What do you think of piracy?

I'll go with neutral.

Back in the day, it was basically the only way to watch anime in the West. Especially places that weren't the US. Heck, we didn't even get the Big Three over here.
Without piracy, anime never would've gotten this big outside of Japan.

There's no service that has all anime. They're divided over every single streaming service there is, a lot of anime are geolocked and even then a ton of older stuff isn't even on any streaming service.

If a pirate really likes an anime, there's a fair chance they'll buy the manga/merch of said anime so in the end they still earn money from those.

I said this in another thread, but it's basically a necessity at this point for archival purposes. There are so many films and series that are out of print on DVD and Blu Ray and that haven't been picked up by major streaming services. Should they just disappear into the ether because studios and corporate suits don't care about them? Fuck that.

"Piracy is the most successful form of distribution" - Werner Herzog

You act like out of print Anime DVDs and Blu-rays are some how inevitably out of reach for anyone to ever obtain. Most films and series released on physical media were never streamed in the past in the 1st place.

Before internet Piracy, consuming media entertainment was a privilege not some perceived right.

I could go shop online now and search for just about any Anime series that got released on physical media in over the past two decades and find it at extremely affordable prices, especially if they are used.

Even if out of print DVDs and Blu-rays started being streamed legally on platforms, one who would resort to piracy wouldn't likely suddenly just get up and subscribe to a service offering the out of print Anime they want to watch in the 1st place. Further more if someone isn't going to pay a small monthly subscription fee to watch a specific Anime, you really think they would spend 20 to sometimes 60USDs to buy a complete Anime series on physical media?

This seems more like just another lame excuse used to justify piracy.

I will never understand this sense of entitlement fans have with this medium where they feel just because something exists, they should be entitled to it no matter what.

@ColourWheel

You don't need a "sense of entitlement". It's completely natural for people to take things which they want if doing so does no harm to anybody else.

Piracy does cause harm, just you either didn't know, don't care, or refuse to acknowledge the harm it causes. Piracy devalues the Content creators work, it harms Copyright holders and distributors with financial losses, it impacts incentives for innovation and creativity, decreases investment in new content, it undermines the business models of legitimate distributors and retailers, and Piracy ultimately undermines the rule of law (Because piracy is illegal in most Western countries around the globe even if not enforceable). etc...

@ColourWheel You only need a "sense of entitlement" if you've had the kind of brainwashing necessary to produce that screed. "Piracy", at least on a peer to peer level, does nothing except entertain the person who gets the thing. It can literally happen without anyone else in the world even knowing, let alone being affected.

I said this in another thread, but it's basically a necessity at this point for archival purposes. There are so many films and series that are out of print on DVD and Blu Ray and that haven't been picked up by major streaming services. Should they just disappear into the ether because studios and corporate suits don't care about them? Fuck that.

"Piracy is the most successful form of distribution" - Werner Herzog

@logopolis

Entertain this for a moment, just imagine you are a content creator and sudden find out over half of your profit has been cut in half because a majority of people consuming your content simply resort to pirating it? I doubt that would make you very happy. You wouldn't feel like that would be harming you financially? They would literally be taking stuff that you created and not giving you a penny to enjoy your work.

Even if it's not your work, you license it for $300,000 to distribute. You wouldn't feel harm if you find people have just been ripping the content off your website and uploading it to the internet just so others can consume it for free?

@ColourWheel

That's impossible. People "pirating" it has no effect on my income.

What affects my income there is not whether people pirate it, but whether people buy it.



I'm not a capitalist, so no, I could never feel entitled to an artificial monopoly.

The problem here is not people sharing with each other, it's an economic system which fails to feed people even if they're doing plenty of socially useful labour.

It does if your work is being devalued based on the fact most people are simply pirating your hard work. By default it would effect any type of contract you would ever try to make for future distribution.



I guess then you can go ahead and throw all your money away. Oh wait... you probably need that money because you live and thrive in an economic system that relies on that money.



