Japanese Government Enforcing Anti-Piracy Law on Anime and Manga - Update

[Mechamorph]

So best case scenario, their anti-piracy campaign succeeds and strangles interest in their products and worst case scenario it fails and breeds resentment within their foreign fanbase? I don't really see a particularly good "win" condition for the industry in this scenario but I am sure that the companies consider the loss of any foreign revenue as inconsequential. In the end all they'll have left will be a small handful otaku and without a critical mass necessary to make licensing a viable concern, the odds that anything will get brought over will dwindle. Excellent strategy, I applaud.

 

[Mechamorph]

Apologies for double posting. A glitch in my computer.

 

[michael87cn]

that picture of people literally reading books for free is perfect.

i hear its pretty common for japanese students to spend all day in a book story reading manga books.

 

[Infernal Lawyer]

I'm against piracy for the most part, but I draw the line when you don't give people the ability to actually pay you for your product: you don't have the right to ***** about people "stealing" your work if that's the only way they can obtain and consume it (yes, I DO mean assuming they have the cash and a card).

So as has been said if the Anime industry is only focusing on cutting down on piracy and not working on localizing the products and such, this will only end up hurting themselves. This is the digital age people, fucking act like it: you'll never come close to stopping the pirates if they have a better service.

 

[EMWISE94]

If we lived in a more competent world, I'd suggest that rather than cutting out the middle man that supplies the masses with their entertainment needs, why not give the middle man a job for it? Have scanlator/fansub groups be on a hosting site that has a subscription fee, in which the cash goes to the publishers and throws a bone to the translators seeing as how most of them operate on a 'donate to keep us alive' model.

As most have mentioned, getting a hold of manga/anime outside of the US is kinda hard and in most cases its just the popular stuff and its behind by like months or even years, cutting off the only tie most have to the stuff is only gonna further alienate Japanese media to the world. Then again, Japan always struck me as isolationist (maybe cause it is) and they just don't wanna bother with the rest of the world in terms of media at times.

 

[Alterego-X]

How does it work then? Bi-lingual Japanese people faithfully and without remuneration write subtitles over the dialogue? Is Engrish really evident in these translations? Or do we have western fans who speak Japanese? Do all anime films get the treatment, or only select few? Is it a small thing or industrial scale? Are there competing groups like there are for cracking (like Razor1911, Fairlight, Skidrow, etc)?

It's a rather agressively competent hobbyist scene, somewhat like the the PC modder scene that produces works like Skywind or Black Mesa, with people self-organizing themselves into working on a schedule in teams.

There are rival groups, and there are some ideological differences between their attitudes, they mostly tend to have drama about how liberal/literal a good translation has to be, how weeaboo-ish or westernized their style should be (in terms of leaving in honorifics, and other loanword jargon), and how much decorative visual touch should be added (specialized fonts, retouched in-universe texts, opening song karaoke effects, etc).

Fans just tend to pick their favrite and stay loyal to them. By and large they are more competent than professional subs. (Nowadays some works get instant official subs, and fansubbers still work on them, at least for fixing mistakes and adding decorative fluff).

 

[Shinkicker444]

I wouldn't mind a streaming site with ads (if it were free, if you charge I better not see ads), with no stupid region locking.

I used to use Crunchyroll for a while, until I started getting "Not available in your country." Yeah, I'm not going to wait for months or whatever until I can see it, I'll just get it from a subber (the official subs on CR were downright horrible at times, which is amusingly ironic since I use HorribleSubs who're actual fairly good). I will still buy the boxed set for series I enjoy though, but initial viewing I'll watch via sub treating it as though it were any other show aired on TV.

 

[Strazdas]

In 2012 Japanese government enacted a bill that punished both people who uploaded copyright infringing material and people who downloaded the material. The jail sentence can be as long as two years for downloading copyright infringing material and as long as 10 years for uploading it.

really Japan? get more jailtime for uploading a comic book than for murder? yeah, great way to fight for betterment of your citizens right there!

Honestly, this has been the problem for most industries. Music industry. Movie industry. Man, how awesome would it be if someone actually LEARNT something from all of this and didnt go through the EXACT same hoops as the stupid industry before them did?

but that would imply that the industry CEOs arent stuck in 20th century and their lawyers arent running everything. we both know thats not true.

If someone can point me to a site with English subs that I can download DRM free, 1080p episodes for three dollars I would be over the moon.

