Forum - View topicImitations, Fakes and Piracy in Manga and Anime
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2 Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
DRosencraft
Posts: 667 |
|
|||||||
I think this is another crucial part about the whole "education of the consumer" aspect. The notion that Japan, or any developed nation, doesn't have copyright laws is one of those headscratchers that you wonder where the misinformation came from. The clear effect is that some individuals end up thinking that copyright and trademark violations are just vapor from some big company trying to scare people. The tolerance aspect is likely not helpful either, probably part of the problem. It seems to be the anime/manga industry's attempt to insert their own variation of fair-use by broad-based assent. But there aren't a lot of rules, and absent those rules you're going to have problems directing behavior, so when someone ascribes similar behavior to stuff other than doujinshi (not even realizing doujinshi just means self-published, not specifically derivate works) explaining the difference becomes a scatter-shot of rationalizations. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
SHD
Posts: 1752 |
|
|||||||
How is this a strawman argument? People have no access to content they want to consume. Even if they want to pay they literally can't, they're not allowed to. And I've yet to meet anyone to explain to me how, exactly, are people hurting creators/companies/etc. by not paying for something they are not allowed to pay for (and is also digital so it's not like they're taking something that someone else could have bought). And before some people inevitably trot out the holier-than-thou "it's a luxury not a right" and "back when I was young when I couldn't have X I had something else" etc. treatises, I'd just like to note that it's so damn easy to brush off geoblocking as no big deal when you're in the US and 99.9% of everything is already available to you and is in fact designed to cater to you. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
DRosencraft
Posts: 667 |
|
|||||||
It's not "holier than thou" to say you or have no right to non life-essential items duly created by another person, regardless of our own perception of what harm it might cause someone else. I own my own home, I don't have to prove it caused any harm to me at all to have you thrown in jail for repeatedly ignoring a "do not trespass" sign as you take a shortcut across my yard to wherever you're going. Yes, sorry to say, your particular choice of entertainment is a luxury, not a right. Access to that luxury has its limits. No one is targeting you, telling you you can't enjoy anime and manga. But it's someone else's decision on where to make that available. You could throw the greatest parties ever, have a massive guest list, but if I don't make the guest list I don't get to come in unless you say so. No matter how much fun your parties are, even if I can somehow empirically prove that my being there would not only not hurt your party but everyone would have more fun, I don't get in the door unless you say so. You could let me into the parties this week and not next week's; that's your choice to make, not mine. It's the same principle here. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
lossthief
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 1416 |
|
|||||||
|
On the one hand, there is absolutely work to be done on the side of the industry to better serve a global audience. Regional restrictions make less sense every year and continue to leave entire markets in the dark with little option for staying up to date in anime or manga spheres outside of piracy. While translation has progressed leaps and bounds in the past decade, there are still plenty of cases where a series is available in certain territories, but not in the language most fans living there speak or read.
At the same time, I find the continued argument that piracy is foremost a service issue less convincing every week. Shueisha, through both Viz's Shonen Jump simulpub releases and MangaPLUS, have made it incredibly easy, convenient, and FREE to read the latest chapters of many of their biggest titles. Every single week the latest chapters of My Hero Academia, One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, and the rest of the WSJ line-up are available for free, in English, at roughly 1am in Japan. This is damn near as close as you can possibly get to platonic idea of availability: it's fully translated, high quality digital releases of these series barely an hour after they'd be available in Japan, and through one or both services are available in 95% of the world. Yet people still pirate these series through scanlations, made from copies of the magazine issues released before their street date. They do it reliably and with enough volume that multiple times in the last year events of certain chapters have trended on social media days before WSJ even releases in Japan. Hell, this past week it happened with just a summary of the next MHA chapter without it even being fan-translated. These are people who see a free, rock-solid reliable official release and say "No thank you" to read inferior quality copies/translations, just to be a couple days early. So what, exactly, is the "Service issue" left to address in this case? What is there for Shueisha to change, outside of full-on eliminating the print version of the magazine to cut off the leaks? The issue, to me, cannot solely be one of availability, because this is a significant chunk of these series' audience that actively are choosing to pirate it for reasons that can only exist because the work is pirated. Outside of changing fan culture - encouraging legitimate sources and pushing people away from pirated releases - I don't see what else there is to be done. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
OrdepNM
 Posts: 244 |
|
|||||||
