Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Anime Pirates Off the Port Bow
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Kiwi93
Posts: 413 |
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As long as we have to pay for 5+ streaming services just to watch anime and not have a bunch of titles legally available piracy in anime will not die.
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Vanadise
 Posts: 535 |
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I assure you that you could have a single streaming service with literally every anime series on it that cost only $5/month (or an equivalent relatively small amount of your local currency), and there would still be people who pirate everything and are vocal and proud about it. You hear a lot of justifications about how legal solutions are too expensive or too complicated, or how it's really all about preservation, and in a few cases that's true, but the vast majority of people who pirate anime are just kids who don't want to pay for it and feel like they're sticking it to the man by being vocal about it. |
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2317 Location: Online Terminal |
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Kids and adults. Instead of thinking about it tribally, however, I would want to test a hypothesis (at least as far as modern privateers go.) As a child, you don't perceive the purchase of a lot of media; it just always exists as "TV" or "internet" or "radio." So as an adult, when you realize that this intangible but always-present thing isn't actually free and is in fact something you pay for, you bristle at that and choose to pirate. Also, the act of pirating a movie or show is so low-stakes that there is no moral quandary to help discourage it. As an aside I don't buy the pro-legal argument about interfaces simply because it's not a real-world argument anymore. If you're both streaming and pirating on a computer, maybe the legal site's UX is better, but a large swath of people will stream through a TV and pirate via computer, and those experiences are not the same. |
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Kiwi93
Posts: 413 |
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Oh yea I completely agree with you and I’m not saying that my statements are the only reason people pirate. I do agree that there are those who pirate because they don’t want to pay (I know some people personally who are like this). It at the same time I do believe that having shows and seasons fragmented amongst multiple streaming services doesn’t help. I do pay for CR and Hidive so i watch a lot of my anime legally but I still pirate a good amount of shows because i refuse to pay for 5-6 services to watch anime (People can call me entitled it’s whatever), and there are some old shows that aren’t available legally anywhere. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5959 Location: Virginia, United States |
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For the most part, people have their standard streaming services packages, (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney, and etc) and then add your anime streaming services on top of that. It is not unfair to say that their streaming costs could be a significant factor.
I have Crunchyroll and Amazon for anime, guess Hulu now too. The original Puella Magi Madoka Magica TV series has been trapped by Hulu for awhile now. I was hoping to buy a digital copy from Amazon, when I got the movies, but Hulu has it locked it for now. There will always be people who pirate, even if you gave them everything they want; but that doesn't mean everyone who pirates is like that. Yes, there is much less room for excuses now, but I see no swan song for piracy. There are still things you can't legally buy and if you are anime fanatic you are going to have to pay for multiple anime streaming services, on top of you mainstream services. Another reason anime piracy is not going anywhere, is the rest of the world. We in the West have much better options, but that is not so true everywhere else. With the mainstreaming and popularity of anime globally, there is a demand that is not being met. If you don't feed your citizen's their bread and circuses, they'll find a way to get it. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18508 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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While essentially true, I also regard this as a flimsy excuse for piracy in current time. About 90% of the anime I watch week-to-week is costing me less than $20 a month to view without commercials. Getting the rest costs $20-40 more (depending on your tolerance for commercials), but you get a lot beyond anime and can just turn those off for a season when nothing you care about is streaming on them. Granted, I am in the U.S., so pricing may be different for those who live elsewhere, but this is still vastly cheaper than cable. I could have afforded it easily with my part-time job had such things existed when I was a teen, and I came from a working-class family. Fansubs have served a valuable purpose for anime over the years - heck, in the earliest days of ANN's Preview Guide, it was done based on torrented fansubs - but there's less legitimate excuse for them nowadays, especially for rips of titles streaming on CR or HIDIVE. I probably still have hundreds of gigs of torrented fansubs on old devices, but I always deleted them as legitimate versions were released, so nearly all of what I have left should be only stuff that's never been officially licensed and released in English. That guides my current philosophy on pirate sites: I only use them for content that's not available elsewhere, with the minor exception of cases where a pirate site might have an uncensored version of something that's censored on a major site. (And even that's become rarer in the last year or so.) I'll also clarify that what I've said above only applies to people living in countries which have established, reliable access to legitimate anime streaming services. I'd be much more tolerant of fansubs in countries where that infrastructure doesn't exist and/or with languages that aren't covered by the major streaming services. |
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RobbiRobb
 Posts: 56 |
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Something discussions like this always fail to acknowledge is the fact that this view on piracy is often US-centric. Yeah, of course it's easy to say you should stop pirating when literally anything is available to you. But if you're from another country there is a decent chance anime are not available to watch legally for you. Hidive doesn't operate where I live, so I already lose out on about 1/5 of the entire anime season by default. Sure, I could use a VPN to get around that region block, but that's a legal gray area, so why bother? I'm not going to disregard the fact that people are pirating stuff just because they are lazy or don't want to pay - those people exist and there are a lot of them. But it's also still very much a service problem.
