I'll play a bit of a devils advocate here. One could argue that if a product is never properly made available commercially in a region, then from a moral —but n

I'll play a bit of a devils advocate here. One could argue that if a product is never properly made available commercially in a region, then from a moral —but not necessarily legal— perspective it shouldn't be entitled to any copyright protection as it was never available. Piracy is also distraction for the real issues facing that industry. The rising popularity of anime/manga in the west is significantly linked to the consumption of pirated media content released by scanlation/fansub groups. Even Crunchyroll —a site that is relatively new and brought about more legal viewing options than ever— started as a piracy site. While nowadays there are more commercial options than a few niche players who only bring over a small sampling of series, it still is a fact that overwhelmingly most anime/manga prior to 2010 is and was never commercially available in multiple regions. In the regions it was available many products were also only partially available or heavily bowdlerized. I feel the entire anime/manga industry is sitting on a gold mine and is too focused on blaming piracy, where the real issue is the lack of true availability for many titles. Instead of focusing on piracy they would be more successful in; doing something about Sony having a near monopoly on distribution of the entire industry's content in the west, crack down on bad localization bowdlerizing their series, and work on translating and distributing their older content. Korean Webtoon/Manwha companies have the same identical issues faced by the Japanese Anime/Manga industries, but they are much more heavy handed with enforcement. Often to the point of unreasonableness, like going after technology neutral applications that serve legal purposes.