I don't think anyone is arguing they have a right to any kind of entertainment content. It is an illegal activity no matter how you slice it, but given that at present, enforcing legislation at the consumer level is nigh-impossible, the issue transfers to the realm of morals, essentially whether you should feel bad for pirating due to its impact on the industry. Personally I subscribe to Netflix and Crunchyroll and I'll pay for a month of HiDive like once a year to catch up with the 2 or 3 shows they added to the library since last time (if even, the only thing they've added this year so far was Redo of Healer and Non Non Biyori). Funimation tough? Yeah, I pirate those, I'm currently pirating Vivy because I get a "Sorry, but this content isn't avaliable in your country" banner when I try to access the entire website (at least Crunchyroll has the decency to let me access the website before telling me I can't watch Konosuba but that's another matter). On to the morals issue, do I feel bad? Lol no. Funi literally refuses to take my money, they don't even have a "leave your email and location and we'll inform you when we're ready to service your area" Netflix used to have, they clearly just want me to go away so me pirating it has no effect on their business, either direct or indirect. I don't advertise where you can pirate it online and I know I can't exactly get mad if they find a way to shut down the service I use since yes, it is copyright theft, but I honestly can't think of a more victimless crime so I'm gonna keep watching Vivy and be happier for it. The points you raise are more relevant in the case of people who refuse to buy a CR subscription because it's actually *more* expensive in my country than in the US, despite having a sizeable chunk of the library geoblocked away anyway. True, it's their product and it's their pricing, but in a global market, where people know they're paying more for less compared to other consumers, I can't exactly call it surpsing that people decide to go through the piracy route as an emotional response. No one likes getting ripped off. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
DRosencraft
Posts: 667 |
|
|||||||
|
[quote="OrdepNM"]
But again, it IS the same issue. You don't like Funimation because they won't sell you their product. Fine, you don't have to like them at all. That doesn't give you the moral indignation to say I'll just get it from someone else illegally. The idea problem is too big to fix is self-serving and I see this intellectually dishonest argument it all the time. You're basically saying, I know so many other people are doing it, I don't care to moderate my own behavior unless someone comes after me. It's like the childhood admonishment from parents about jumping off a bridge because your friends did it too. All sorts of crimes continue to take place despite literal centuries of laws in place to fight the behavior. Petty theft still happens all the time, yet has been against the law in some form or fashion around the world for ages. But I don't hear anyone suggesting the laws against theft shouldn't apply anymore, except when it applies to someone else's intellectual property. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
OrdepNM
Posts: 244 |
|
|||||||
Who said anything about indignation? The closest I get to indignation with Funi is that it's dumb to geoblock their entire website rather than just the content, like any other streaming service does. This would avoid them embarrassing situations like when they directed their Mexican and Brazilian audience towards a link with an announcement on when they'd start serving those countries - only for the link to land them on the geoblock page anyway. From my end tough, I'm just reacting to the situation as Funimation established it and acting in the way that best fits with my morals as a consumer and my desire to consume a product.
The problem is neither too big to fix nor particularly hard, but it is entirely on the court of Funimation to fix it, I can't even let them know I'd like to pay for their service like Netflix used to do.
That's not even close to what I'm saying. I do know people who pirate anime, most (all?) of them won't even bother conjuring up a justification for why they should be allowed to do it - they do it because they can. and while I may disagree with their feelings on the issue, it's not my place or duty to judge them. Enforceability of the rules does play a part here wether you like it or not. If the rules, as they stand, are effectively unenforceable, then it falls on the morals of the person to follow them or not. If we're talking about my morals, then the fact that plenty of people do it has absolutely no bearing on how I choose to proceed, as you claim. Otherwise I wouldn't be paying Netflix and Crunchyroll monthly. For the issue of Funimation, the issue is separate as the situation they created erases all my moral qualms about pirating their content. It's not an issue of moral indignation as you claim but simple cost-benefit utilitarian consideration with all stakeholders being taken into account. The calculation goes something like this: ->I want to watch Vivy. It's on Funimation. I can: A) Not watch it. This benefits: No one. This hinders: Me, because I don't watch it, I have to see people discuss it online, potentially get spoiled for if/when I get a chance to watch it and I have to live with that upsetting feeling -no matter how small in the grand scheme of things- that I have to pass on an experience I'd like to partake in because I'm literally turned at the door. or I can B) Watch it illegaly. This benefits: Me, because I watch it and I extract benefit from it. This hinders: No one.Because Funimation expressly does not want my money, they can't claim, no matter how indirectly, that I'm a lost sale, that I'm hurting their bottom line or that I'm artificially reducing their viewership numbers. Thus, taking the interest of all of society in account rather than my self-interest, I consider that option B provides the best overall benefit - because A benefits absolutely no one. There is something to be said about the idea that people should strictly follow rules irregardless of the context and wether they have any benefit to society or the rule of law, but as someone who does a quick 5 second jaywalk on my way to and from work in order to avoid a 10 minutes and 2 sets of stairs detour to get accross - which would then force me to catch an earlier, more crowded train, I disagree with that stance and believe one should still take into account the scenario in which each situation takes place and act according to what's best for the collective. I'm sure the police officers I see all the time doing the exact same jaywalk on their foot patrols feel the same. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
