9 ms·

Hollywood steps up anime piracy war and battles domain-hopping evaders

55 points by picture 3y ago

jchw 3y ago
Of all the anti-piracy wars, I feel like this one is probably the most viscerally futile. Anime may have become substantially more mainstream than it was in the past, but it just has a huge culture around piracy and fansubs that is not going to be easy to shake; this is especially true as the main legal venues for anime consolidate and target primarily mainstream audiences, leaving a lot of the older fans disillusioned with purchasing anime goods outside of direct imports from Japan. I am not a huge anime watcher, but it's hard to think of a fan base more obsessed with cleaner rips, better encoding, etc. and a ton of people in the scene are simply not motivated by the prospect of making money. I sincerely do not believe you can turn a substantial amount of the people pirating anime into e.g. Crunchyroll subscribers. I'll believe it when I see it. (Of course, mentioning Crunchyroll is, in itself, kind of funny: owing to just how rooted the modern foreign anime fan scene is rooted in piracy, it began as a website for pirating anime.)
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  > I sincerely do not believe you can turn a substantial amount of the people pirating anime into e.g. Crunchyroll subscribers. Yeah, not a chance. I periodically check what Crunchyroll has available, and it's always abysmal. Virtually nothing I'm interested in watching is ever on Crunchyroll. I don't think my tastes are very obscure, they don't even have Bubblegum Crisis, Patlabor or Macross right now. So even if they took away all possibilities for me to pirate anime, I still wouldn't subscribe to Crunchyroll.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    Its straight up scary how much quality anime is jettisoned off of all streaming services and almost the internet entirely! A lot of the highest quality and revered things have owners that are too comfortable with their pre-streaming syndication options, and are too expensive to license. This is a dystopia, piracy is definitely the way. I always have to check that I’m not being a hipster about it, and I’ve shown lots of 20 year olds some older stuff and they’re all enamored with it and can see how their current options are functionally trash. (But the silver lining is that hot women are into anime now. Its not a counterculture thing for maladjusted people and its great to share this experience so casually)
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      It's really concerning to me, young people today seem to get stuck in these content ghettos and a lot of them don't even seem to be aware of it. If it's not in the streaming catalogue, they probably haven't heard of it. And when they hear about something they might initially be interested, but then all interest evaporates once you tell them they'll have to pirate it. It almost feels like media companies are erasing the past so that their modern slop doesn't have to compete with the portion of past content that was good (I'm not saying that all old anime was good of course. I just want to say this before somebody trots out the "ackshully, most old stuff was bad and you just don't hear about it anymore" argument.) Piracy lets you watch the best content of past eras, which gives you context to evaluate modern content. And a lot of modern content doesn't come out looking very good once you have this context. Fortunately classic literature is still easy to get, but with anime/movies it's becoming difficult.
      - yieldcrv 3y ago
        Hmm I hadn't noticed that as I find a way to download the thing and watch it with people I wouldn't say interest evaporates out of principle, they just arent set up to enjoy it. There are many hoops to jump through and then they cant play it on their same devices, more hoops if its possible at all.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    As someone who watches a few shoes per year, I haven’t heard of any of these. Wikipedia says bubblegum crisis is an 8 episode one off from over 30 years ago. I’m amused at your definition of obscure.
    - throwaway6734 3y ago
      Macross isn't an obscure show for those interested in Mecha shows like Gundam
      - erik_seaberg 3y ago
        They dubbed and spliced Macross with two other series to get enough episodes to syndicate as “Robotech,” which made it to a local TV station after school.
        astrange 3y ago
        And the company who made Robotech has been legally blocking actual Macross ever since. It hasn't come out in any other form because they have the exclusive license and refuse to let anyone else touch it. …But that changed last year, so it may now appear somewhere, somehow.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        I’m sure you’re not wrong And yet https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Search for some "Top N anime" lists and you'll very frequently run into the names I mentioned. For instance: https://myanimelist.net/featured/1408/Top_10_Best_Cyberpunk_Anime_of_All_Time https://myanimelist.net/featured/1408/Top_10_Best_Cyberpunk_... Some more prominent examples they don't have: Ghost in the Shell (except for Arise, which TBQH is slop), Serial Experiments Lain, even Neon Genesis Evangelion (tbf, I think Netflix has it?). Here's a nice little taste of Bubblegum Crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an_0IIRDlc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an_0IIRDlc4
  - omoikane 3y ago
    > Virtually nothing I'm interested in watching is ever on Crunchyroll Curiously, Crunchyroll had virtually everything that we wanted to fansub back then. Their licensing coverage was sufficiently wide that a lot of us just stopped fansubbing, because everything had been "crunchyrolled".
  - hakfoo 3y ago