Ironic you suddenly are concerned with income here when you claim to not be a capitalist.

I'm pretty sure they mean that a lot of people who pirate it aren't going to buy/consume it anyways if piracy wasn't available. Not all of them of course, but a vast majority.

Which means a huge part of the pirates actually don't affect your income, cause you wouldn't gain any income from them to begin with. You do lose some profit, yes, but that loss is far less than the amount of people pirating.

I don't really care.
I am the kind of person that pirates even free stuff.
I have even pirated games that I already had.

Piracy is the necessary evil. I have been on these high seas for a long time. I have reasons that are very justifiable to any reasonable person [even proponents of stringent capitalism]..
Reasoning(s), though are similar in periphery, they are different in root. I thought of giving them here [especially software and published material piracy], but won't be unnecessary. So I would stick to anime piracy.

1. Unavailability of all titles in any of the services due to laws of the state. I won't pay for the entire service and have access to a few. Here, the slog is the state law which bans stuff. And by stuff I mean digital media on both online platforms and physical mediums.

2. Company vs User terminology and meaning ascertained of the word "ownership". If I pay for something to own, I demand complete control over it. This is not the case in reality. Providers can at any time change terms of use. They can remove titles, titles you paid for. Say I pay for a yearly subscription on a platform. Then midway though the year, they remove the prime shows I paid the sub for from their platform. What are you gonna do? NOTHING. You cant fight their EULA. You cant fight their lobby. You cant fight their lawyers.

And since the prime monopolizer of the current anime market is Crunchyroll, this is more than likely to happen and keep happening. For those who don't know, Crunchyroll LLC is owned by Sony Group Corporation. And there can't be a better example of what I say above than the instance of SONY removing 1,317 shows from Playstation overnight [they revoked the removal after ~two months, uproar and about +1k court cases].

What SONY said:

"
Discovery Entitlements Affected Titles

As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.

We sincerely thank you for your continued support.

Thank you,

PlayStation Store

"

See what I mean. They removed items you "purchased". Without your consent. You have no say in this. And remember, this is for item "Purchased", not "Stream" or "Rent".
You own a laptop made by X company that has Y company's CPU. They have a dispute, goons of X come and take away your laptop. Fit any analogy in this scenario.

Piracy from this side seems just.

@Luchipher-Zen
That's a very good post. Not only is anime piracy good, it is how most of us pre-2015 or so even found out about anime. But why is it good? Anime is japanese media. We like it because it is japanese in nature. It shouldn't aim to cater to western audiences. For most cases, the revenue from the production of anime and manga is largely generated inside Japan itself. The outside isn't the target market. And I believe we should keep it that way. Not only that, but anime themselves are made in order to sell manga and other items such as figures, costumes, posters, artbooks, the list goes on (again, for most cases). Remember a good chunk of anime are TV shows which don't get their blu-rays released until much later.

Experience has shown us official translations and dubbing seems to always end up in vandalism. The work of community-based, not-for-profit fansubs and other fan groups has fueled the expansion of anime since the beginning, only fading in recent years, and in all fairness they make much better translations. In addition, it is common knowledge by now that companies like Crunchyroll, its parent Sony, and the now defunct Funimation are, bluntly put, against our interests as customers and fans.

Theft, is morally wrong. That is, the forceful acquisition of one's private property for whatever reason. Piracy on the other hand is not an infringement on anyone's private property rights, since, it involves copying, rather than removing from it's original owner. You cannot move me from this position, but you are welcome to try. Is it a "good" thing, though? Yes! For multiple reasons that many people probably pointed out and more. Can it be a bad thing? Sometimes. It can turn someone away from a potential sale, but this could also make the person like it now that they have given it a try, then maybe they will buy it later. That's kind of the worst case scenario, really. And even in that scenario, the producer never had the right to take money from them that they didn't want to pay.

There's nuance, of course. I think you are an idiot if you complain about the quality of a product if you haven't even paid for it. There's no reason why they should listen to you if you're not a customer. And you should pay for things you like and want to see more of. But the reality is that people are going to take the cheaper option if it is handed to them, just like anything else. I vote necessary because it's going to exist no matter what.

