So it appears there was a study on anime piracy in Japan...

[Corran]

Guess what they found.
http://www.rieti.go.jp/en/publications/ ... 10021.html


Slashdot discussion: http://t.co/PqnH5pL


Found via CastorTroy.

[Qyot27]

Of course, like any instance of studies like this, the industries involved (Japanese and domestic) will ignore it and keep on rehashing the same 'you're destroying our sales' arguments as though nothing's changed.

I'm just too much of a cynic on this subject, I guess.

[BasharOfTheAges]

It'll be fun to troll Greg Ayers with it at cons though.

[Sukunai]

You can't measure something that can't be counted.

If you watch a show live on TV you do it with commercials through a normally paid for TV service provider.
But frankly, I find the whole process of being told to pay a normally hefty price, for a normally preselected block of channels, offered with the normal not to my liking schedule, a total waste of cash. Most of the programming will be considered crap by everyone, because not everyone is going to watch all of the content.

Why should we pay for garbage we definitely know we don't want. Here in Canada for instance, sure give the French programming, but maybe they should come to grips with how non French Canada doesn't want damned French programming eh.

Anime suffers from the fact it is non English language (several others too for that matter) and yet has a market outside of Japan (whether xenophobic Japanese otaku like it or not). If anime was something out of Hollywood, and in English, no doubt the market in Japan would look different if they liked it as much as they do now all the same. It would of course need subbing into Japanese, but, I dare say, culturally speaking, no one would regard the process of downloading it the same way. Over here, no one thinks it is anything other than it is when we download TV shows we like.

Yeah, it is technically a form of piracy, but, it is also definitely a case of the market not providing, so those that can go ahead and not bother waiting for the source to figure it out.

TV shows can't air for free. TV shows can't be made for free. You don't make an anime on the basis of expected dvd sales if you have any brains either. So you market it to the broadcasters. They sell time slots and that means commercials and commercials is where the cash comes from.

Every last anime ever aired, was paid for long before we anime fans in fansub land ever got to it.
Piracy? in some ways of thinking, we are not talking about stealing so much as filling a market no one wishes to exploit efficiently to begin with.
It's 2011, there is NOTHING preventing an anime being broadcast to anywhere on the planet the same day it was released in as many language editions as you wish. The only people stopping this from happening, are the people that make the anime. And fuck off about the cost to do it. This is 2011, you trying to tell me you can't find one person fluent in Japanese and English? Not trying very fucking hard. You give them the script, they do the English language version the same time the Japanese version is done.

If of course they stopped making poorly planned, poorly thought out shows, devoted to fake nudity (because a nude girl with no pubic hair or genitalia is really just a Barbie doll eh), maybe they could tap a lot more audiences in a lot more countries with a lot more ease.
I'd be ok watching anime show whatever, airing on such and such day, through my TV service provider, if the process was no more effort than turning on the TV and watching anything else.

Culturally, anime has a lot of quirks that seem at odds outside of Japan. Maybe if they tried harder to make anime less quirky, it would be more cross border friendly in more cases. I am not saying I hate anime for it's goofy need of fan service, I am saying if it is unrealistic as a product in prude land, they can't complain if it doesn't work as a product.
The reason anime can really only work in North America as retail sales and not as broadcast options, is the source refuses to budge on the content.
Limited sales potential means limited profitability. That means they give up selling it, and leave me no choice to settle for non legit sources.
I don't download because I like to, I download because there really is no intelligent alternative.

Maybe with a logical approach, sales of the show abroad would make it more lucrative and they could make the physical retail item cheaper.
You juuuuuust go and try and sell a normal season of anything in North America for the normal prices of the stuff in Japan, and your stock is not going anywhere. A season of anime, is no different than a season of any other show in North America. I can buy Stargate SG1 seasons for peanuts. And it cost them a lot more to make that show too.

I do not suffer fools willingly.
I like anime, like it a lot.
But most of how it is made is retarded.
Most of how it is marketed is retarded.
I have no interest in listening to the complaints of retards normally.

[BasharOfTheAges]

Related - http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... hunter.ars
ANN version - http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20 ... -one-piece

Seems like FUNi has decided to go after people that watch fansubs with the help of the most corrupt P2P lawyer in the US. Classy times we live in.

EDIT: looks like the case got severed along with the other ones that dirtbag was handling: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... p-lawsuits

[Qyot27]

Related - http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... hunter.ars
ANN version - http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20 ... -one-piece

Seems like FUNi has decided to go after people that watch fansubs with the help of the most corrupt P2P lawyer in the US. Classy times we live in.

It takes a lot to make people realize that BitTorrent isn't immune to attack (which is why Linux releases are just about the only thing I use it for these days - if they try to prosecute me over grabbing a totally legit distribution by the original authors, they will have hell to pay). The ANN article explicitly details the technical 'why', of course, but obviously some users weren't paying attention to the BayTSP stuff that's been going on now for two or three years. That was all the chilling effect I needed, even though my ISP wasn't not cooperative with them when that whole mess started (we've since switched and have no clue whether the new one does or not, as if it even mattered now).

[Qyot27]

even though my ISP wasn't not cooperative with them when that whole mess started

How did that extra 'not' get in there? Disregard that.

[NME]

ITT the American legal system has sufficiently scared American citizens into tightly shrivelled balls of detritus.

Land of the free to bite your nails.

[BadgerKing]

Only taking into account Youtube and one file-sharing program is ridiculous - not to mention that this paper discusses the effect in JAPAN, not in America where anime piracy is far more rampant and anime is a far more niche market.

[BiScuiTje]

Well i do not know how they can measure something like piracy etc and how accurate they were...but anyway what they said is kinda true...if the show is good people are gonna buy it even after watch it online for free....