Got one question about the superman episodes and...

KingSpanky · **KingSpanky**

Yeah I know... but now that I have a job and I can buy the really good anime boxsets, I don't feel as bad.

John_Bono_Smithy_Satchmo · **John_Bono_Smithy_Satchmo**

Hang on, if anyone's interested, I wrote a half-assed paper on just why Anime companies don't go after American fan-subbers.
It's old, and I think there's some factual errors, but hell, I did it on High School... (Warning: This is 4 Pages double-spaced in word)

Standing outside of the school auditorium, a collection of the average motley crew of today’s college students gather together on a Friday, Saturday, or possibly Sunday night. One club officer carries in a VCR under one arm, and twenty yards of video cables on the other hand. Another club officer carries a small collection of video tapes that are quite obviously not professionally manufactured. Behind them are an even larger crowd of club members and teenagers from around the area, there to hang out and see a free show. The crew sets up the VCR to the auditorium’s projector, and hits play. The peanut gallery quiets as the opening credits hit the screen. What shows up on the screen is not the latest comedy or action flick. It’s anime: a Japanese subculture phenomenon that has swept through a good portion of college students and teenagers throughout the country. But suddenly, the projector stops, the sound silences, and the flashing 12:00 on the VCR shuts off. A horde of police officers suddenly break through the door, guns at their hip and cuffs in hand. They slam the club officers against the nearest table, cuffing their hands, and reading Miranda rights, declaring that these students have violated international copyright law, and cart them away to the local jail, where hearings will be scheduled. This story will never happen, at least if the industry that makes said stolen media has a say in it.
Let’s back up for a minute for a bit of a history lesson. Anime is a form of entertainment, produced in Japan, which tells its story through animation. The large difference, besides drawing styles between anime and American animation, is that anime covers any variety of fictional topics. Where most American drawing studios, such as Disney and Nickelodeon produce cartoons aimed at children, the works of anime drawing studios, such as Gainax and Sunrise are targeted at a much older audience, usually anywhere within the age range of 15 and up, and thus tends to have a more mature theme. The form of animation called anime finds its roots in manga—what we could best compare to comics—except they’re not quite the same as comics, at least not usually. While the whole of Europe was busy writing novels, Eastern Asia was putting drawings along with their words, creating what is called manga, and the form of entertainment and literature aged with the culture. What was created was a form of visual literature that was just as valid in that part of the world as written literature in the western world (an acceptance western comics haven’t found, due in part to being a fledgling form of art). After World War 2, when the rest of the modernized world started producing television shows, it only seemed natural to continue the film tradition of live action that had been set forth in westerns and other early forms of film. And while Japan had live action in their television media, another form of televised media slowly evolved—the motion equivalent of manga—anime.
In the early 70s, as this form of media became prevalent in Japan, a small number of American and European teenagers also stumbled upon the form of storytelling, and found the less western traditional form of art more than its American live action counterparts. This underground culture of sorts began a network of distribution between the fans of anime. Someone’s friend or relative in Japan would record an anime off TV, or copy their purchased copy using a second VCR, and send it to a friend in the States or Europe who knows a bit of the Japanese language, who then splices video together and adds text translations of what’s being said. This copy of the tapes would then have more copies of it made, and friends would trade copies, or charge the cost of the tape for a copy. The fans got what they wanted: their month’s new piece added to their collection, or their club’s new view. The anime producers didn’t very much mind: they knew they couldn’t reasonably expect someone so far away to legitimately purchase said video legally (having such obstacles as a language barrier, distribution channels, and sheer obscurity of anime at the time), so the technically illegal action was ignored by the publishers.
That was the way anime worked in those days, all up until the early 90s. Due to the growing popularity of anime over the years (largely in part thanks to the release of Akira (1989), an anime movie that received enough popularity it found its way into art house theatres around the country), the anime industry found itself in a position to make money off of its product outside of Eastern Asia, and they did.
Within a few years, both Japanese and American companies started devouring licenses to animes as fast as they could afford to purchase them. Suddenly, anime had become a commercial product outside of Japan. Anime was finally being sold on a few store shelves, and, a few years later, by internet retailers.
But still, the practice of fan subbing persists. New animes are still taped (or now days, digitally recorded) off the airwaves, sent to a friend in another country, and translated. Why are people still taking the time and effort to illegally distribute this form of media, and why isn’t the industry that produces said media prosecuting them to the full extent of the law? The answer, like the question, is two fold.
First, fans of anime, like any form of media are impatient. While proper licensing and production (i.e. making of tapes or DVDs, then shipment) of an anime takes months at best, whereas a fan sub takes as little as a day or two after broadcast or tape release. animesuki.com, the largest online distributor of fan-subbed anime, will usually at least have a link to any decently popular unlicensed anime, usually within a few days of broadcast.
Which brings us to the second question: why fan subbers aren’t being shipped off to prison, or at least paying stiff fines. For most of the last decade, only unlicensed anime has been fan subbed for the most part. The reason for this is simple: most groups of people with the resources to encode a fan sub are not only legal targets, but they also understand that illegally distributing something commercially available will hurt whoever releases said product legally. If someone doesn’t want to pay for the latest Tenchi series, whose to stop them from just downloading it? This is why most fan sub distributors will simply stop making their fan subs available upon the release of an anime.
The other part of the reason that the industry lets it persist is a matter of feedback. The American consumer, even one that watches anime, will likely have a radically different taste than a Japanese consumer of the same demographic. With that as the case, a company blindly sinking perhaps millions of dollars for the license and distribution, and hoping said anime becomes popular, sounds like an unsound business strategy. Thus, if they merely wait a few months after the release of said anime, they can generally find how well accepted an anime will be to the core audience that it’s targeting. If an anime isn’t popular, they simply won’t pick up the license. Fans of the anime will still download and copy it, and the industry will continue to turn a blind eye, preferring not to alienate it’s customers with a petty suit that it wouldn’t expect to win.
This model for release seems to be working well for the anime industry. Wildly popular fan subbed titles, such as Cowboy Bebop or Trigun (two massively popular animes released in 1998), for example, quickly find their way to a VHS and DVD release, and the fans, who tend to feel a high sense of civic duty, will destroy any illegal copies they have (usually just sending it to their computer’s recycle bin). Other less popular fan subbed titles just aren’t picked up, saving the industry upwards of hundreds of thousands per title.
Until the day when anime distributors know that any anime title they release abroad will turn a profit, it will continue to look the other way when it sees someone putting a fan sub of the newest anime to hit the airwaves. The fan subbing will continue, and everyone wins.
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KingSpanky · **KingSpanky**