    Much more than with many other media, anime/manga collections are a signal of personal allegiance and preference. For example, I can still recall the bitterness in the early US One Piece fandom when it seemed like Naruto and Bleach got all the marketing, the high-quality dubs, and merchandise galore, while they had to suffer through one of the most atrocious dubs in modern history and a manga release schedule that was 40 volumes behind Japan. I still have the tokens of this-- some untranslated copies found in secondhand shops and from fan-forum group buys, terrible figures, artbooks purchased at conventions long before the translated versions existed. Bookshelves full of print manga will not disappear for anything short of a house fire. The same with owned DVDs, or properly maintained pirate content. They remain an ongoing symbol of the commitment to these franchises. In a way that would make sense to mainstream marketers, it's more like sports memorabelia-- keeping the cards/jerseys/etc. of their favourite baseball players from their childhood-- than a bookshelf full of novels. Conversely, anything you consume on a "subscription service" basis will go poof when some MBA sees a KPI trending in the wrong direction. Can you really build the same anchored relationship with that sort of fragile foundation?
  - mike50 3y ago
    Macross has been in licensing hell since the VHS days if I recall correctly.
  - ThrowawayR2 3y ago
    And I thought I was an old fogey. That's like griping that today's broadcast television networks don't show the Andy Griffith Show[1], Leave It To Beaver, Mr. Ed., and the original Star Trek. [1] Which modern gamers may at least minimally know since Barney from the Half-Life series got his name from one of its characters.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >but it just has a huge culture around piracy and fansubs Simulcasting killed most of the culture around fansubs since pirate groups could now just steal both the video and subs from crunchyroll, amazon, hidive, etc. There is no longer a point in taking a Japanese release and packaging it up for English audiences when the English release happens at pretty much the same time.
- Nyan 3y ago
  Your experience may be slightly out of date. Fansubbers these days are a tiny shadow of that they used to be. The vast majority of anime piracy these days consists of ripping official streams, which include subtitles. Of course, if you're into older shows, you'll find many to be missing on the mainstream streaming platforms, and will often need to resort to piracy and fansubs to get that. But as anime becomes more mainstream, those interested in older stuff become a smaller slice of the market. Also, due to more mainstream adoption, those interested in "cleaner rips, better encoding, etc" are dwindling. Whilst these people are still out there, you'll find the vast majority of people are perfectly happy with low quality streaming sites (also worth pointing out that these streams still offer vastly better video quality than what you typically got in the 90s). Enforcement wise, I doubt they're targeting the hardcore fans - they're going after the mainstream, which is a big slice of the market.
  - pierat 3y ago
    Your experiences are absolutely out of date. For example, the recent (6th season) of JoJo, are all sorts of references that the fansubbers can make from the original material, but the corporate subbers aren't legally able to. In fact, the corpo-subs are considered degraded and garbage, compared to a fansub. There aren't 'sensibilities' to maintain, nor is there corporate rights etc to hold up. And frankly, we make better! If you want a comparison between corporate and fansubs, look no further than the book and movie of Ready Player One. That's a fair comparison.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Another example: Just a few weeks ago somebody released a restoration (painstakingly recreated frame-for-frame from bluray source) of Nadia: The Nautilus Story. This is a substantially cut-down version of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water that removes a ton of filler as well as many widely hated episodes (island arc). Originally it existed only on Laserdisc, with very poor quality audio and video and no subtitles. A high quality copy of this never existed until last month. No corporation ever would have done this.
      - 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mcpackieh 3y ago
Kind of strange they're going after these literally who sites instead of you know where. I guess because these are commercial? Or has the most popular public tracker for anime somehow escaped their notice?
- jchw 3y ago
  Nyaa has been targeted, though. It's jumped several domains in the past, and in one of the most insane measures I've ever seen, I recall a time where linking it on Twitter was full-on banned. Maybe it's less targeted now because it's simply proven to be too evasive to find any good pressure points, or perhaps it's just in the back burner after previous failed attempts. (I don't see a point in not mentioning it by name, but maybe I'm missing something.)
  - serf 3y ago
    >(I don't see a point in not mentioning it by name, but maybe I'm missing something.) you're missing how even more attention towards something that has had legal troubles in the past might add fuel to the fire? or, from the opposite side of the aisle : you're missing how rebroadcasting piracy sources might hinder the anime industry? feels obvious to me, from either angle.
    - jchw 3y ago
      I doubt Nyaa is flying under anyone's radar that would have impact here, but even if they were, why would they be any more likely to discover it here on HN versus anywhere else on the internet? Very strange logic in my opinion.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    I know at least a few people on HN are copyright maximalists, so I hesitate to mention things like this by name in mixed company.