One could ask themselves is rape not the same as sexual assault? When one asks these types of questions they are simply getting into semantics.

Just like Rape falls under sexual assault, Privacy falls under theft. One is taking something, even if it's simply copying, that is intellectual property that doesn't belong to them without permission. The same could be said about out right plagiarism. While most wouldn't like to view piracy as theft, it pretty much is logical thinking that taking something that doesn't belong to someone without permission, even if it's copying, is basically just stealing it.

If someone takes intellectual property that belongs to you and simply just copies it without permission you would probably feel robbed too and rightfully so.

Piracy is called piracy for a reason. It's basically a free for all plundering of intellectual property on the internet.

@ColourWheel

Rape and sexual assault are both violent intrusions on one's own body. It is, unquestionably, a violation of their property rights in either scenario. The victim owns their body, and the intruder is making violent attacks against it. The same standard simply does not apply when you refer to copying something. There is no infringement to be seen.

I defined theft in the post.



An idea is not property. You stole my idea for a username, so now I'm going to sue you for ownership. Do I have a case? How does one measure that I have a case? If I had your exact username on other sites before other people did (this has happened to me before), that doesn't mean anyone "stole my idea". You can't "own" an idea in the same way you can own property. And similarly you cannot steal an idea in the same way you can steal property. Copying simply cannot be theft, since there is no forceful exchange of property. Even putting that aside, there's also the possibility that two works can also be extremely similar by complete coincidence, because ideas are transferred throughout cultures. To say that you have ownership over an idea is to say that you own a portion of the thoughts and minds of other people, which is simply not true. It can't be measured in the same way someone can measure who owns private property.

Intellectual property is property. It's in the freaken name. You might not like to think of it like that, but that's just the fact. Having a legal case is irrelevant because we aren't talking about a legal matter to begin with.

If something has been copyrighted and someone copies it without permission that is basically theft. Last time I checked Japanese Anime is generally copywrited intellectual property. Taking something without permission is forceful in itself.

@ColourWheel



Stellar reasoning, bro. It contains the word, therefore it is the same thing. Nevermind the hundreds of "republics" around the world that have nothing to do with a republic system of governance. Never mind that contradictory terms can form compound words... Words have meanings beyond their codified legal definitions. Not all countries have intellectual property law, and they don't define it in the same way. It's nowhere near as universally applicible as private property rights, where you can declare exactly what is mine and what is yours.
Please explain to me how me copying someone's video and putting it onto another website, in any way shape or form, physically takes it out of the other person's hand. If you can do that, you can convince me that it is theft.



How is it theft? How are you removing anything from the person who made it by reuploading it somewhere else? You are not taking the files from their computer. You are not taking any DVDs / BluRays / any form of physical merch, you are not displacing any resources whatsoever from the original creator. The notion that something is copyrighted doesn't mean anything, because you are leaving out the fact that many anime were based on public domain resources that were themselves influenced by material that was not anyone's intellectual property. IP is simply a legal and arbitrary construct that does not constitute ownership. It constitutes the "feeling" of ownership, maybe, but that's the only reasoning you can really provide.

Do all the mental gymnastics you want...

You are taking something that doesn't belong to you without permission, plain and simple.

Might not be easy for you to understand that someone or something can own something that is not physical in nature but they do.

I had to watch One Piece through Piracy and it was singlehandedly one of the best shows I've watched since then. Trying to watch One Piece is extremely difficult given the 1000 episodes that have aired, but those hundreds of episodes still haven't aired completely in the streaming services I'm using. It's weird how anime piracy sites provide a better experience to watch One Piece than bigger streaming services that are supposed to provide a legal way to television.

