No, I'm not going to join. The music and film industry's efforts have taught us that seeking litigation is NOT the right way to combat piracy. No matter who you sue or threaten with a C&D, somebody else will always step in to take their place. The pirates will just find new ways to protect their anonymity, and the companies will just put new and more restrictive DRM on their products. In the end, everybody loses.

Instead, I think the anime industry should follow Crunchyroll, Madman Entertainment and FUNimation's example. Instead of trying to shut down pirates with direct action, they should instead offer a viable alternative to cash-strapped anime fans. After all, why bother downloading a Naruto or One Piece fansub when the series is being simulcast in HD for free online? Why torrent DVD rips of Kiddy Grade when the entire show is available for free?

If you are trying to stomp out piracy, then all torrent sites would have to go. That is something you can never truly deal with. Take out one torrent site, 2 will replace it.

LOL. So they're planning on 'taking down hosting websites'? Well, they'll have a tough time getting rid of Rapidshare and Megaupload; those are really the only hosting websites used after all.

Personally I think anime is way over priced. I never see Haruhi on sale at Best Buy, and I will not live long enough to see it under $20. I do not consider myself cash-strapped, just not willing to pay crazy prices.

I agree with Jon. An anime Hulu would save the industry and make it grow.

What exactly is it that they consider "piracy"? Is it any titles licensed in the US or any show period? The later I would take offense to since it's basically letting some exec from bandai or what have you decide for me what show I should watch based on his preference and rating summary files in front of him. As for titles licensed in the US, I don't see any harm in cracking down on the illegal distribution of those. Personally, I don't believe there are many shows that have enough pull to make people spend $30 for four episodes. If they were smarter they would try to get the US audience more into the merchandising that has become a mainstay in Japan. The dvds sales being supplemental to that of pvcs, pencil boads, or other sale items that can been marked "collector's" would make for a much more profitable business model.

Well who do they consider pirates? I know I consider myself an 'early adopter' if you will. I keep up with shows airing currently and occasionally I'll actually end up picking up a series when it makes it over here (I'm looking at you Gurren/Deathnote/etc). Or maybe if I didn't feel like it was highway robbery I'd buy more (Specifically noting Xam'd and it's PSN pricing)

All in all though Snyders got a point. Pirates are like the cockroaches of the internet. Unless you take the whole system down they aren't going anywhere.

But seriously though if pricing and turnaround time were (harder) better/faster (stronger) then I'd be less inclined to find my anime in the webs.

I think that its gone past the point of preventing it now.

Well, I pirate anime and I consider myself a fan. I don't try and justify it or anything. I feel bad about it because I'd like to support these companies.

The fact of the matter is that I like anime, but I generally can't afford it. So I'm left with two options, watch anime by downloading it, or not watch it at all.

If I ever get the money that I can pay for it I totally will. A good 95% of the anime I own I downloaded before watching.

LOL

TAFAPTAFAPTAFAP!!!

Maybe when they start bring stuff over the right way, and at a resnible price i'll consider buying it but until hell freezes ever I doubt it's ever going to happen. The only way i'll even consider buying a legit series is if:

A: it's complete or at least a full season or a movie.
B: on Blueray, with double digital audio and the japanese language track
C: it's a collectors edition with some kind of bounus art or tee shirt, or somthing.

until then not buying.

Jon: Really, the solution says a great deal about the problem itself. Not an awful lot of anime fans, I think, pirate because it's free. Unlike the video game piracy scene, which has a lot more to do with people being lazy and cheap, genuine anime fans have a bit of a dilemma on their hands.

Of course they want to support the studios who create these shows and the publishers and translators who bring them to the states. But nobody wants to sit and wait for the Winter 2010 season to be licensed and localized (in time for Winter 2011/12!). And publishers who choose to threaten and demonize fansubbers and their audiences strike me as not only not caring about anime fans, but as people who noticed a market and cashed in on it, never thinking about how that market worked.

Is it me,or that sounds like a collective for onanists.... :P

I'm all for everybody gets their fair share of the pie, but it's an uphill proposition.

