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No more Anime and Manga piracy?


Nosebleed

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Update 2 (List of sites affected): https://forums.fuwanovel.net/index.php?/topic/5768-no-more-anime-and-manga-piracy/?p=142731

Update (7/30): https://forums.fuwanovel.net/index.php?/topic/5768-no-more-anime-and-manga-piracy/?p=142490

 

So Japan decided that they're going to partner up with 15 major anime and manga publishers and send requests to 580 foreign sites to remove the content they illegally uploaded.

 

This affects both anime and manga. Of course we don't know which sites are going to be affected, as far as we're concerned it might not be any site we visit, but it's still something to keep in mind.

 

The operation starts on August 1st:

"On August 1, the government will start simultaneously sending requests to delete illegal anime and manga contents to the operators of the 580 foreign pirate sites which they have found. In addition, the operation will launch a new site to guide the fans to a legitimate site offering some 250 titles including the latest ones at a cost of several hundred yen."

 

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry production spokesman also said this:

“We want to create a project so that anime fans overseas can enjoy Japanese content legally and without infringement worries while the profits are paid to anime production companies and publishers,”

 

Implying that they're going to find a solution to give us, foreigners, a way to get the manga and anime they removed legally.

 

 

How do you feel about this? Do you think they're actually going to achieve less pirating or is this just useless effort? And any hopes of us getting more anime and manga through legal means?

 

Me personally I don't believe they'll ever end piracy, trying to control the internet is a ridiculous fantasy. I think that, even if they manage to take all the content from these sites, another 600 new sites will just appear again, that is if the sites they're targetting even comply to their terms which I believe will be hard to achieve for all of them.

 

But it's also a nice thing that they're recognizing the foreign market for anime and manga and said they're willing to open up their market to give us even more anime and manga. At least according to the spokesman, it could all be a lie, but it'd be nice if it weren't.

 

 

Sources:

http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2014/07/28/japanese-government-to-start-anti-animemanga-piracy-operation-next-month

http://torrentfreak.com/japan-to-crack-down-on-anime-and-manga-piracy-140728/

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I agree about futility part. Attempts to remove piracy in history have always been useless or backfired. You can encourage people to spend more but not stop pirates. Best way to encourage people spend money is to engage their fans and community by inspiring love and loyalty to the brand.

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For us, who speak more than one language, this is kind of wasted effort. I highly doubt they'll be able to stop piracy in english to begin with, they going out of their way to stop some underground Brazillian blogs which upload stuff with portuguese subs is kinda ridiculous.

 

Don't think they'll ever stop anime piracy as a whole.

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Japanese goverment facing financial problems? Check. Japanese goverment finally acknowledging A/M industry as a serious business? Check. Japanese goverment trying to find new and reliable sources of income? Check.

 

They aren't first who tried to control the internet. Little they know it's as futile, as trying to make our world a "better world" for everyone. History shows that any of such endeavours ended preety abruptly. If anything, the mess caused by their greed to fully monetize on a "virtual" monopoly they're trying to force through might only create a massive backlash, with people intentionally boycotting japanese shit to teach them a lesson.

 

I doubt western communities have to worry about anything; japanese are so old fashioned and silly when it comes to tilting at windmills, soon enough they will start wondering whether it was really worth it; the costs of this campaign will quickly outweigh any potential profits.

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I don't think they're revenue will be an excessively large amount. Anime is a popular thing but not popular enough for people to actually go an buy it. Most of the people I know watch it for free. Most of the people I know do not have the money to pay for subscriptions on a legal anime site. 

This is a step back for most of us, A step forward for the Industry.

 

I do not think there is a certified way to "STOP" Piracy XD. The reason it exists is because people want what they are not able to have. 

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I would happily pay money to a site to watch it legally, if it was subbed, good quality and most of all, ran on servers that didn't buffer every few minutes.

 

Most of all though, you know all those different series you are running this season? Yeah, make sure they are on one site, I have little interest in having to sub to a bunch of sites. Also, only go after sites hosting content you are willing to bring over to the west, I want to be able to watch any series out, give me a way to give you money to do that and I will.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFpnW5En33M

I think we need gather all the pirates lords~~

 

Jokes aside,

I think they cant close all the piracy website....nobody can control the internet.