    - sh34r 3y ago
      There's at least a few people on HN who hold every possible belief you can enumerate. There's Kopimists and patent trolls. There's people who believe microdosing LSD makes them more productive, that we live in a simulation, that LLMs are sentient, that UAPs are interdimensional entities that live under the ocean, that Nickelback makes good music, that bananas belong on pizza. I do not understand why you'd self-censor on this basis alone.
Animats 3y ago
From 2013-2017, Japan had a site, Daisuki.net, which looked like a pirate site, but was funded by the Cool Japan Fund, a venture fund run by the government and some of the big banks.[1] The government's goal was to promote Japanese culture; they were worried abut competition from K-pop. Sadly, that site is gone. [1] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/files/press_141030-1.pdf https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/files/press_141030-1.pdf
- creamyhorror 3y ago
  Ah yes, Daisuki. I don't recall it ever gaining that much traction, probably because of the limited amount of anime on it. Government policy ebbs and flows with the short-term success of its experiments, as usual. But I don't see how it could have worked economically, given that anime is expensive to produce and content owners want a good ROI. In contrast, hallyu/K-drama's cross-border grip remains as strong as ever; they just keep pumping it out for a hungry global audience who'll stream it (paid or pirated). There seems to be a fundamental difference in the appetite for it - K-media probably appeals to more people on the whole, you don't even need the government to subsidise it for global consumption - and thus in the economics of it. edit: That said, MUSE Asia somehow managed to secure licenses for a good amount of previous and ongoing releases and streams it for free in much of Asia on Youtube. So maybe there's some content subsidising still going on, or at least MUSE has worked out some free-content model with owners that might be economically sustainable.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Anime is not expensive to produce for what it is. It's amazing how much smaller the budgets for anime are compared to universally awful looking and poorly animated Western shows. The main problem is that the amount of anime that can be produced at one time just isn't that much, because there's only so many studios to do it. And the best studio of all Kyoto Animation hasn't recovered from most of their staff literally being killed by a terrorist attack a few years ago. (Sometimes Western animation tries to make fake anime; there's a Superman TV show that just started. They are somehow completely unable to do this. It's worse than what Japanese children could do.)
justinclift 3y ago
It'll be so (ironically?) funny if AI becomes able to practically generate good quality stories (along with the matching generated video and audio / subs), after being trained exclusively on Manga and Anime content. That'd all be legal too, as the Japanese gov has categorically stated that copyright doesn't exist on the source material when used to train AI. Not sure if there would even need to be royalties payable for generated Anime characters that happen to look like existing IP. Nintendo would absolutely go bonkers. I kind of can't wait. :D
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  The only thing Japan has done is adopt the TDM exceptions that the EU has. In the US the only certainty we have is that text-to-image AI art generation is not a creative process and thus does not accrue copyright on its own. That being said - and, again, sticking with US law - if your AI generated an anime character that looks like an existing character, and that character was either in the training set or described in your prompt, then you'd have an open and shut case. Otherwise it'd be considered a happy accident. That's also the standard for non-AI art as well. It's called "access and substantial similarity." I fully expect Nintendo to privately tell all their licensed developers not to use AI art generators. Actually, boycotting is probably going to be the most effective solution from the perspective of human artists who don't want their job being turned into SEO keyword stuffing[0]. While AI art proponents think that progress is inevitable, the reality of it is that in order for the AI generators to "get better", we need bigger models and more research, both of which are resting on exponential price curves. So if human artists as a class decide they aren't going to use AI, then AI will always be relegated to "second best", even if we can always finetune on those human artists' work. [0] No seriously I think this is what human artists actually fear. It's one thing to point out that they're being put on a treadmill to train the bot that will replace them. But a lot of artists seem to hate the idea of working with a text-to-image art generator, even if that art generator was trained on ethically sourced data. They feel as if their fun has been taken away.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Hmmm, that's not really what seems to be the case, as widely reported about a month ago. eg: https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/ https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-...
didibus 3y ago
I'm subbed to Funimation and now Crunchyroll, and their apps are so terrible, that I still often use an unofficial streaming website instead. Only when anime is on Netflix do I much prefer to watch it there. Once again, piracy is a response to lack of competition in delivery and publishing. If the user experience was better on paid services than on free sketchy online websites (you'd think it's a low bar), I'm sure a lot of the piracy would go away.