@Dyne1319: Virtually every anime DVD release these days is either a full season boxset (i.e. Strike Witches) or a half-season boxset. Single-volume releases have gone the way of the dinosaur. Plus, there are plenty of bluray releases out there too. All of these are provided at a fraction of what they cost in Japan. So, what's stopping you from buying?

@Pangloss: So, download the fansubs now and buy later!

Pirating is a necessary evil when I know there are shows I'm interested in that never have and probably never will get a DVD release. At that point there is no legal alternative. However, to all the people concerned about price, it is possible to get DVDs for cheap if you're willing to wait for it. I don't think anything in my collection has cost me more than $4/disc, and I would go as far to say that the majority were less than that. I just keep a watch on various forums where sales would be posted and jump on it when I find something good. It takes some diligence and patience, but the prices do eventually go down. So, to repeat what Jon said, fansub now and buy later.

I haven't pirated anime in a long time... and as a result, I haven't watched anime in a long time.

I think the last anime I bought was Paprika on Blu-Ray... either that, or it was the Slayer OVA DVD Box Set I got for $20 when ADV closed its doors. I don't want to pirate anime, but I don't want to pay the absolute insane prices they go for. I also have been trying not to buy DVDs period - if it ain't Blu, I just don't see the point.

@ Jon Snyder
There are plenty of Blu-Ray anime releases? Where? In Japan? I'm still waiting for some Blu-Ray releases of shows I actually give a crap about. Where's Haruhi? Where's Zetsubou-Sensei? Where's Nadia/Eva/Gurren Lagann? Where's GITS:SAC? Where's Nausicaä/Mononoke? For God's Sake, WHERE THE HELL IS COWBOY BEBOP?

All I ever see is Afro Samurai and Akira. I will be picking up Samurai Champloo and GITS 2.0 soon enough, but the landscape for Blu-Ray anime in the States is pretty barren from where I'm sitting.

If there wasn't pirating, you wouldn't be able to watch Legend of the Galactic Heroes, considered by many to be one of the greatest. I'm sure there are other worthwhile series that will never see the light of day outside Japan.

What other series fit this description? The Zetsubou anime?

I wouldn't consider downloading series that aren't available legally in the United States to be piracy.

@Jon
Maybe you wouldn't, but the law would. International copyright laws do still apply.

What would Harlock say to this?

Also, yeah, people who complain about American anime prices have no real room to talk. Here it's usually $20 for four or five episodes. In Japan, it's pretty typical to see them at 6000 yen (roughly $60) for two episodes.

Speak for yourselves. Third-world countries are having a hard time dealing with inflation, the current economic crisis, unemployment, and then you want to remove our access to cheap fansubbed anime? So what if it's licensed in the US? It's not the only country in the world!

Anime fans should know better than everybody that America isn't the center of the world.

@JDavis
Just because the prices are higher somewhere else doesn't mean that American prices are reasonable - because they are not. 3-4ish dollars an episode (less than 20 minutes not including OP and ED) is a ripoff. What it does mean is that other people are getting more screwed over than Americans.

@the7k Try Amazon. Tons of BR releases listed there.

@andiboo
what he's saying is $20-$30 for 60-80 minutes (minus op and ed) of content is a better deal than $40 or more for 20-40 minutes of content. Heck if one episode is a clip show then you really got screwed.

This TAFAP is such an industry shill it's pathetic.
While I myself only download legit fansubs I won't say I'm not guilty of grifting a series or two that I really wanted to watch.
I'm in support of the culture revolution when it comes to stemming piracy though.
Notice I used the word stem and not stop, because as long as a medium exists to exchange information quickly, piracy will happen. Anyone who believes differently needs to get back on the boat back to Happy-Fairy-Land where everyone is good and rainbows are made of gumdrops.

#notapirate ^_^

At least you guys have easy, legal alternatives in your local stores. Here in Malaysia, even the so-called legal video-chains carry nothing but pirated anime DVDs.

My only legal alternatives to supporting the anime industry is to buy manga in Borders, and music CDs from the only otaku-specific store in the entire country!