Why doesn't it belong to me, now? I can infinitely replicate any image on the internet that I want (I didn't make my profile picture). Yes, I didn't make the original and that's plain for everyone to see. But to say that we shouldn't be able to replicate or proliferate copies of images / media borders on insane. If I make a fanart of Goku and post it on deviantart.com I should be a felon, under such a "plain and simple" definition, because I didn't make the character. But everyone can see that that's nonsense.

But that's only assuming that IP law stays limited to copies. Often times, intellectual property is used to crack down on fair use transformative content, such as fan games, and fan art. If I can legally make an adaptation of, say, Alice in wonderland, or some public domain work, then why can I not do the same thing with Harry Potter, or Bleach, or something like that? It makes no sense. They didn't own the ideas of wizardry, or spirits.

@DreamWindow

You are making absurd arguments now because User names, wizards, and even spirits are not intellectual property. Anime is Intellectual property. Directly making copies of Intellectual property without permission is theft. Taking anything that belongs to someone else without permission is theft. Simply copy an image off the internet most of the time is public domain to begin with because users agree to the User conditions when they upload them whether they read or know about them to begin with. So fan art uploaded to the internet is made public domain by the consent of the uploader who created said art work. Same goes with any User made media that gets uploaded to the internet without it being 1st copywrited.

Before you type anything, go on Google images right now, for any image of any anime. Doesn't matter. Click on it. In the bottom you will see "Images may be subject to copyright.". This is because the studios claim copyright for the images that are associated with that work, including the character designs, the promotional art, graphics, logos etc. YES, copying an image IS copyright infringement. The only reason why you or most people don't care is because it's impossible to enforce, and even if it was, it's stupid to actually think that you are stealing anything by doing this. It doesn't become clear even when you reupload the whole product, because, copyright counts a whole myriad of things. And, again, there is no displacement of resources from one hand to another. It's simply not the same thing as theft.

@DreamWindow

"May" is the key word there you seem to over look.

Generally speaking images uploaded to the internet do not fall under the umbrella of Piracy. You are simply just trying to make an argument to fit your own narrative to justify piracy. Still doesn't distract from the fact that taking copies of Anime without permission is theft. If you want to believe taking copies of images off the internet is theft too, I am not going to argue with you on that.

I will say it again, Piracy equates to taking something that doesn't belong to you without permission, plain and simple, even if they are simply copies. That sounds like theft to me. How else would you view it or even generally call it?

Depends. In some cases, I'm pro-piracy, in others, I'm against it.

Pirating from a massive corporation like Disney is always morally acceptable, pirating from smaller, independent creators is bad.

When it comes to anime, it's just easier to pirate it because the biggest legal anime streaming platform (Crunchyroll) sucks ass, and other platforms have very little that's of interest.

I'll pay for a hi-dive subscription if they ever get No Game No Life season 2 though.

@ColourWheel



You didn't prove me wrong. All aspects of the work are subject to copyright in some way or another (music, image, designs, everything I said above). You fixating on one word doesn't disprove the fact that it is factually correct that copyright holders hold the copyright to these things. If you wish to argue against that, then you would be factually incorrect. But if you wish to use copyright as an argumentive tool to why people you don't like are "evil", you should at least put in some effort, to understand how it works, first.



I'm filling in the blanks of your position, and trying to explain to you exactly what copyright and intellectual property is. I am presenting you facts about the position that you hold, not "justifying a narrative".



This was not my argument. This was yours, but only if you take it to the logical conclusion of using a de facto guide for copyright and IP as an argument for morality of piracy.

So let's take a step back. Have you ever pirated anything? And why do you look down on it so strongly?

@ShatteredSans they have it with the zero movie.

https://www.hidive.com/season/20021

https://www.hidive.com/playlist/20663

No, I have never needed to pirate anything before. If I want to consume Anime it's not like it's extremely expensive to pay for a full month subscription which is basically like buying a single meal at McDonalds.



It's because it's created a culture of unprecedented entitlement. I thought I made that clear earlier on in the thread.

When it comes to Anime, Fans feel like they are entitled to something simply because it exists, This is because of Piracy. Many Users use excuses which make no sense at all to me.