55 points by picture 3y ago

jchw 3y ago

Of all the anti-piracy wars, I feel like this one is probably the most viscerally futile. Anime may have become substantially more mainstream than it was in the past, but it just has a huge culture around piracy and fansubs that is not going to be easy to shake; this is especially true as the main legal venues for anime consolidate and target primarily mainstream audiences, leaving a lot of the older fans disillusioned with purchasing anime goods outside of direct imports from Japan. I am not a huge anime watcher, but it's hard to think of a fan base more obsessed with cleaner rips, better encoding, etc. and a ton of people in the scene are simply not motivated by the prospect of making money. I sincerely do not believe you can turn a substantial amount of the people pirating anime into e.g. Crunchyroll subscribers. I'll believe it when I see it. (Of course, mentioning Crunchyroll is, in itself, kind of funny: owing to just how rooted the modern foreign anime fan scene is rooted in piracy, it began as a website for pirating anime.)

mcpackieh 3y ago
> I sincerely do not believe you can turn a substantial amount of the people pirating anime into e.g. Crunchyroll subscribers. Yeah, not a chance. I periodically check what Crunchyroll has available, and it's always abysmal. Virtually nothing I'm interested in watching is ever on Crunchyroll. I don't think my tastes are very obscure, they don't even have Bubblegum Crisis, Patlabor or Macross right now. So even if they took away all possibilities for me to pirate anime, I still wouldn't subscribe to Crunchyroll.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  Its straight up scary how much quality anime is jettisoned off of all streaming services and almost the internet entirely! A lot of the highest quality and revered things have owners that are too comfortable with their pre-streaming syndication options, and are too expensive to license. This is a dystopia, piracy is definitely the way. I always have to check that I’m not being a hipster about it, and I’ve shown lots of 20 year olds some older stuff and they’re all enamored with it and can see how their current options are functionally trash. (But the silver lining is that hot women are into anime now. Its not a counterculture thing for maladjusted people and its great to share this experience so casually)
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    It's really concerning to me, young people today seem to get stuck in these content ghettos and a lot of them don't even seem to be aware of it. If it's not in the streaming catalogue, they probably haven't heard of it. And when they hear about something they might initially be interested, but then all interest evaporates once you tell them they'll have to pirate it. It almost feels like media companies are erasing the past so that their modern slop doesn't have to compete with the portion of past content that was good (I'm not saying that all old anime was good of course. I just want to say this before somebody trots out the "ackshully, most old stuff was bad and you just don't hear about it anymore" argument.) Piracy lets you watch the best content of past eras, which gives you context to evaluate modern content. And a lot of modern content doesn't come out looking very good once you have this context. Fortunately classic literature is still easy to get, but with anime/movies it's becoming difficult.
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      Hmm I hadn't noticed that as I find a way to download the thing and watch it with people I wouldn't say interest evaporates out of principle, they just arent set up to enjoy it. There are many hoops to jump through and then they cant play it on their same devices, more hoops if its possible at all.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  As someone who watches a few shoes per year, I haven’t heard of any of these. Wikipedia says bubblegum crisis is an 8 episode one off from over 30 years ago. I’m amused at your definition of obscure.
  - throwaway6734 3y ago
    Macross isn't an obscure show for those interested in Mecha shows like Gundam
    - erik_seaberg 3y ago
      They dubbed and spliced Macross with two other series to get enough episodes to syndicate as “Robotech,” which made it to a local TV station after school.
      - astrange 3y ago
        And the company who made Robotech has been legally blocking actual Macross ever since. It hasn't come out in any other form because they have the exclusive license and refuse to let anyone else touch it. …But that changed last year, so it may now appear somewhere, somehow.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      I’m sure you’re not wrong And yet https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Search for some "Top N anime" lists and you'll very frequently run into the names I mentioned. For instance: https://myanimelist.net/featured/1408/Top_10_Best_Cyberpunk_Anime_of_All_Time https://myanimelist.net/featured/1408/Top_10_Best_Cyberpunk_... Some more prominent examples they don't have: Ghost in the Shell (except for Arise, which TBQH is slop), Serial Experiments Lain, even Neon Genesis Evangelion (tbf, I think Netflix has it?). Here's a nice little taste of Bubblegum Crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an_0IIRDlc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an_0IIRDlc4
