Forum - View topicNEWS: Japan's CODA, Companies From 12 Other Countries to Form International Anti-Piracy Organization
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vgiannell5
Posts: 86 |
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Well I for one don't support what they're doing because I know for a fact that all they care about is money and that makes them greedy. |
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Adv193
Posts: 187 |
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While these companies are greedy, my first choice is supporting more legal options even if it means through something like digital purchasing as the whole digital age of piracy cannot last forever (which I was making sure not to get too attached in case something like this happened). |
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zrdb
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It hasn't worked before and it won't work now. People who download anime are a dedicated bunch and are quite resourceful and places where they can download will reappear under new guises if removed.
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vgiannell5
Posts: 86 |
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These companies probably hope things will be different this time which is highly unlikely. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
Posts: 6864 Location: Kazune City |
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I kind of hope things don't come to massive crackdowns, since a lot of interesting older/obscure anime and manga aren't legally available. But if it comes down to losing those or the industry suffering a serious downturn, I'll take the former. (And the numbers on pirate sites show that most viewers are there for the recent/popular stuff anyway.) Especially with anime piracy becoming more ideologically driven, the legitimate industry can't "compete" with bootleg sites.
I've bought plenty of things I've torrented over the years too, but as Redbeard points out, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." I've seen that EU study thrown around in these discussions before, but here's the problem with it:
Not featured in this study of piracy: anime. So how does a piracy study that doesn't study anime prove anything about anime piracy? Studying mainstream books, music, and movies and such doesn't account for the unique nature of the anime viewerbase, its historical veneration of fansubbing, its outlaw "stick it to the man" attitude, its misguided "Japanese superfans will subsidize our entertainment, overseas sales are just gravy / don't really count" mindset, its state of being young, broke, tech-savvy, and early-adopters of piracy technologies, its endless litany of culture-war grievances fueling piracy ("sub vs. dub", High Guardian Spice, Vic Mignogna, disagreement with a handful of oft-repeated controversial localization choices, etc.), and the pernicious influence of anti-industry grifters, outrage merchants, and saboteurs spurring viewers to pirate. Enforcement has also been historically weaker than with MPAA movies and RIAA music, due to geographical and language barriers. And if all that weren't enough, we have real-world evidence to the contrary: the market crash of 2007-08. Back then, anime popularity, online buzz, convention attendance, and piracy (aided by the rise of illegal streaming on "Wild West" YouTube) were all soaring, yet sales cratered and companies scaled back or shut down. If, as the study suggests, piracy had a neutral or positive effect on sales, how does this collapse ever happen?
The First-sale doctrine somewhat covers the secondhand/used copy issue; basically, there is still one purchase and one copy in circulation, and the original buyer gives up their rights to consume the work when selling it to a secondhand buyer. It's not at all like one copy getting read/watched by or distributed to millions for free. Existing business models in the publishing industry can survive libraries, or buyers lending a copy of a manga volume to their sibling or having a few friends over to watch a show on Blu-Ray. But nobody has hundreds of thousands of friends spread all over the world.
You're omitting another "minus" category that exists in the anime/manga sphere: 4. "Evangelical" pirates who refuse to pay whether they can or not, tell new viewers and readers to pirate (thus establishing piracy as the "default/natural" option and making it harder for legitimate sellers to make inroads with them), recommend illegal options at every opportunity (even when people ask for legal avenues), spread misinformation and lies about legal options, and actively work to sabotage the industry by trying to convince paying consumers to switch to piracy. Anti-piracy actions are no longer about merely preventing the "wouldn't have paid for it anyway" crowd from accessing media illegally; they're about excising malignant elements in the community that threaten the stability and viability of the industry. I can't blame them for taking those steps.
I don't know; over the past few years I've seen torrent trackers close down or go private/underground, ripping/subbing groups distributing on IRC losing their XDCC bots for good, and direct-downloading sites closing down with no replacements. Some options for the well-connected and hardcore will likely remain, sure. But the vast majority of pirates go to "Easy Mode" illegal streaming and reading sites -- shutting them down probably gives companies the best bang for their buck, as those sites' more casual userbases would be more likely to either stop consuming the material, or be willing to pay for subscriptions or watch a few ads on legal sites. |
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xolulu
Posts: 16 |
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I don't really care to participate in this whole debate but I think it's disingenuous, to say the least, to forget the fact that practically the entire global economy crashed in 2007-08, with all the many impacts that had on aggregate demand, discretionary spending, business cash flow, and investor confidence. No amount of piracy is going to spur people to buy anime when they just lost their job. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
Posts: 6864 Location: Kazune City |
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SHD
Posts: 1752 |
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Frankly I don't give a flying squirrel as long as region blocking exists. No-one has ever managed to put forward a convincing argument (or well, just an argument) about how it is a lost sale if someone pirates something they have no legal way to purchase/view. And as long as I have to actually apply illegal (or not entirely legal, anyway) strategies to be able to buy things by creators that I want to support with my money, because they're not being made available for me legally due to irrational legal knots, outdated business practices or other weird, backwards thinking, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy when the same businesses that do crap like that cry about pirates.
(And this is not just anime/manga btw. I pay for Netflix and yet I have access to only a fraction of its library. There are books/comics I'm not able to buy digitally in English - in Spanish, German, French, Dutch, etc. yes, but in English, no. Friends who have bought ebooks from Amazon found that some of them were made unavailble for them when they traveled to other continents. I literally can't buy digital content from Amazon.jp. And so on.) |
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