And this also extends beyond this. A recent example: A friend recently came back to watching anime and asked about Attack on Titan and whether it would be worth watching. Turns out, the first season isn't available on Crunchyroll anymore where he's living, so he can't watch it. Meanwhile the later seasons are still available. So now what? Buy the disc for $100 for what will probably be a single watch-through? Yeah no, that won't happen, that's really unproportional. And again it's a service problem, if it were available through streaming there would be no reason to pirate. Of course that wouldn't mean everyone would stop pirating, but it's not hard to imagine that people who have the disposable income would choose legal streaming over piracy if it were available to them. |
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Kiwi93
Posts: 413 |
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Man I wish I could upvote this, with the exception of YouTube anime is pretty much all I watch nowadays so I’m fine paying for Crunchyroll and Hidive since they cater to anime specifically, but if you want to keep up with seasonal anime you now also need Netflix, Hulu, Amazon as well as HBO MAX, I just cannot justify paying for these other services when I honestly do not care for most of their catalogs. |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18508 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Sure, if you want to keep up with every single series. Netflix only exclusively had one this season (two if you count the all-at-once drop of Terminator Zero). Hulu only has two, or three if you count Murai in Love. Prime didn't have any that I'm aware of, nor MAX. (Granted, MAX does have one upcoming, but only one IIRC.) So, again, you can pare down those services if you're not following the sole title or two that airs on them. And you can use ANN's Preview Guides to determine if that one series on one of the non-anime-focused services is worth paying for the monthly subscription or not. |
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Kiwi93
Posts: 413 |
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You know this is a very fair take and I do appreciate the response I still think it’s BS to have to pay for multiple services (especially for non anime focus ones) to watch anime shows, honestly my problem is I just watch too much lol and these past couple of seasons there have been some landing on Netflix and Hulu that I wanted to watch but didn’t want to pay the subs to watch them so I sailed the seas instead. |
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2623 Location: Germany |
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Baccano came out in the summer of 2007. 1080p torrents with lowered bit rates were common by then. Gurren Lagann started the season before and I distinctly remember seeing it in 1080p about a day after Japan aired it through the kindness of strangers.
How smug those 3/10 sites must feel right now but regular piracy sites that carry US shows also offer let´s say half of the seasonal anime in some cases. That´s how big the anime piracy Kraken has grown. No legal service will ever compete but that´s also why shows like Attack on Titan or Game of Thrones could grow so large into the mainstream. Type in watch X online into Google and there you have it. And as long as enough of those pirates buy merch of some kind then the rights holder can´t complain too much. Most anime obviously can´t sustain themselves through endless related means to generate revenue. Especially if the pirates look up where the anime ended to jump on a scanlation of the following chapter. Legal ways to watch anime collapse as fast as big piracy sites, that should always be the A story, so it´s all kind of a mess. |
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Glordit
 Posts: 696 |
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Just subscribe to ABEMA or dAnime. Problem solved. You only need a native understanding of Japanese. e: Just tallied up the costs to stream anime for me with: Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video & Crunchyroll (I am excluding Hidive & MAX as they are too much of a hustle to subscribe to since they not in my country) and it was the equivalent of about $23. Not bad at all, though I will admit regional pricing helps. |
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 700 |
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The literal article and multiple posts before you have acknowledged exactly that. The attempt to pretend it is unacknowledged in order to justify it carte blanche is as eternal and tiring as anything else and has always been addressed, and yet you still see attempts to pretend that anyone that supports legal avenues is somehow ignorant of something they’re literally addressing. |
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Connor Dino
Posts: 355 |
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Whew...thank god you guys said you aren't cops. We were really on the line there and I was about to light myself on fire. Excuse me as I shower off this gasoline.
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rizuchan
 Posts: 980 Location: Kansas |
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The "piracy culture" thing is an interesting discussion. Like, I don't chide kids and teens for watching anime by whatever means. Even when Crunchyroll is relatively cheap, not everyone can get their parents to pay for a subscription service. I remember being prideful of my anime mp4 collection back when buying a full series on DVD cost me my entire paycheck.
But I had a grown man in his 40s with a good paying job laugh at me a few months back when I mentioned watching anime on Crunchyroll and my physical media collection. "Why would you pay for anime?" like, at this stage of my life, why...wouldn't I? I know this guy spent more on coffee every week than a Crunchryroll sub costs. Piracy wasn't a convenience thing for him either, it was like, an identity thing. Being "immorally superior" or something. |
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