- omoikane 3y ago
  > Virtually nothing I'm interested in watching is ever on Crunchyroll Curiously, Crunchyroll had virtually everything that we wanted to fansub back then. Their licensing coverage was sufficiently wide that a lot of us just stopped fansubbing, because everything had been "crunchyrolled".
- hakfoo 3y ago
  Much more than with many other media, anime/manga collections are a signal of personal allegiance and preference. For example, I can still recall the bitterness in the early US One Piece fandom when it seemed like Naruto and Bleach got all the marketing, the high-quality dubs, and merchandise galore, while they had to suffer through one of the most atrocious dubs in modern history and a manga release schedule that was 40 volumes behind Japan. I still have the tokens of this-- some untranslated copies found in secondhand shops and from fan-forum group buys, terrible figures, artbooks purchased at conventions long before the translated versions existed. Bookshelves full of print manga will not disappear for anything short of a house fire. The same with owned DVDs, or properly maintained pirate content. They remain an ongoing symbol of the commitment to these franchises. In a way that would make sense to mainstream marketers, it's more like sports memorabelia-- keeping the cards/jerseys/etc. of their favourite baseball players from their childhood-- than a bookshelf full of novels. Conversely, anything you consume on a "subscription service" basis will go poof when some MBA sees a KPI trending in the wrong direction. Can you really build the same anchored relationship with that sort of fragile foundation?
- mike50 3y ago
  Macross has been in licensing hell since the VHS days if I recall correctly.
- ThrowawayR2 3y ago
  And I thought I was an old fogey. That's like griping that today's broadcast television networks don't show the Andy Griffith Show[1], Leave It To Beaver, Mr. Ed., and the original Star Trek. [1] Which modern gamers may at least minimally know since Barney from the Half-Life series got his name from one of its characters.
charcircuit 3y ago
>but it just has a huge culture around piracy and fansubs Simulcasting killed most of the culture around fansubs since pirate groups could now just steal both the video and subs from crunchyroll, amazon, hidive, etc. There is no longer a point in taking a Japanese release and packaging it up for English audiences when the English release happens at pretty much the same time.
Nyan 3y ago
Your experience may be slightly out of date. Fansubbers these days are a tiny shadow of that they used to be. The vast majority of anime piracy these days consists of ripping official streams, which include subtitles. Of course, if you're into older shows, you'll find many to be missing on the mainstream streaming platforms, and will often need to resort to piracy and fansubs to get that. But as anime becomes more mainstream, those interested in older stuff become a smaller slice of the market. Also, due to more mainstream adoption, those interested in "cleaner rips, better encoding, etc" are dwindling. Whilst these people are still out there, you'll find the vast majority of people are perfectly happy with low quality streaming sites (also worth pointing out that these streams still offer vastly better video quality than what you typically got in the 90s). Enforcement wise, I doubt they're targeting the hardcore fans - they're going after the mainstream, which is a big slice of the market.
- pierat 3y ago
  Your experiences are absolutely out of date. For example, the recent (6th season) of JoJo, are all sorts of references that the fansubbers can make from the original material, but the corporate subbers aren't legally able to. In fact, the corpo-subs are considered degraded and garbage, compared to a fansub. There aren't 'sensibilities' to maintain, nor is there corporate rights etc to hold up. And frankly, we make better! If you want a comparison between corporate and fansubs, look no further than the book and movie of Ready Player One. That's a fair comparison.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Another example: Just a few weeks ago somebody released a restoration (painstakingly recreated frame-for-frame from bluray source) of Nadia: The Nautilus Story. This is a substantially cut-down version of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water that removes a ton of filler as well as many widely hated episodes (island arc). Originally it existed only on Laserdisc, with very poor quality audio and video and no subtitles. A high quality copy of this never existed until last month. No corporation ever would have done this.
    - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