Well i wont say i never pirated anything(who doesnt?) but i did buy official products range from DVD's and BD's, yet i still prefer downloading from sites.

However i wont think for another second to buy my fav animes BD's and other stuff, and i wouldnt mind to pay a lil bit for streaming sites for my portable devices.

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According to Crunchy the loss they estimated from these pirate sites is 560 billion yen or 5.5 billion dollars.

Not sure if the cost of operation will be higher but that's what they said.

 

I agree wtih Kendjin, if they are taking down series that are not available anywhere legally, I want them to offer me a way to watch/read them legally and with good quality. Otherwise they're just taking content from us which is a pretty bad move.

 

I doubt anime will be majorly affected by this since anime pirating is huge, but manga concerns me if this operation actually achieves to remove manga from manga hosting sites. There's so much manga that doesn't get translated officially (hell not even half the manga that gets put out even has an fan translation) and even official releases more often than not get dropped halfway, meaning there is no way for us to finish a story without using a more illegal method. I don't want them to remove an already scarce resource from me.

 

Well in the end I still doubt this will achieve anything major. It's just ridiculous to think you can control the content on the internet.

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Man, I hope it doesn't affect me a lot, as getting anime legally here is really a pain in the ass. Local stores rarely sell anime, and if they do, it's chinese subbed. Sites like Crunchy and FUNimation for some reason hates my country and blocks us. 

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Well in the end I still doubt this will achieve anything major. It's just ridiculous to think you can control the content on the internet.

Depends. They can't control everything but they can make life really difficult for us. Imagine they have the weight to take down Nyaa? Or HorribleSubs and the other Crunchy rippers? How much time before other rippers get a good system in place, and before fan teams get back into place?

 

I don't think it will be of that order of magnitude but who knows. As you said I'd be more worried about manga than anime. Targeting scanlation websites is probably easier.

 

But I think the main goal of this operation is to rack up some money by getting some people who don't have access to CR (which already covers almost everything for people who have access to it TBH) to legally get their stuff, which is not a bad thing really. A cheap legal offer can't be bad - no guarantee it will be of quality though.

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Assuming they have the power to take down Nyaa it'll be a big hit that would hinder us for a while, but it's not such a hit that would cause the whole anime pirating thing to go down in flames. If it's not on Nyaa it'll just go to another torrent site. And that is if Nyaa doesn't eventually come back.

I mean just look at megaupload for example, it was taken down a couple years ago by the US Government (which has much more power than the Japan government I'm assuming) and now it's used worldwide again (under a different name) and it's doing the exact same thing it did previously pretty much.

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That actually sounds like a lot of websites, though I'm curious to see how useless this is going to be:p

Will they be able to do anything about websites that don't comply? I don't know how these type of things work.

They did used the word 'request' though, so that's actually an interesting point to note...

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personally i wouldnt watch anime on "3rd party" sites if there was a good alternative. i dont mind paying. was paying crunchyroll for years.

the problem is the licensing of some animes dont cover EU.  so we get blocked out of the content. 

This.

I can't begin to describe how frustrating it is to go on Crunchy to try and support the industry and getting denied my anime because of "licensing agreements".

It's just as frustrating as going on youtube and seeing "This video is not available in your region"

 

Because you know, god forbid other countries that don't speak english ever watch anime. That's just ridiculous.

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They can't take down Nyaa, simply because Nyaa doesn't host the files - they are just a tracker. If anything, they can only request for a complete removal of all the desired "illegal" torrents from their DB, that's it. And guess what? It will take them time, if anything just to prepare a list and it will cost a lot of money. Any intelligent person knows that in overall, it's unworthy to even try and pursue such operations; when a single site falls, two, three new ones appear after it. They won't remove the sources either - those files will still exist and people will find new ways to share them. Those old pricks running japanese gov do not even know how p2p networks work, otherwise they wouldn't even try to waste their taxpayer's money on such a worthless operation.

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personally i wouldnt watch anime on "3rd party" sites if there was a good alternative. i dont mind paying. was paying crunchyroll for years.

the problem is the licensing of some animes dont cover EU.  so we get blocked out of the content. 

 

Yup, exactly what I thought.