This is my main concern. Why is it that there are no drm-free digital video services yet? Until that happens, they won't be competing for any pirate's cash. Streaming isn't really a bad thing, but if your Internet can't keep up with it the quality will be shit and it can be a hassle to skip forward and back and streams will occasionally freeze. Shit, spotty Internet service works just fine for torrenting though which can be started and stopped at anytime and you'll end up with a better quality and more flexible product than even the fastest Internet streams

yes. DRM free high quality video download service is the only way to combat piracy, because pirates already provide you this. and no, shit quality netflix streams are not competition to pirates. but then we cant even get DRM free on game video we own thanks to whatever moron decided that integrating DRM into HDMI cables was a good idea. Firefox should not have gone to support netflix DRM, that kind of DRM should be banned as anticonsumer.

Problem here is in this particular industry it's going to be very very hard to beat the 'pirates' service. An episode/chapter is released in Japan and within 24 hours it's been professionally subbed/translated and readily available in your language. The official business can never be that quick when you start taking regionalism into account, not to mention all the other stuff they have to catch up on.

regionalism should not even be a thing. you should release it worldwide at the same time, no compromises.

 

[Super Cyborg]

There are series I love, and if I can buy it, I will. One Piece is my favorite manga, so I buy the volumes when they come out, or sometimes wait till all the volumes of an arc are finished and buy multiple volume. I do this because I want, and should, support the author of material, because that's how they are making their livelihood. Problem is, except for the big series that I read, a lot of the ones I read or want to read I cannot buy, or don't want to have to buy the volumes, because it would take up to much space, and I don't care for them as much. I've been reading through JoJo's Bizzare Adventure, and I would love to support Araki in some way. The problem is that only the third part is available for purchase, and that's the only way to support him.

In the states, there is the whole Shonen Jump Alpha, which you pay a subscription to read chapters of shonen jump manga a week after it was released in Japan. Problem is it's only manga from that magazine, and I believe the chapters that are put up are there for a limited amount of time. If they only ask for the series that can be found easily to be taken down, and make it affordable for people to see, then that is understandable, but still a bad move. However, if they ask for series that haven't been officially translated outside of Japan, then that's going to cause a big problem.

 

[soren7550]

[ All in all, while many sites might be taken down because of this, new ones will replace them, just like back when One Manga went down (anyone remember that site).

Yeah, I remember that whole debacle. Happened while I was in high school, so that had to be about five years ago. After the initial anger of no longer having easy access to manga, everyone just moved to the Spectrum. Looks like they're now starting to go through the same thing though.

More on topic, this is a problem that likely isn't going to go away due to the before mentioned fact that a whole lot of anime and manga don't get released outside of Japan, and if they do, it takes a very long time and is more often than not will be very expensive (namely in the anime department).

Let's look at a recent example, Attack on Titan.

The latest issue of the manga to be released in the U.S. is volume 12, which was released on April 29th, 2014. In Japan, volume 12 came out on December 9th 2012, and are about to get volume 14. They also have a means to read the new chapters as they are released legally (which [as far as I'm aware] no one outside of Japan can do, or even read chapters in their non-volume form).

For the anime, in the U.S. the first 13 episodes of the dub came out on DVD on June 3rd, 2014, with the other twelve to come out in September maybe (I don't know if this means it airing on TV or its release on DVD). [For the life of me, I can't get a solid date on when the episodes aired on TV. I get anything from February to May.]
In Japan, the anime started airing an episode a week from April 2013 to September of the same year. As far as I'm aware, the complete DVD box set of the first season came out not too long after the season concluded (again, can't get solid dates).

THIS IS FOR SOMETHING THAT IS POPULAR. You have to wait up to a year or even more after its release in Japan to get anything official in English! If they want to combat piracy, they need to drastically reduce the time it takes for it to come out in English, at the very least.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

While I am generally against this sort of thing, I find it interesting that they're planning to sell episodes online for a few dollars each. Depending on how that works, that could be very interesting. Re: Madoka (here's hoping Madoka gets a cheaper re-release).

However, lately, I've been doing all my anime watching on... Hulu. (If you haven't seen it already, check out my review of Sailor Moon Crystal over in the Review section of the forum).

In addition to new stuff, or at least new to me, I've been watching old favorites. Been watching Ranma 1/2. Awesomeness.

So yeah... annoyed by the attack on fansubbers, but interested in this new service they mentioned.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

By and large they are more competent than professional subs.

Ain't that the truth.

Back when they released Utena on DVD, I was saddened because it had a translation error. How did I know? Because my VHS fansub had the line correctly translated, and when I noticed the difference, I looked it up.

A couple years back when they released the remastered Utena DVDs, I bought them for crisp remastered graphics. I watched that episode... and the translation error was still in there. They fixed the graphics, but the translation errors remained.