mcpackieh 3y ago

Kind of strange they're going after these literally who sites instead of you know where. I guess because these are commercial? Or has the most popular public tracker for anime somehow escaped their notice?

jchw 3y ago
Nyaa has been targeted, though. It's jumped several domains in the past, and in one of the most insane measures I've ever seen, I recall a time where linking it on Twitter was full-on banned. Maybe it's less targeted now because it's simply proven to be too evasive to find any good pressure points, or perhaps it's just in the back burner after previous failed attempts. (I don't see a point in not mentioning it by name, but maybe I'm missing something.)
- serf 3y ago
  >(I don't see a point in not mentioning it by name, but maybe I'm missing something.) you're missing how even more attention towards something that has had legal troubles in the past might add fuel to the fire? or, from the opposite side of the aisle : you're missing how rebroadcasting piracy sources might hinder the anime industry? feels obvious to me, from either angle.
  - jchw 3y ago
    I doubt Nyaa is flying under anyone's radar that would have impact here, but even if they were, why would they be any more likely to discover it here on HN versus anywhere else on the internet? Very strange logic in my opinion.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  I know at least a few people on HN are copyright maximalists, so I hesitate to mention things like this by name in mixed company.
  - sh34r 3y ago
    There's at least a few people on HN who hold every possible belief you can enumerate. There's Kopimists and patent trolls. There's people who believe microdosing LSD makes them more productive, that we live in a simulation, that LLMs are sentient, that UAPs are interdimensional entities that live under the ocean, that Nickelback makes good music, that bananas belong on pizza. I do not understand why you'd self-censor on this basis alone.

