Forum - View topicNEWS: When Piracy Becomes Promotion
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Sword of Whedon
Posts: 683 |
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Another factor that you're forgetting is that these TV series have already been paid for by their broadcast partner(the production company/copyright owner is paid by the network, and it's then the network's responsibility to make a profit selling ad time). Also the US TV show boxes do piles of units. Firefly, a cancelled series has sold over 350,000 copies. Buffy/Angel/X-Files/CSI/ER all reguarly do 6 figures. I think there has only been a handful of non-kid anime that have ever done numbers like that. 30,000 copies is generally a big hit in the anime world. |
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beverins
Posts: 34 |
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Perhaps not absolutely related to this discussion, but I recieved Issue 81 of Protoculture Addicts, and within was an article about a panel where Matt Greenfield (or perhaps someone else? I dont have the article on front of me) of ADV said that fansubs had outlived their usefulness, because "everything that gets made in Japan will be released here anyway".
Umm... Really? GaoGaiGar is on USA R1 DVDs now? I had no idea. Uninhabited Planet Survive (or as ADV's Newtype reads: No Man's Planet - Survive) is on Toonami? Oh, and I must have missed those Panda Z episodes on the Anime Channel. Funny that I don't see mention of Monster being licensed... Brave Raideen, Mazinger Z, Getter Robo G, Zambot 3 and Brave Machine Dagwon are certainly in plentiful supply at Suncoast Video too. 
Yes, I'm being sarcastic, because spur-of-the-moment, ill-thought out, blanket statements like Matt's simply anger rabid anime otaku nerds (like myself). Piracy is not excusable by any means, and I agree with his overall statement. I wonder how companies like ADV have even tolerated digital-rip fansubs as of late, to be honest. I suppose its to their credit that they "allow" them to persist by looking the other way. I think, however, that ADV (and the rest of the US Anime Distributors) have to wake up and smell the same coffee that the RIAA and the MPAA should be waking up to - there is no amount of suing, legislation or software blocks that is going to stop piracy on the internet. Just isn't going to happen. So what to do? Embrace the technology, instead of fighting against it. One method that I think would work fairly well is to have a P2P client that is officially endorsed by media companies, that entails a $100 month subscription fee (I'm sure pricing can be lowered, once people get onto the service) and unlimited downloading.... or, perhaps a set rate per Gigabyte / terabyte, whatever. It would behave just like any other popular P2P program. Users could post their stuff as well as download. Licensed stuff would be distributed by the owning company as a series of downloads, perhaps for a fee... and any fansubs present that duplicate the licensed stuff would be purged from the database automatically (yes, I know, its tremendously hard to filter out all the possible permutations of any given title, and MD5 hashes are weak protection if people play tricky with re-encoding the files and suchlike). I suppose a system like this would have to rely on Ebay "report this listing" sort of user police. Yes, this of course has loads of conflicts with present laws, but laws are there by your vote, or so we are taught to believe. If enough money could be postulated to be made with this design, the laws would change quite fast. And like all things, this idea is not meant to be a perfect solution, but it is meant as an idea (if anyone in the industry is by chance reading this on their coffee break) to explore. |
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cyrax777
 Posts: 1825 Location: the desert |
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seems to me ADV is the only US company screaming about fansubs.
Bandia was suing pirated merchandise sellers but ADV is the only company I hear screaming bloody murder. well Urban Vision did send Anime Junkies a cease and desist letter and then AJ game UV the finger basicly (dont know the rest but essetnly the fandom backlash on AJ shut em down Dont thing any lawyers were involved) but other then ADV I haven't heard any other of the major companys saying anything about fansubs. Bootleg merchanise and pirated dvds on the other hand I've heard plenty about (granted legaly a fansub(not made by yourself on using a raw copy you own ie dvd/ld/vhs/beta/whatever new format that will come out) is the same as bootleg dvd. I think it all boils down to money. The HK pirates have resources that can be confiscated compared to the digisubber whos probly a High school or college student with alot of time on thier hands. Like i said before they never will go away it will just get pushed underground. Since the genie is already out of the bottle it anit going anywere anytime soon. Now hopefully someday the companys will put out somesort of Itunes for anime videos. Ie a couple bucks a episode and you could get it asap But I dont see that happening anytime soon we just dont have the bandwith availble for massive video on demand on that scale. |
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