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Chicks On Anime - Fansubs (Pt 1)

I'm going to go ahead and guess you don't speak Japanese, am I right? Because let me tell you, as someone that speaks enough to get on in every day life, plenty...plenty of Japanese voice acting is absolutely god awful. Ignorance is not an excuse to claim that they're better.

LiuXande wrote:

It's okay though, I loved H&C so much I bought the Japanese DVDs. I'm a true fan.

I just LOVE this argument, because it makes it sound like people who don't enjoy getting raped on prices from the Japanese DVDs are not true anime fans, they're just posers.

b) There's no governing INTERNATIONAL law that makes fansubs "illegal". There is no law governing the shows unlicensed in this country, and most licensors are not like an international branch of the animation studio or such, just a mediator. If Japanese companies set up camp here, that might solve everything too; everything licensed/owned by Sunrise would be licensed by Sunrise USA and we'd get our faster releases etc.

However, the US won't go after anyone who is broadcasting uncopyrighted material, that would be a case for Japanese authorites, and that is my point. If you factor in the already remote chance of being busted for copyrighted material, uncopyrighted material for most people probably empowers people to continue going since the chance of Japanese police coming down on you are about close to zero.

"Federal Law provied severe civil and criminal penalties for UNAUTHORIZED REPRODUCTION, distribution or exhibition of copyrighted motion pictures and video tapes"

So as long as something is copyrighted, even making COPIES of it are illegal, this even applies to TV programs in the US. So when you Tivo Heroes, you are TECHNICALLY breaking the law.

-Subtitled current season anime for Direct Dowload, not using the "pay per episode" business model, but the "subscription fee (Netflix)" business model. I'd be much more stingy with my money for buying single episodes, and everyone's like this. I never buy songs off iTunes either. But I love my netflix.

Psycho 101 wrote:

No, they were complaining when after being a "cult hit" the dvd sales TANKED. At least they tanked based on the level of the shows popularity and expected sales you'd think it would get.

Yeah - Haruhi performed OK for an average anime series but waaaay underperformed based on the fan interest.

Gurren Lagann did about the same. Decent but not exactly a smash hit, especially after all the fan slobbering and whatnot.

Nah, you love misreading things. People who haven't seen FANSUBS of Honey & Clover, are NOT fans of the series. Because fansubs were the only way any American could have been able to see the show. Fair enough? And how can they be fans if they haven't seen it? I mean, we're talking about non-Japanese here. So if you've seen H&C, you have to have seen the fansubs, raws, or randomly decided to "get raped on prices" with a blind dvd purchase, as you put it. Only fans would support the series. That's a fair statement too.

Anyway, what I actually wanted to strike up in this conversation with my post was a not-so-simple question: putting aside for the moment whether or not fansubs are obsolete, which one do the people of this thread want fansubs to be? Do you want them to be obsolete or do you not want them to be obsolete?

No, I was saying (or rather quickly trying to this morning because I needed to leave for work like ten minutes earlier) that it is hard for anti-fansubbers (and seriously, is there a better word for us than this? I'm tired and I can't recall if there is one) to argue against fansubs without bringing up the law. The law is part of the moral framework of the issue

And for the anti-fansubbers here, when will fansubs be marginal enough that you stop railing against them? When they are only for out of print licensed titles? Or maybe only unlicensed or unlicensable titles? When they are gone completely? Where is your line on the subject?

I think the point about who is the fanbase of fansubs is the key issue in this discussion. As interesting as it was to hear a fansubber's take on the issue (albeit with the standard defense, "I'll stop when they prove it to me that the industry is moving in a direction I like"), the fact of the matter is that the people who are "hurting" the industry with fansubs are not the ones who are releasing or consuming the "classic" titles. It's the Naruto and Bleach fansubs that are the real problem: series that are not only licensed and being released here already, but are even available on television (and in Naruto's case, now available nearly simultaneously with the Japanese airdates on the internet). It's unfathomable to me why fansub supporters continue to defend the fansubbing of series in these instances, and worse still, complain when their favorite fansubbed show is now available legally for free, in English, on TV and the internet. There's no pleasing some people.

I'm also irked about the continued argument about the "better" job fansubbers do in translating or presenting anime to the consumer. There are a host of legitimate reasons why titles are "altered" or formatted in certain ways for commercial distribution, and I have to wonder whether the complaints about licensed releases (and I will concede an inconsistency in quality in a number of cases, however many of those are from years past) isn't just a "talking point" for the side of the debate that has the most to "lose" (ie, in their wallets when they actually have to start opening them) and less about the "purity" of the artform. I've read a decent number of scanlations in my day, and seriously, people, the official English versions are always better. "Literal" translations be damned. I think there is a serious misconception there that is possibly related to the downfall of a basic understanding of proper English grammar (that allows abominations like the early DMP yaoi novels to happen and no one demanding their money back--had there been fan translations of those books in the first place, though, I guarantee you they wouldn't have been any better). Just because you get "closer" to the original Japanese doesn't make it a better read.

I think my biggest complaint, though, would be the general sense of entitlement that these people seem to have about anime, as if they deserve to get it for free. Both the US and Japan are capitalist democracies. Nothing is free and everything is marketable. I just honestly wish that people would stop lying to themselves about the reality of what they are doing when they watch fansubs. It's like no one wants to believe they are doing something wrong so they convince themselves that they aren't. It isn't helping any of us in the long run and honestly it is denying the first step, rational debate, from ever being able to take place. I'm not telling anyone to stop doing anything, but please stop saying, "I'm not doing anything illegal and I'm not contributing to the problems with the industry by watching fansubs."

Ashen, you DO know that the bootleg DVDs support criminal activities (mafia, Yakuza, etc.) overseas, right? As much as I debate fansubs and their ethical value, bootlegs are TEN THOUSAND TIMES WORSE than fansubs, and they are not defensible by any terms. You had no right to buy those DVD rip bootleg sets, ESPECIALLY if you knew full well what they were beforehand.