d-a-manga-anime-anti-piracy-committee-stop-online-anime-piracy-by-making-it-accessible
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Touma



Joined: 29 Aug 2007
Posts: 2651
Location: Colorado, USA
PostPosted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 9:36 am Reply with quote
agila61 wrote:
From the article that phifedawg linked to: "In 2008, the digital music sales peaked at an all-time high of ¥ 91.0bn (EUR 644.6m)."

So because of a law passed in 2012, digital music sales peaked in 2008 and then began to decline.

I think that this is a good point.

The people who want to convince us that piracy is a good thing will say that sales decreased because the law was passed, but you can also say that the law was passed because sales were dropping.
And those people will point out that the law did not stop the decrease in sales, which is true. But that does not mean that the law was harmful to sales, or just useless. Nobody here knows how the sales would have changed if the law had not been passed. They could have gotten much worse without the law.

I do not think that any law has ever eliminated any crime. But laws can still be necessary just to keep things from getting worse.
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st_owly



Joined: 20 May 2008
Posts: 5234
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland
PostPosted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 5:46 pm Reply with quote
Re: the anti downloading law. I'm going to be writing my dissertation on the Japanese music industry, and from my research what I've found is that people are so scared that they might be using illegal sources, that they've just reduced/stopped downloading music from /any/ sources. Sony has done very well to ensure that Japan is the largest market for CDs in the world....
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Touma



Joined: 29 Aug 2007
Posts: 2651
Location: Colorado, USA
PostPosted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:19 pm Reply with quote
st_owly wrote:
Re: the anti downloading law. I'm going to be writing my dissertation on the Japanese music industry, and from my research what I've found is that people are so scared that they might be using illegal sources, that they've just reduced/stopped downloading music from /any/ sources.

I suspected that this might be the reason for the decrease in legal downloads.
Is there any indication that people are being educated about how to find the legal sources?
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st_owly



Joined: 20 May 2008
Posts: 5234
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland
PostPosted: Tue Aug 05, 2014 3:07 am Reply with quote
Information is quite scarce, but the record labels and technology companies are doing their best to provide information about legal sources. A lot of mobile networks now have partnerships with music streaming and download services, for instance, and are starting to include music downloads as part of mobile phone subscriptions. The main thing though, is that the new law means that downloading is now a criminal offence not just a civil one, and you can spend a couple of years in jail for it. That combined with the shame it would bring on your family, and it's kind of understandable why people are so wary. Ignorance of the legality of the source/the law is also specifically not a defense.
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