Wow and I thought FDD's essay on 1337 was bad...

John_Bono_Smithy_Satchmo · **John_Bono_Smithy_Satchmo**

And I thought your mom was bad.
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KingSpanky · **KingSpanky**

You'll never make mod with those kind of come backs.

John_Bono_Smithy_Satchmo · **John_Bono_Smithy_Satchmo**

I think my massive post count and constant hounding of TylerL for my custom title already excludes me from that duty.
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KingSpanky · **KingSpanky**

Ditto. Plus I think I'd turn down the offer. Once a mod, I couldn't make my claims about making the other my bitches.

FinalDivineDragoon · **FinalDivineDragoon**

Do not insult my 1337 discussion, it got me a B in my communication class, and that's damn good for a class I didn't give a crap about.
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There is limited intelligence in the galaxy, but the stupidity of the universe is infinite.

Vegito1471 · **Vegito1471**

I think it was pretty good.
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Anime Conquers all.
1.Dragonball Z
2.Naruto
3.Yu Yu Hakusho

UpYurSkirt · **UpYurSkirt**

counterparadox · **counterparadox**

To give you an idea of when things legally kick into public domain. The Superman shorts were made, if memory serves me correctly, in 1945. They became public domain at the very end of last year. Or the first dady of this year.

That's 60 years. If it's not that old, it's not free.
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anime is teh s uck

Play City of Heroes/Villians? Look me up, Pinnacle server, @C Paradox


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