NeverConvex
 Subscriber Posts: 2371 |
|
|||||||
Any idea if there are quantitative studies of the volume of illegal scanlations? That doesn't seem like it should be a very difficult thing for researchers to estimate, considering how widely available and easily crawled many of the relevant sites are. I wonder whether there's evidence that the services you mention at least detectably decreased the pirating rate, here; I expect there's a significant chunk of pirating that is going to be really intransigent (some combination of people who just don't care, and people who don't have enough disposable income to be willing to pay for these services), but I'd also be surprised if there aren't quite a number of consumers who pirated primarily because they didn't have access. It would be really nice to have an estimate of the relevant [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity_(economics)]cross-price elasticity[/url]; at least, I think that's a nice way to think about it. I can only speak anecdotally -- and not about manga, but about anime -- but I personally used to pirate anime near exclusively, back in undergraduate and earlier, before I had much disposable income. On the other hand, now that I've got a full-time job with a decent salary, I consume anime legally in 99% of circumstances; I can think of exactly one time in the past 10 years where I've not been able to find a way to pay for a show and ended up watching it on some random bootlegged upload. I'm not sure if my attitude and situation are common or rare, but I have trouble believing they're so uncommon as to make the effect on piracy of availability of these legal alternatives near 0%. (Well, I suppose I would have been in the intransigent/nonresponsive category 10 years ago, and would already be a legal consumer today, but I guess I mean that I doubt it is uncommon that some people want to consume this content legally and have the disposable income to reasonably do so but don't/didn't have access to the legal service.) |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
lossthief
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 1416 |
|
|||||||
I don't know of any particular studies, but with regards to the Shonen Jump series I mentioned, last year or so 2 of the biggest sources for early scanlations were hit with Cease & Desist messages and shut down. The following week, readership on MangaPLUS increased significantly for nearly every WSJ series, in some cases doubling or more the views they received just a week earlier.
I seriously doubt in this case that disposable income has anything to do with it. The subject here is people reading the latest chapters of series as they release in Japan, which Viz and MangaPLUS provide for free going back 3 chapters. One could argue some people without income/access will read scans to catch up on the series before becoming current, but that doesn't factor in for people who insist on reading chapters days before the magazine even goes on sale in Japan. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2371 |
|
|||||||
That's pretty interesting, thanks. I wonder if there's some price point at which the large group who apparently switch services when the scanlation ones aren't available would voluntarily opt for the legal services, or if they're just largely unwilling to pay any price whatsoever.
Oh, I must've missed that. Seems like there are some follow-up questions that'd be useful to try to figure out answers to (are most of the people doing this very young? do many of them access the legal services much as well and make legitimate purchases, too, or are they pretty much fully substituting pirated access for legal access?), but this point does persuade me to be a fair bit more pessimistic about those answers. Appreciate the explanation. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6883 Location: Kazune City |
|
|||||||
A number of creators would disagree! First off, I don't morally condemn people in underserved regions for pirating content that isn't legally available to them, just as I wouldn't condemn myself or my fellow USians for pirating something old/obscure/out-of-print. That said, I think that if these underserved areas have a viable paying audience for anime, the solution lies with more local companies that're actually IN those regions (and thus more attuned to local economics, languages, content regulations, fanbase preferences, etc.) rising up and acquiring the licenses, rather than everyone expecting US companies to serve nearly every corner of the globe. However, a look at the traffic numbers for the major illegal sites shows that a good 30-40% plurality of their visits come from the US and Japan... which don't exactly lack for legal options. As I went into excessive detail here, most of the justifications for piracy in well-served regions don't hold water, since pirates are primarily watching the same shows, videos, and translations offered by legal sites, meaning that anime piracy in well-served regions is a pricing problem, not a service problem. The "multiple subscriptions" complaints boil down to price as well, since pirates are perfectly willing to navigate to multiple sites to get want they want, as long as it's free. (And basic math stipulates that those who don't want to pay $8 + $7 for two sites are unlikely to pay $15 for one.) The view counts on pirate sites show that most users don't care about older anime, so older shows being removed or unavailable on legal sites is not all that relevant. As for exclusivity, it's quite possible that Japanese companies don't want to deal with 5 different companies when it comes to negotiating contracts and sending out materials on a weekly basis, or have 5 different translations of their work floating around. And it doesn't really matter, as even if exclusivity went away, pirate sites would still have a better selection for free.