I see Users complain they can't get access to some Anime so they rely on piracy. Those Users feel they are entitled to something that isn't officially available to them. When I grew up if something wasn't available to me it was tough luck. I would have to wait till I could afford to buy it on physical media and sometimes it took years to up to a decade till it was even released in the West to begin with.

Like some Users have argued they have to pirate. No one has to do anything, piracy is a conscious choice. No one is physically forcing them to pirate anything. To them, simply because an Anime exists they feel they should be entitled to it without paying for it.

Then there are Users who complain about not having access to all Anime. I have never had access to ALL Anime ever in my life and have lived quite fine to this day without the need to resort to piracy. I even remember growing up reading Anime UK magazine some Anime franchise I wish I could have watched which never came to the West till like decades later. The only way one could watch some of those Anime titles was simply to be lucky enough to get a copy of them on VHS bootlegs which still cost money and at extremely inflated prices with very low quality. I simply just passed on those because they weren't worth the money to sometimes buy a VHS tape of a single episode costing around 20USDs to sometimes 60USDs.

Then there are Users who bitch whine about pricing. If I had the access to the amount of Anime back when I was growing up that exists today on official sites, I would shit myself thinking how inexpensive it would be to literally have over 100s of seasonal franchises at my finger tips at the cost of only a single lunch at a fast food restaurant for a full month. If I wanted to watch a new Anime that I haven't seen before I would have to rent it on VHS for sometimes up to $5 and that would only be for only a few episodes of that series and not everything was ever available to rent either.

etc...

I could go on and on talking about the excuses Users make simply to resort to piracy. When you boil things down they are simply nothing but excuses...

Now this is my time to bitch and whine about shit. This sense of entitlement had also lead to another thing...

Modern Western Users these days amount to complete snowflakes bitching and whining about the most petty things when dealing with this medium on a platform dedicated to Japanese Anime where a vast majority of them are likely not even paying to consume in the Anime they consume 1st place. The irony...

Like I will see some Users admit to prating all Anime they consume on one topic, then in the next see them bitch and complain about Anime in another. That's like someone generously offering a free meal only after to see people start to bitching and whining to the person who gave them that meal about not getting French fries, a drink, as well as a desert for free too. Users complain why quality has perceived to have gone down in this medium, they should look in the mirror and see they are likely part of the problem.

Piracy is more of a plague than anything else to me, doesn't matter how popular it has become. Anime was popular way before Anime piracy even existed, I should know I have gown up consuming it way before most Users were even existing in their fathers nut sack.

@ColourWheel

So you have never watched anime on a free site? Not even once? Even though you have access to the internet, and the fastest way to find anime is a free site, you just... never thought to do it? I find that hard to believe.

Your whole argument just comes across as a bitter old man who doesn't like it because he didn't have access to it as a kid. You just don't like it because you don't like the "entitled" attitude? Ok, so we can watch anime, and discuss anime, but we can't actually seek out the shows we want to watch when we want to watch them, or else we are entitled? The fuck kind of arbitrary bullshit is this...?

The price is not the issue, the service is. You are making the argument that if you get a bad service, you shouldn't demand better because -tough shit, that's the way you had it growing up. Well that's just bitter, man. Many people just consider it second nature to just look up a show online, and there still has not been a service that can compete with the free sites. Licensing makes it so that the best option is piracy, and so you are arguing that people should not have the best possible option because....? "It would be entitled to do so?!?!" It's entitled to seek out resources that already exists, AND are easier to access? And they should stop because.... just they are entitled? There's not even a logical explanation. You just are mad that people are seeking out easier and better options at consuming their anime. Full stop.

You complain that anime fans are making mountains out of molehills, but after seeing this, I think you are projecting, man. I don't even know what to say, this is just sad. Maybe you want to limit yourself, that's fine, I don't give a shit, but complaining that other people want more and better quality options just because you didn't have it, or don't like them, is just pathetic. The correct amount of anime to watch is more. It's not an issue if people watch more of what they love.