I've talked a lot about the illegal downloading and internet piracy of anime, and it is one of the most prevalent problems facing the anime industry today. However, because of that, I often tend to forget the other, closely related problem of bootleg anime DVDs and merchandise.
When visited Bakuretsu Con last year, I attended and recorded Greg Ayres' new anti-piracy panel focusing specifically on bootleg DVD's and bootlegs. The complete panel is now up for viewing on KeepAnimeAlive.com.
Greg Ayres, whom I've talked about previously, is by and large considered to be the spokesperson on the war against anime piracy. During the panel, he points out many ways to identify bootleg items, and not just DVDs. All sorts of items are subject to being bootlegged, from DVDs, to soundtracks, to posters, to wall scrolls, and even to figurines. One of the key ways he mentions to recognize a piece of bootlegged material is check and see if it's missing a copyright statement. Almost every piece of legitimate anime merchandise will have the companies copyright written somewhere on it.
After doing my own research on the subject, and looking at the Piracy FAQ Greg mentions, I looked at some of my own merchandise, to verify whether or not they were legitimate items. Unfortunately, I discovered more bootlegged items that I'm happy to admit among my collection. Over 3/4s of my anime posters are most likely bootleg, lacking any sort of copyright information at all. I'll be saving these for a future project involving fire and various implements of destruction.
Additionally one of the things that Greg mentions is a court case where some studios sued a flea market to knowingly allow vendors to sell illegitimate and bootleg items. The court ended up ruling in favor of the studios, saying that it was illegal for a marketplace to knowingly allow illegitimate infringing items to be sold. I believe the case he was talking about was Fonovisa, Inc. v. Cherry Auction, Inc.
Now, my own stance on piracy is pretty solid. It's illegal, and it's hurting an industry that I am very passionate about. A benefit to this is that I have the motivation to start a website and blog about it, or go out and record interviews with industry professionals. One of the drawbacks however, is keeping a cool temper when I'm confronted with people defending piracy. In Episode 4 of Conflict of Interest the shows host discuss anime piracy, and specifically a study that was done earlier this year that implied that streaming piracy was helping anime DVD sales
According to the study every 1% increase of views on YouTube correlated to a 0.25% increase in DVD sales. This has been interpreted as meaning that piracy was contributing to DVD sales. Personally, this doesn't make any sense to me. You can't prove that the people that made up the 0.25% increase in DVD sales are part of the 1% viewing the show on YouTube. It makes far more sense to assume the the increase in both DVD sales and YouTube views were simply because the show was just more popular.
They do make many false statements in their podcast, such as the fact that Blu-Ray discs are not region encoded and will play on any bluray player in the world. Unlike with DVD regions, Japan and the United States are in the same bluray region, but there are regions none-the-less.
Now they also make mention of the common pro-piracy argument that piracy acts as free advertising for the show, and contributes to it's popularity in the United States. While this may have been true back when anime was barely known in the United States and didn't have as much of a following, more people are just using them as an alternative to purchasing the legal DVDs. Regardless of whether or not they help the industry, it is still illegal and infringing on the rights of the creators. For me, this is still the strongest argument.
I also listened to the bonus content of episode 116 of Anime Today, a podcast run by RightStuf.com. They interviewed Ed Chavez, the marketing director from Vertical, Inc. A very interesting thing that Vertical, Inc. does is that periodically, they will ask fans exactly which series that they would like Vertical to license. This really lessons the damages of piracy, since the titles they are licensing are ones that people are asking for specifically, so there are better chances of them having higher sales.
Interestingly enough, Chavez denies one of the claims that companies look at the number of illegal downloads to determine which series would do well in the US. Instead, he says that any heavily pirated series, they are far less likely to license that series. The anime and manga industry is already a niche market in the United States, and Vertical caters to an even more niche group of manga fans. They need to licenses things that aren't being pirated in order to make sure that they will get enough sales.
Additionally, they discuss that some Japanese authors, upon seeing their content being illegally translated and distributed, decide to never allow that series to be licensed by American companies as a result. They cite a recent development last year where many authors of Japanese work spoke out and voiced their disapproval of their content being pirated.
Chavez notes at one point that piracy and scanlations are making it less and less viable for companies to licenses content and distribute it over here, which could lead to the eventual collapse of the entire anime industry.
There are reasons why we have copyright laws in place, and reasons why we protect intellectual property. Unfortunately the internet has made it incredibly easy to infringe upon these rights with far less threat of ever being punished for doing so. It seems to me that the amount of pirated and illegitimate anime and manga far outweighs that which is legitimately obtained and watched. There is just so much out there, and very little means of controlling content available on the world wide web. At this point, there isn't much the anime companies can do. If they decide to exercise their rights and try to protect their content, they will be, as Greg Ayres has said, be "crucified" by the people who claim to be their fans.
It's clear that if the anime industry is to be saved, it has to be done by fans who decide to take a stand to protect the shows and comics that they love.
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