**sigh**

 

[Nurb]

There's lots of movies and shows that never release outside of Japan, so if they're not interested in having dirty gaijin money anyway, fansubs will exist. It's their own damn fault for not persuing a market that exists or expecting anyone interested to learn japanese and buy it directly from a japanese site.

It seems like corporations are getting their own offices in police departments and angencies all over the civilized world.

 

[Alterego-X]

this aspect of fan translations is not one I've heard about before and is likely unique to anime as a Japanese export.

Other Japanese exports alo get fan translated, even Visual novels and light novels with massive amounts of text. (although their translation quality is somewhat lower because of that and the work on them might take years, not days).

 

[Alterego-X]

"Professionally translated" is kinda laughable when most fansubs insist on leaving chan or san on names despite any decent translator will know that makes you a very bad translator. If a word isn't impossible to translate, AKA. Tsundere, it should be translated. And if you cant translate it into an equivalent, 99% of the time its because its irrelevant.

But RandV80 was talking abbout the audience's highest expectations being met, not about how academic schools of professional translation would feel about it.

After all, any famous fansubbers' stances are rather well-known on this issue, if people would dislike it they would be free to pick one that is more appropriately targeting their expectations. But in reality, when even now there are some people who actively go out of their way to get the honorific-keeping fansub versions rather than liberal official subs, that just demonstrates the point that fansubs can't be competed with. Which is more relevant than any abstract principles of "professionalism".



And anyways, how liberal a translator should get, is a subjective issue. Any decent translator will know that there is no inherently "right" and "wrong" way to approximate a cultural flavor, it's a matter of knowing your audience and your specific goals. There are plenty of official translators that leave foreign honorifics in. You can hardly find an Alexandre Dumas translation without "monsieur"s thrown around. Even in Japanese tranlations, the character is Mr. Bean, not Bean-san, and Agent Smith is calling Neo Misuta Anderson. There are some others where it's dropped, where no excesive britishness or specific flavor of American office formality needs to be established, but this is a case by case basis.

Tsundere is entirely possible to translate. Depending on the context you can go with "bipolar", although that's sometimes misleading. I once saw the solution "hot n' cold", although that can be a bit hard to figure out on the fly. There is also a good match, that anglicized loanword that most viewers are likely to be familiar with... which would be "tsundere". Sometimes katana is translated as "katana", and shogun is translated as "shogun".

Specifically avoiding that option because "every word should be translated", has less to do with an attempt to make a comprehendable translation, and more with dogmatic insistence on language purity, and what "ough to" be proper english.

 

[Piorn]

So they think shutting down the only way to get anime is going to stop piracy, instead of offering easier, safer and reasonably cheap options to buy it, which would eliminate the need for piracy?
People don't pirate for fun, they do it because it's the best and usually the only option.

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

A nice idea, but outside of Japan at least, the largest problem is they simply do not licence it for many countries. The USA seems to get a reasonable amount of online options but beyond that you are lucky if a hugely popular series gets a Western DVD release within 2 years of a Japanese one.

When you compare that to some non-Americans not being willing to wait a week or even a day for a US television program to be released before pirating it, it does put it in perspective.

Even with legal avenues such as Funimation and CrunchyRoll, they have bizarre restrictions on which countries can watch what. The Anime and Manga industry consider non-Japanese countries to be a very low priority a lot of the time. So while piracy is bad, they really should not be surprised how bad it is.

A lot of shows are refused licensing or have it delayed because of there fear of reverse importing. That the Japanese fans will wait to buy the cheaper US release rather than pay $60+ for 2 episodes of there normal release (some anime cost as much as $100 for a 22 min episode in Japan)

Not only this, but some publishers just flat out have no way to get certain things over here. Many Gundam series have not, and likely never will, arrive stateside. I mean, Gundam is one of the largest standing anime names out there and has a HUGE following in Japan, and if there some of it that we can't get over here, it doesn't give you much hope for being able to watch things legally.

Crunchy Roll is great, but I think that piracy is always going to be an issue where Anime and Manga are concerned.

 

[loa]

Alright fine, so when will they release their reasonably priced, internationally available subscription service to get that stuff then?
Cause there's no way in hell I'll ever fill an entire bookshelf up with evangelion, naruto, berserk & co manga volumes along with the occasional one-off volume of some random manga that turned out to be crap that cost 5 bucks each again.
Those were the dark ages where tenchi muyo was "the best" since our overpriced options were limited and I'd like it if we didn't do that again.

Oh wait they won't, they'll just step on the only channel for some countries to obtain certain anime and manga like this will fix anything.