Using pirated sites to watch anime is ok if you can't afford to pay?

One of my favorite quotes,
"Piracy is almost always a service problem" - Gabe Newell

I think most people's argument these days is more about the availability of their favorite shows, and how there's like 6000 different streaming platforms nowadays. It feels like every other show you'd want to watch is on a different streaming service. That redundancy is what people don't want to pay for.

Plus, plenty of shows aren't streamed anywhere, be it due to popularity, age, or a myriad of other reasons. How else am I supposed to watch them? Buying a $40 DVD? For something I might not even like? No thanks.

@Akuya I'm pretty sure all of you are misusing that quote, given there's a pretty reasonable streaming service. lol

@Vampire_Lord

Just be be clear I am not trying to pick on you here, but just because someone can't afford something they should be entitled to get it for free?

This is a mentality I have never truly understood about modern Anime fandom. Back over two decades ago if fans simply couldn't afford to buy an Anime they wanted to consume that wasn't being aired on TV then they were shit out of luck, end of story.

Piracy and torrents have created a culture of entitlement to fans in the West thinking they deserve to have access to stuff simply because it exists.

There use to be a lot of Anime before the turn of the century that simply never got officially released in the West but I certainly wasn't kicking and screaming and bitching about not being able to consume it, let alone expecting to get it for free.

@LostSpectre
Not at all, streaming anime from subscription services is an absolute nightmare.
Only select seasons are available, series and seasons scattered all across different streaming services, western releases often being much slower or delayed, having to use vpns to get around georestriction and many more problems and annoyances.

Heres an example that just happened to me a couple weeks ago.
It's been quite a while since I watch Tensura so I decided to rewatch it since the new seasons coming out. I watched the first season on Hulu. But Hulu, only has the first season. I don't have any subscriptions to any streaming service that has season 2. So what am I supposed to do? Either I dont finish watching it, or I pay out the ass for more subscriptions that I dont need. I'd say thats the exact opposite of "a pretty reasonable streaming service."

Another great example is Pokemon, if you wanted to watch the entire series, you would have to go through an insane amount of different services.
Its so ridiculously out of hand Pokemon had to make a full guide on there own website on how to watch the show.

tbf if someone like Kadokawa has a service for me to buy DRM-free anime from them via torrent, I would not hesitate to give them money for that.

@Akuya In terms of overall content I would call CR pretty reasonable. I'm also skeptical of claims that put streaming services in a category of being less reliable than pirated hosting. Also, pirating is not a zero-sum game, just because you might need to pirate certain content, because it's not available on a particular anime streaming service, would not negate the entire point/value of the service itself, and make it more acceptable simply to pirate everything while paying for nothing. I wouldn't call Hulu an anime streaming service, either, it's a streaming service that happens to have some anime, nothing more.

@LostSpectre
Maybe you misunderstand me. I'm not someone who just pirates anything and everything and feels entitled to free content, not at all. I'm with you in the fact that if there's a reasonable service for something, I'm more than willing to pay for it. But when it comes to streaming anime it's still so far from "reaonable." When I did have a CR subscription, I'd find that more than half the anime I wanted to watch just wasn't available on CR. It was ether on Netflix or Hulu or Hidive or Prime Video, or just wasn't available to stream at all. Paying $8 a month for something that I watch less than half of my anime on just isn't worth it.

@Akuya Interesting. I guess if you're looking for older stuff there may be quite a bit of missing content, but I assume they have nearly every seasonal anime, that's more along the lines of what I had in mind. Yeah, when it comes to sheer content (because of licensing) there's probably nothing that compares to a pirated library. Also, I pirate everything, I just think it's amusing when people make excuses for it, but you provided a valid argument here.

My pirating is 100% justified since my country was banned from almost all existing platforms. If you don't want my money, well, you won't get it lol.

If you pirate anime, how is that helping the industry? If you don't want to spend the money to buy or stream the anime through a service, then do you really like anime? You wouldn't go to a store grab a piece of anime merch and then walk out the door without paying for it would you? If you can afford Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and/or Disney+ then perhaps you might be able to buy, rent, or stream anime legally...otherwise I'd wager significantly more than a dollar that your not that big of an anime fan.

@mo_lave

So just because they don't offer what you want, you expect to get it for free then?

Reminder that morality is fake and gay and it was made by the tunnel dwellers in order to control you.
It's always OK to steal digital media without paying.

@MogKnight you sound like a tourist. Go home. Anime should have been gate kept harder.

@KingOfPneumos Does this actually apply to anime? It's certainly understandable that you can't pay for every service, and may need to pirate some things, but that in itself still wouldn't justify pirating everything over just some of the things. It's hard to imagine this is anything other than an excuse, but I know that CR is very divisive among anime fans in general.

@LostSpectre

Ehh, not anime so much as streamed media in general, fair point.

But I definitely think the second point still stands and is the top reason I use those sorts of sites. I have a CR subscription, but they don't have what I'm looking for so frequently that any more I often default to searching other places for anime first.

@KingOfPneumos Yeah, I was thinking more about seasonals than older shows, there's a whole mess with licensing issues when it comes to that stuff, and it's split among several streaming services. If anime piracy wasn't so damn efficient there would be more of a case to actually use services like CR, even if they're missing quite a bit of older titles.

it is ok even when you can afford to pay🗿🗿🗿

i mean think about it. would anime really be as famous and popular as it is today if not for piracy? anime was introduced to the west because of piracy.

if you really want to support the creators just buy physical manga.

If I did pay for a subscription, how is that going to help the original creator/studio that produced the anime or manga? All that money lines the pockets of the executives of those companies, they've already paid for the rights to host the content at a set cost for a certain period of time (who knows how much money the creators actually get from that deal - production committees also take a cut). The best way to support a creator is to buy their manga/LN volumes or their DVDs and merch (that a portion of that money goes directly back to them).

I'm helping them by spreading the word about certain series and getting others into them, much more useful than buying a CR or Netflix subscription.

When you have monopolies and duopolies, these services get lazy and their products (i.e. their sites and servers) get worse. Pirate sites attract users because they put out a great product, as well as their options and variety of shows, and the fact that they are in competition with other sites and copycats.

Anime was already famous and popular way before piracy. An argument could be easily made that being more popular is irrelevant when an extremely large majority of consumers in the west simply resort to piracy, as well as a large demographic that were never paying to consume it in the 1st place.



This is a completely false statement. Anime was introduced to the west close to the early 70s due to cultural exchange, economic opportunities, and it's Unique content. Long before Anime piracy ever existed.



If this was simply how everyone chose to try to support a franchise then eventually no Anime would ever get produced again (There would be zero financial incentive to invest in them).

Piracy has been a net positive for the industry, when the barrier of entry is non-existent this leads to the greatest number of people who will try out anime, and then a portion of them will go on to want to pay for it because they got hooked and care. The percentage of paying vs non paying fans is smaller than when you have the paywall, but the total is so much larger that more profit is still made. Compare anime's popularity and the industry's overall profit now in comparison to the 90s when piracy was more difficult, the industry is huge now in comparison.