PC games sellers also have things like DRM, multiplayer servers, updates/patches, and other technical features they can use to make buying a game a better experience than pirating it and risking malware. Not so with media distributors, who can't make "not-everything for not-free" more convenient than "everything for free." Besides, if gamers evaluated Steam the way anime viewers judge legal anime services, Steam would've been burned to the ground by piracy ages ago for not letting gamers play any video game ever made for $5 a month.
There's basically a whole mythological system behind the pro-piracy and anti-industry movements, one that casts Japan as a Mystical Exotic Land, separated by oceans, a language barrier, and cultural differences from all those silly Western concerns like "copyright" and "international revenue". Perhaps it stems from the 90s/00s fansubbing era, when some releases would have disclaimers like "please stop distributing when this show is licensed in your area," which obscured the fact that if something is copyrighted in Japan, it's also copyrighted in any other country of consequence. Among other things anime viewers should know: * The Japanese side of the global anime industry has known and cared about overseas piracy for a long time, * Overseas revenue is an increasingly important part of the Japanese industry's and studios' revenue, not just extra bonus "pocket change." * A decline in the fortunes of overseas distributors has real and dire consequences on the Japanese side of the industry, as we saw in the wake of the 2007 market crash -- fewer anime produced, worse budgets, less innovative/risky content, more "safe" products that pandered to Japanese fans. And Japanese disc sales have fallen off so much since then that they might not keep the industry afloat in the event of another piracy-induced overseas catastrophe. * Access to legal anime in the US is cheaper than it's ever been, even if* you decide to be a perfect angel and subscribe to every service out there. Even just 2-3 services get you 90-95% of airing anime and massive back catalogues. I don't exactly feel "ripped off" as a consumer if I can subscribe to 3 services for a year for about what it cost to buy one 26-episode series back in 2005. (*I don't expect anyone to do this -- I advocate finding an affordable compromise between "pay for everything" and "pay for nothing.") |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
SHD
Posts: 1752 |
|
|||||||
|
I'd just like to quietly point out that yet again nobody posted a convincing argument about how pirating stuff one is geoblocked from legally obtaining hurts anyone, including the copyright holder.
That's amazing and I'm really happy for all of you guys in the US. I mean... I understand that geoblocking is not much of an issue in the US , and I know that this is ANN and it's US-centric by nature and so on but every once in a while it would be nice if more people remembered that there's a whole world out there where access to digital services is very different than in the US (and not just for anime). (I remember the time I wanted to buy a certain manga in digital version in English specifically, for a project I was doing. I couldn't. I could've bought it in German, French or Italian, but in English - nope, no chance. I also remember the times I wanted to watch anime, only to find it's not available in my country. It was usually available in a neighboring country and in select other countries in the EU, but in mine? nope. Or all those times that I wanted to buy some manga, in Japanese this time, only to find that surprise, I couldn't because they could only be bought in Japan, even though they were digital releases. And so on...) |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 663 |
|
|||||||
You quoted Zalis while completely ignoring his entire first paragraph in order to continue pretending he’s making an argument that he’s not. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
El Hermano
 Posts: 450 Location: Texas |
|
|||||||
They may not hold water for you, but everyone has their own values and priorities. You may not personally care about politics or censorship, but for some people it's a deal breaker. Some people just refuse to support individuals or companies for personal reasons like with Rurouni Kenshin or Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken but still want to read their work. Arguing if they're entitled to a work or not isn't going to get them to stop since people can't be shamed into stop pirating so ultimately the morality of the subject is irrelevant and it comes down to a pragmatic issue. It's very easy to pirate anime, manga, LNs, and other media so the industry can either try to understand and maybe alleviate why people pirate or simply write pirates off as customers. I'm sure companies like Seven Seas, Viz and Funimation know that altering work will alienate a part of the fanbase but it must not hurt their bottom line enough to get them to stop, in which case piracy must not be that big deal for them. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group