Animats 3y ago

From 2013-2017, Japan had a site, Daisuki.net, which looked like a pirate site, but was funded by the Cool Japan Fund, a venture fund run by the government and some of the big banks.[1] The government's goal was to promote Japanese culture; they were worried abut competition from K-pop. Sadly, that site is gone. [1] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/files/press_141030-1.pdf https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/files/press_141030-1.pdf

creamyhorror 3y ago
Ah yes, Daisuki. I don't recall it ever gaining that much traction, probably because of the limited amount of anime on it. Government policy ebbs and flows with the short-term success of its experiments, as usual. But I don't see how it could have worked economically, given that anime is expensive to produce and content owners want a good ROI. In contrast, hallyu/K-drama's cross-border grip remains as strong as ever; they just keep pumping it out for a hungry global audience who'll stream it (paid or pirated). There seems to be a fundamental difference in the appetite for it - K-media probably appeals to more people on the whole, you don't even need the government to subsidise it for global consumption - and thus in the economics of it. edit: That said, MUSE Asia somehow managed to secure licenses for a good amount of previous and ongoing releases and streams it for free in much of Asia on Youtube. So maybe there's some content subsidising still going on, or at least MUSE has worked out some free-content model with owners that might be economically sustainable.
- astrange 3y ago
  Anime is not expensive to produce for what it is. It's amazing how much smaller the budgets for anime are compared to universally awful looking and poorly animated Western shows. The main problem is that the amount of anime that can be produced at one time just isn't that much, because there's only so many studios to do it. And the best studio of all Kyoto Animation hasn't recovered from most of their staff literally being killed by a terrorist attack a few years ago. (Sometimes Western animation tries to make fake anime; there's a Superman TV show that just started. They are somehow completely unable to do this. It's worse than what Japanese children could do.)

justinclift 3y ago

It'll be so (ironically?) funny if AI becomes able to practically generate good quality stories (along with the matching generated video and audio / subs), after being trained exclusively on Manga and Anime content. That'd all be legal too, as the Japanese gov has categorically stated that copyright doesn't exist on the source material when used to train AI. Not sure if there would even need to be royalties payable for generated Anime characters that happen to look like existing IP. Nintendo would absolutely go bonkers. I kind of can't wait. :D

kmeisthax 3y ago
The only thing Japan has done is adopt the TDM exceptions that the EU has. In the US the only certainty we have is that text-to-image AI art generation is not a creative process and thus does not accrue copyright on its own. That being said - and, again, sticking with US law - if your AI generated an anime character that looks like an existing character, and that character was either in the training set or described in your prompt, then you'd have an open and shut case. Otherwise it'd be considered a happy accident. That's also the standard for non-AI art as well. It's called "access and substantial similarity." I fully expect Nintendo to privately tell all their licensed developers not to use AI art generators. Actually, boycotting is probably going to be the most effective solution from the perspective of human artists who don't want their job being turned into SEO keyword stuffing[0]. While AI art proponents think that progress is inevitable, the reality of it is that in order for the AI generators to "get better", we need bigger models and more research, both of which are resting on exponential price curves. So if human artists as a class decide they aren't going to use AI, then AI will always be relegated to "second best", even if we can always finetune on those human artists' work. [0] No seriously I think this is what human artists actually fear. It's one thing to point out that they're being put on a treadmill to train the bot that will replace them. But a lot of artists seem to hate the idea of working with a text-to-image art generator, even if that art generator was trained on ethically sourced data. They feel as if their fun has been taken away.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Hmmm, that's not really what seems to be the case, as widely reported about a month ago. eg: https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/ https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-...

didibus 3y ago

I'm subbed to Funimation and now Crunchyroll, and their apps are so terrible, that I still often use an unofficial streaming website instead. Only when anime is on Netflix do I much prefer to watch it there. Once again, piracy is a response to lack of competition in delivery and publishing. If the user experience was better on paid services than on free sketchy online websites (you'd think it's a low bar), I'm sure a lot of the piracy would go away.