Hollywood steps up anime piracy war and battles domain-hopping evaders
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
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.)
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.
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)
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.
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.
…But that changed last year, so it may now appear somewhere, somehow.
And yet
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
Tangentially, some cool anime got aired on this local PBS station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvUfoDH_1w0
It’s old but it’s one of those foundation pieces that really bridged the gap into western markets.
Having seen a lot of shoes on the shoe rack is quite distinct from being aware of the major influences in the footwear market.
I just don’t really expect something like crunchy roll to be carrying titles that are over 30 years old and I think it’s kind of silly to expect them to do otherwise. Not that I really use crunchy roll.
I perceive a different vibe of crunchyroll cataloging stuff like that vs Netflix offering things like neon genesis, cowboy bebop, and other impactful old titles. Idk if I can justify that belief. Perhaps it’s just that Netflix’s anime catalog is small and honestly pretty well curated cache for people that probably aren’t anime watchers. I kind of expect crunchyroll to be a service that focuses only on the latest stuff with ads and merch for big anime fans.
I (and this is just me) expect my local library to carry 125 year old stage plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest .. and it does.
I expect an online libray of AV media to carry copies of material that was influential and popular when I was 30 .. (such as the anime series under discussion).
If Crunchyroll is just service that focuses upon trending bleeding edge viral latest fad material then so be it.
That by no means makes the plays of Oscar Wilde nor the popular culture of our youth obscure .. it just means that those that don't look outside a particular bubble won't see a bigger landscape.
If I travel to the next town, they have a couple of bland shoe shops that sell generic shoes, a few outfitters that have various work boots.
There's a capital city 100 km away that has almost every type of shoe you might want, sold across a multitude of stores, with the exception of exclusive high end brands that might require travelling to London, Milan, Paris, etc to source in person .. perhaps they deign to mail such goods now (that seems unlikely).
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".
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?
[1] Which modern gamers may at least minimally know since Barney from the Half-Life series got his name from one of its characters.
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.
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.
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.
While I'm happy that someone went to the trouble of recreating a different cut of the show based on official work, I don't know that it's really even necessary, just as I rarely find those sorts of efforts (which happen somewhat frequently in anime, where they condense tv shows into movies) to be very good.
For reference, The Nautilus Story clocks in at 5h30m, while the full show is something like 20 hours. So TNS is a substantial streamlining, removing a lot more than just the island episodes. But this might be what some people want.
And the fansubbers subs quality for some are incredible, integrating the sub in the anime itself (text over a sign and similar things, sometimes different coloring to easily identify characters and such.
Very passionate about anime, but lately struggling to get hooked, I have 2 children that are young, so what I can watch without traumatizing them is limited (had to watch Made in Abyss late at night)
They don't matter and are not what you're missing by reading a translation. (Similarly, it's not possible that a word "should not be translated". Words are just part of sentences.)
All the good old fansub translators have moved on simply by being old enough to need real jobs, but a lot of them are professional anime translators now.
I definitely do not speak japanese, which is why it's important to me, some language joke literally don't transmit. In "Shakugan no Shana" there is literally a scene where the protagonist drops honorific and Shana talks about it. That section would need to be cut, or the joke would just not come through because I would have no idea what an honorific is. "Senpai" also has no direct translation in my mother language and it's a figure that doesn't really exist, there is an episode of Full Metal Panic that's around a character that's important to Kaname and it wouldn't come through the "why" if without knowing the meaning of the word. But the word just doesn't exist in Italian, so it was translated with a made-up sound "senpaia" in the official dub. Result was that nobody (we were teenagers at the time) had any idea of what it meant or why this was important.
There are various examples spread everywhere for this.
Teaching some words that do not translate is important, to convey some cultural aspects of japan that give context to the anime.
Which incidentally is the reason why I don't watch dubbed animes, because the voice acting is different. This might sound like a joke, but the high pitched screams of some female characters in anime just don't translate to my mother language and indeed when dubbed, the scream was mild at best.
Now you may think that these workarounds cause some meaning loss, and you'd be correct. However, the problem with this line of thinking is that this isn't unique to honorifics - there's a tonne of other stuff in the Japanese language which has no English equivalent (I don't know Italian, so can't say much on that front), and non-Japanese speaking anime fans are often unaware of these because fansubs never introduced those concepts (for example, purpose of -desu/-masu which can be used to show respect, somewhat like honorifics).
The reality is that a lot of nuance gets lost in translation, with or without honorifics; unfortunately, if nuance is important to you, there's no substitute to learning the language. As such, people who think honorifics are highly important generally give me the impression of blissful ignorance (i.e. don't know what they don't know).
Of course, you're welcome to have your own preferences regarding translations. But having some hybrid of Japanese/English subtitle to portray slightly more nuance (whilst still missing out on a lot), can seem weird (e.g. why is this particular aspect exposed, but not something else?) and isn't necessarily objectively "better" than a translation that just sticks to English.
As a related issue, Japanese has a lot of English words (wasei-eigo) and they /all/ mean completely different things than in English. But people wanting subtitles to sound like what's spoken causes translators to leave them in even though it makes the meaning wrong.
(When someone buys a "juice" from a vending machine they're buying a soft drink. Don't even ask what "feminist" means.)