I don't own a credit card yet which would allow me to import anime straight from the holy land, until then, fansubs are actually a good way for me to tell the legal from the illegal stuff here.

The illegal DVDs (all of them) don't have the extra DVD exclusive episodes.

Why can't we just have more channels like Anime Network? Or give Adult Swim it's own 2 channels, Comedy and Anime? Why did Toonami have to die? I miss the old days when the only Anime I knew about, watched, and loved was on Carton Network.

I applaud Funimation in there ability to offer many Anime shows for free to watch on their site similar to Hulu. It gives people the opportunity to watch shows they would never even see or hear of in the States, and more importantly, it creates fans. And fans are the ones who will go out and actually purchase the DVDs and Blu-Rays of these shows when they are released in the U.S.

Point is, you can't stop Piracy. However, you can change how Anime is distributed to the rest of the non-Japanese world. Make piracy seem like more of a hassle than it's worth to enjoy quality Anime. Video Games have long since won that war, and I believe Anime can too.

Here's the twist:

The guy who runs the TAFAP site also runs a tickle fetish site.

Where he's posted links to download fansubs and copies of commercially released anime.

Here's his TAFAP member profile:

http://operationtafap.webs.com/apps/profile/profilePage?id=47321810

Here's his Time 4 A Tickle! profile (NSFW, probably):

http://time4atickle.webs.com/apps/profile/profilePage?id=47321810

He's removed the links between the sites since last night and his real name (Jonah Ray Little), but unfortunately for him, his webs.com profile id is the same. He also made the posts with embedded media members only, but this page is still accessible to visitors:

http://time4atickle.webs.com/freedownloads.htm

Where he links to various anime to download.

So this whole TAFAP thing just seems to be an attention seeking exercise.

Correction: The guy's name is Jordan Ray Little.

Blueray!!!!!!!!

Kneesocks.

Looks like I win this fight.

@Brack:
BAM!

I believe he was targeting sites like NarutoFan and Bleach7 that hosted direct downloads to anime, more than the torrenting community.

Cheap bastards are cheap, and stealing is free. All this copyfight/industry rage crap is retarded.

@Brack:

This should be posted on failblog.org.

I live in the UK, where anime is really hard to come by, but even in the US many of the animes that I have watched have never seen a release. The Valkyria anime, many Gundam series' and countless others leave us no choice but to torrent or stream with fansubs. I do pay for anime where I can, but even then many of these when bought from the internet turn out to be bootlegs. It's a sorry state, but to enjoy anime we have to resort to piracy, especially if we don't speak Japanese.

For the few channels that are showing anime (cartoon network, disney xd, sifi, and what others there are) they aren't as up to date as with the online stuff. Which is why we pirate stuff.

But I have a solution. Why don't they just put the sub/translator's for the online streaming on payroll and have the translations out that much faster? And make it so they don't have to deal with the legal stuff, just pay them for the subbings/translations, and use it in the actual dubbing. With subs that are translated in less then a day of the anime/manga coming out then why would people look and watch dubbed versions when they'll already know what happens? I lost interest the one time I looked at a spoiler for a chapter that was coming out the next day because I already knew what happened.

I agree with John. Litigation is not the answer to pirating

This sounds too much like those Warriors for Innocence or whatever the hell they called themselves over on Livejournal. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." They took it upon themselves to enact "justice," but all they did was cause more trouble.

Yeah, good luck with that. True Anime Fans Aren't Pirating Licensed Anime (or TAFAPLA).

no,

not until region blocking is abolished

Welcome to reality. The industry helped cultivate the pirates by using them to increase the fanbase of anime in the U.S. but never thought of an endgame. This is like the argument against piracy in general, if nobody pirates then the world is good? Wrong. In this day and age, with the internet anything is fair game. All these people are are fan-hating-fans. What are you going to do, go to a convention and call anyone who watched a fansub a pirate? I say leave that up to the companies, after all if they want to survive they have to learn to adapt and overcome their problems. That's just business. If you can't handle competing with free, well, then your company just won't make it, simple as that. You reap what you sow.

As of now, the operation seems to be a solo effort and will be in vain.