 

I wouldn't like them blocking content I couldn't have acces to otherwise.

Same issue as fan translation.

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I agree that they will never stop piracy, maybe slow it down a bit here and there but never stop. I for one have no problem paying for some thing so long as i am not getting riped off in the deal. I have seen more then a few edited VNs and some times manga that are release for people outside japan.

 

I dont want a family friendly version or some thing missing parts, in which case i will get the full version how ever i can.

 

But if what they offer is the full thing and its in english then i see no problem.

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*cough* thepiratebay. didnt host any files either. and now theyr in jail

Only the creators, but that didn't affect the website at all. The arrests were actually a part of a large scale, international display made by US goverment to "teach these nasty pirates a lesson". And they did learned a lesson. Now we have TPB servers all over the globe.

 

If Japan has so much budget "deposits" to waste, they should rather fund the developers and help them personally TL and localize their works for oversea market, which would cut the costs tremendously and make both anime and manga a lot more available and affordable to everyone around the globe. They should work to correct their absurd laws which restrict freedom of speech and make artists go out of business. They should try to fix the issues and find ways to ease the pression and oversaturation within the market. They should work on more efficient and easier ways to export japanese works easily outside Japan. Have they even tried any of that? No, because they don't care at all - all they care about is trying to lick A/M industry's asses, just so the current electorate can carry over to the next tenure.

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Maybe instead of hunting anime pirates they should focus on projects that will increase their birth rate. Doesn't it seem strange that they protect the very thing that helps the decline of number of births instead. Something smells bad here and it ain't dirty diapers.

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Maybe instead of hunting anime pirates they should focus on projects that will increase their birth rate. Doesn't it seem strange that they protect the very thing that helps the decline of number of births instead. Something smells bad here and it ain't dirty diapers.

Money's more important than their people, clearly :P

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"Request" before they take legal action, but how does legal action work over the internet? I'm just not knowledgeable on this stuff.

There's different types of requests really. They can just send them a message asking politely to remove content (that's probably not happening).

Or, the most common, send them DMCAs which would force the content to get taken down although some sites don't comply to DMCAs, it depends on the site.

A DMCA can also be coupled with a C&D (Cease and Desist) which pretty much is telling you to stop the activity you're doing on the site.

Violating these "requests" may or may not lead to legal action being taken against you, that action also varies from site to site.

 

Right now we don't know what their plan is so it can be a lot of different actions, we'll just have to wait and see.

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"Request" before they take legal action, but how does legal action work over the internet? I'm just not knowledgeable on this stuff.

A takedown notice is sent from the copyright holder either to the local police or directly to ISP's. Depending on circumstances, ISP's can either block the website completely, or contact the administrators, asking them to comply or face the consequences. In a lot of situations though, DMCA takedown notices are simply sent directly to the accused parties. A lot of this depends on how "serious" are the charges. In most cases, administrators remove anything which breakes the copyright acts and everyone forgets anything ever happened. In case whether copyright holder feels he suffered massive financial loss from illegal operations, cases might be even instantly taken to the court.

 

This won't ever happen in this case, though. Most of the massive websites which host torrents, are completely "transparent" - they can't be accused, because they DO NOT OWN (as in, host) the copyrighted materials. If they want to sue anyone, they'd have to sue half of the world for hosting files on millions of pc's and servers.

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I partly agree with the Japanese government, but there are a few problems. I, myself, don't have any problems with this, because I do understand Japanese enough to watch anime without subtitles, so buying the original BD or watching them on Japanese TV isn't a problem.

 

First of all, people who watch anime with mild to much nudity and such anime aren't allowed in some countries. Take Kiss x sis and To LOVE-Ru for example. I doubt they'll bring ecchi anime like that to the western countries.

 

Second thing, do people have to watch their shit dubbed? Or with ugly, yellow hardsubs? In my opinion, most anime sound way better in Japanese (if I compare it to the dubbed version). This isn't really a problem, but more like, the quality of the anime drops(?)

 

People who live in Southeast Asia or America won't have many problems, since anime and such are easily available there, but for people who live in Europe (such like myself) have to import much of their stuff and this will bring some costs with it. Unless you've a steady job or plenty of money, access to anime will be a lot harder. Isn't this a bit unfair? 

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