I watched many animes in japanese with fansubs, as well as with translation, there is just too much lost and the professional subtitles applied did not provide enough context, like at all (in dvds you could watch italian dubs with subtitles).
Of course it could be a problem with the studio, but the experience has been pretty consistent.
The panorama might also have changed, who knows.
Oh, one glaring example is watching animes with subs on netflix was a terrible experience both in visual quality and subs, while the exact same anime from fansubs are really high quality, with amazing subs (all the stuff I described earlier), it just doesn't work.
That's a joke. You shouldn't literally translate jokes because they won't funny; explaining jokes ruins them. The purpose of watching a TV show is to be entertained, not for you to learn grammar quirks only used by anime girls, so they should put new jokes there. You have not learned any useful information about Japan or their language by observing someone says desu a lot.
An amusing case when translating for people like this is you often have to translate honorifics into other honorifics, because they don't actually know all of them but just get upset when they don't see the few they do know. So -dono -me might get left out or shinobi/bushi changed to ninja/samurai.
Your and the parent's statements are actually congruent: they're not saying ripsubs aren't shit, which they are, but that they're good enough to minimize the relevance of fansubbing to the mass market, which they are.
I mean, just look at the output of prolific fansubbing groups from ~2010 to ~2020. At the start of that window, groups like FFF/Underwater/gg/commie/Vivid (and many more I'm forgetting) would race to release subs for airing eps and would frequently have them out within a day or so of the rips. Now, like... maybe three, generously? shows a season get that treatment, and a lot of the people from the scene have moved on.
I believe fansubbing still has immense value, but effort is obviously shifting towards making really high quality releases of older stuff rather than racing to sub airing shows (not to imply that the former didn't happen beforehand; it did, but was a smaller slice of the overall scene). And even though I never worked on airing shows, I get it: why kill yourself to release a better version ASAP if 99% of schmucks will just grab Horrible instead?
e: s/high-tier/prolific before someone goes in on me for gg/commie
I think for most of us fansubbing stopped being about the anime at some point along the way - I personally kept subbing for a few years after I last watched a show, and then continued to develop Aegisub for a few more years after that - but basically everyone got into it because we wanted to make it so that shows could be watched. The first few things I worked on would simply not have subs at all if I didn’t step up and do the work, and I can’t imagine I every would have gotten into subbing if that wasn’t the case.
There’s still room for better-than-the-official-release subs, but the simple fact is that most fansubs never were that, and most viewers never wanted that in the first place. There’s no longer a reason for kinda slow subs translated by a college student who’s taken a few years of Japanese classes to exist, and that’s what most of the scene was.
Yeah the racing was silly. The subs themselves weren't necessarily that much better either, which is why I think rips like Horriblesubs won out in the end for most people. I loved fansubs and the community around it (and the drama).
Though I think the scene dying is less of a mix of people moving on and more the internet changing (and the medium subjectively getting worse). There's more shows out now than ever before, but relatively less interest for most of them.
Also, newer people getting into the medium are mostly only used to consuming media via official streaming sites, so there's simply less awareness of fansubs versus the 2000s when fansubs were the only way to get Naruto online.
Yep, like another commenter says, the scene got Crunchyrolled 2010-2012ish and many subbers retired.
It's funny (frankly outright amazing) how Crunchyroll, originally a major pirate streaming site, managed to cross the chasm by striking legal agreements with content owners, and for a large amount of content to boot. It might have been possible only for a small window (before the real rise of global online media platforms), during which the owners wanted to gain the global online audience and didn't have as much familiarity with building online international distribution channels. Can't imagine moves like that happening any more in our climate.
The translations can be so poor at times, it may invert the meaning of the joke or phrase.
Personal opinion: whilst bad official translations certainly exist, most of the time, they're fine. There's usually stuff that could be improved (for example, songs often don't get included, typesetting etc), but as far as portraying the meaning, they generally work. And this is likely a key reason why fansubs died - the official subs are often in the "good enough" category.
Sadly, that site is gone.
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.
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.)
(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.
I do not understand why you'd self-censor on this basis alone.
I get that HN is run by VC people and their business model specifically relies on monopolization, but... I mean, come on. They can't actually believe that their actions are prosocial or even beneficial to the consumer, can they? I don't mean the basic idea of there being a copyright system, but the specific situation that we have where everything owned by someone else and customers have to permanently rent out their own culture. You've either deluded yourself into thinking that the international copyright bargain set up in the 1970s is still somehow the best possible option in 2023, or you're a cartoon supervillain called "Fuck You, Pay Me" Man.
One thing to note is that there's actually two Nyaa sites, so it's important to not confuse the two.
The original jumped several domains, and closed down in May 2017 (last domain was nyaa.se). The "current Nyaa", nyaa.si, is a clone site that launched shortly after, and hasn't changed any domains.
With the original, I recall the domains jumped were linked to various legislative changes in Europe, with the shutdown in 2017 likely due to similar reasons.
Current Nyaa (nyaa.si) has been targeted [https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-lawyers-are-trying-to-shut-down...], but efforts haven't been successful so far.
> I guess because these are commercial?
Highly unlikely - it's not like rights holders get anything regardless of commercial status. Also, Nyaa runs ads on their NSFW site, so it's commercial in that respect.
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.
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
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.
eg: https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-...